Abstract
Alerting learners that diagnostic information may lie in stimulus absence reduces the feature-positive effect — present-present associations are detected more readily than absence-presence pairs (Rassin, 2014).
Rassin, E. (2014). Reducing the feature positive effect by alerting people to its existence. Learning & Behavior, 42(4), 313–317. DOI
Key findings
- Present-present advantage: — Organisms learn associations between two present stimuli more easily than between one absent and one present stimulus.
- Understudied bias: — Despite long recognition, FPE lacks extensive remediation research.
Application
When a clinician reviewing test results focuses on abnormal values present on a panel but misses that a key marker’s absence is diagnostic — Rassin’s instruction prime (“consider what is missing”) reduces this feature-positive blind spot in lab analogues — open this cite for the study behind the move.