On the Course of Answering Questions

Five down, Absquatulated: Crossword puzzle clues to how the mind works

“…Smith and Clark (1993) found a positive correlation between the feeling of knowing and the time people took before giving up on questions they could not answer; more generally, they found that, when people were able to answer a question, the higher the confidence in the answer, the more quickly it was produced, whereas when they could not produce an answer, the stronger the feeling of knowing, the longer they took before giving up. This makes intuitive sense.…”

“…As numerous studies have shown, when people feel they have knowledge in memory that they cannot retrieve, the strength of this feeling is a reasonably good indication of the probability that they will be able to recall it eventually or to recognize what they cannot produce (Blake, 1973;Read & Bruce, 1982;Smith & Clark, 1993), or even to produce it with the help of additional retrieval clues, such as the first letter of the sought-for word (Gruneberg & Monks, 1974).…”

Disfluencies and human language comprehension

“…They have discovered that disfluencies are useful for dividing referents in a discourse into those that are given, or already established in the discourse, and those that are new [2]. Some work has examined what disfluencies reveal about speakers' confidence in their utterances [27,28]. Further evidence suggests that people have less trouble understanding utterances with filled pauses and repeats than those with repairs [8], and that the difficulty of handling a repair is greater when the speaker produces an incorrect word in its entirety rather than truncating it [29].…”

Applying Deception Detection to True and False Confessions: A Novel Approach to Conducting Experiments in Legal Psychology

“…time spent talking) associated/predicting with deception (Feeley & deTurck, 1998, Vrij, 2008a Certain paralinguistic cues like increased latency (i.e. time lapse between question and answer), speech hesitations (use of "ums" "uhs" or "ers"), speech errors, and a slower rate of speech are associated with increased cognitive load (Goldman-Eisler, 1968, Smith & Clark, 1993, & Sporer & Schwandt, 2006. Cognitive load, previously mentioned as a focus of interrogational practices relying on empirically-supported psychological research, lends support to the investigation of paralingustic cues to deception in the search for indicators of veracity in confessions, as was done in the present study.…”