This award is under the International Postdoctoral Fellows Program, which enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct three to twelve months of research at foreign centers of proven excellence. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad. This award will support a twelve-month postdoctoral research visit by Dr. Derek J. Koehler to the Medical Research Council - Applied Psychology Unit, Cambridge, to work with Dr. Alan Baddeley. Their research topic is the relationship between the active set of hypotheses in working memory and the judged probability of these hypotheses. They will investigate how the processes of hypothesis generation and probability judgement fit into the well- established framework of working memory developed by Dr. Baddeley and his colleagues. Recent studies show that people's probability judgements are nonextensional, not constrained by rules of set inclusion. This implies that any descriptive model of subjective probability must account for such judgements in terms of the individual's representation of the events or possibilities under consideration. Dr. Baddeley's working memory model suggests a potential research program for the empirical study of subjective probability and provides a larger context in which to frame the problem. Such research will allow empirical testing of the theory that people normalize or adjust their probability estimates only with respect to the evidential support received by those hypotheses that are active in working memory. This approach should also yield insight into the more general issue of how people generate and evaluate novel hypotheses under conditions of uncertainty. The award recommendation provides funds to cover international travel and a stipend for twelve months.
