In addition to the excellent g-distance paper, recently published in Psychological Review, the other main output from Lenard Dome’s Ph.D. was a paper on the effect of concurrent load on the inverse base-rate effect (IBRE). In the IBRE, one pair of cues (AB) predict a common outcome, while an overlapping pair of cues (AC) predict a rare outcome. When subsequently asked to make a decision about BC, participants tend to predict that the rare outcome will occur. This seems illogical. Lenard found that the IBRE could be reduced by concurrent load during training. Thus, counter-intuitively, being distracted led to better generalization in this case.

For a longer (and more accessibly written) description, see Alyssa Asmar’s interesting blog post, recently published on the Psychonomic Society’s Featured Content blog.