Overview
Background
I’m a Professor of Cognitive Science in the School of Psychology at The University of Queensland.
I spend most of my time investigating the cognitive processes involved in learning new skills. For example, we’ve been working closely with policing and security agencies to help experts interpret evidence more effectively and reduce the amount of time that it takes to train examiners. I take great pleasure in working across multiple domains from basic visual processes to high level decision making, misinformation, and insight moments.
I received a BASc in Philosophy and Psychology from The University of Lethbridge, in Alberta, Canada where I grew up, and a PhD in Psychology from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, before moving to Sydney in 2004 for a postdoctoral fellowship at UNSW, and joined The University of Queensland in 2006.
I work with some outstanding collaborators, and I have been fortunate to have many wonderful honours and PhD students in my lab.
Availability
- Professor Jason Tangen is:
- Available for supervision
- Media expert
Fields of research
Qualifications
- Doctor of Philosophy, McMaster University
Research interests
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Expertise in Forensic Decision Making
“CSI”-style TV shows give the impression that fingerprint identification is fully automated. In reality, when a fingerprint is found at a crime scene, it is a human examiner who is faced with the task of identifying the person who left the print. We conducted one of the first empirical tests of fingerprint identification, finding that examiners possess genuine expertise in matching fingerprints (Tangen, Thompson & McCarthy, 2011; Thompson, Tangen & McCarthy, 2013). Since these early experiments, we have conducted dozens of lab- and field-based experiments on fingerprint expert, trainee, and novice participants. We provided evidence that expertise in forensic identification is characteristically fast (Thompson, Tangen & McCarthy, 2014; Thompson, Tangen & Searston, 2014), is affected by the similarity (Searston, Tangen, & Eva, 2016), that the visual structure of forensic evidence is distributed across prior instances (Searston & Tangen, 2016), and is domain specific (Searston & Tangen, 2017). We have examined how experts constrain their attention to relevant features that will enable them to make decisions quickly and accurately (Robson, Tangen, & Searston, 2020), and extract important features more efficiently than novices (Robson, Searston, Edmond, McCarthy, & Tangen, 2020). We have also demonstrated that pooling the decisions of small, independent groups of analysts can substantially boost the performance of these crowds and reduce the influence of errors (Tangen, Kent, & Searston, 2020).
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Communicating Uncertainty
As John Allen Paulos once said, “Uncertainty is the only certainty there is.” Indeed, we all try to articulate or even quantify this sense of uncertainty everyday in predicting future events or deciding what to do. In science, we tend to convey our level of uncertainty by comparing our observations to “chance” or control groups to infer something meaningful about reality. But if uncertainty is not communicated clearly and effectively, then mistakes will happen, even in high-stakes situations where people’s lives are at stake in areas such as diagnostic medicine, legal decision making, climate change, or intelligence analysis. We have explored perceptions of error and involvement of human judgment in each stage of forensic analysis (Ribeiro, Tangen, McKimmie, 2019), and demonstrated that people struggle to understand and evaluating probabilistic information (Ribeiro, Tangen, McKimmie, 2020) compared to conveying the same information using a diagnostic information approach that we developed (Edmond, Thompson, & Tangen, 2014), which provides decision-makers with the tools they need to make inferences about the current case based on information about how examiners perform in previous, similar situations. We have translated our findings for use in the legal system to support law reform by publishing dozens of review and commentary papers in leading law reviews, and discipline-focused journals (e.g., Edmond et al, 2014, 2015, 2017).
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Insight and the Eureka Heuristic
An “Aha!” or insight experience occurs when a solution to a problem presents itself suddenly and without warning. For example, while waiting to go to a concert, mathematician Yitang Zhang discovered the solution to the twin prime problem. He said that he “...immediately knew that it would work,” and then it took several months to verify his solution. The mathematician Jacques Hadamard said that, “on being very abruptly awakened by an external noise, a solution long searched for appeared to me at once without the slightest instant of reflection on my part.” Given the myriad thoughts that appear in our minds at any given moment, it’s interesting to know why some ideas are dismissed as meaningless distractions while others are grasped as significant or profound. These insight moments make an idea feel more true or valuable in order to aid quick and efficient decision-making — akin to a heuristic — which we can now detect and measure reliably (Laukkonen & Tangen, 2018). But we have argued that these feelings of insight have a dark side: they can make misinformation feel true and we discuss circumstances where they may inspire false beliefs and delusions (Laukkonen, Kaveladze, Tangen, & Schooler, 2020). Indeed, these so-called false insights have been difficult to investigate, but we have developed a new paradigm to reliably induce false insights in order to explore their origins. Our broader goal is to better understand how to calibrate these experiences so we can help people to better distinguish between true and false information.
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The Flashed Face Distortion Effect
In 2010, Sean Murphy — an honours student in the lab — was “eye aligning” hundreds of faces for a memory experiment we were about to run. He noticed that when he quickly flicked through the faces on the screen one-by-one, they began to appear highly distorted and even monstrous. For example, if a person had a large jaw, it looked particularly large, almost ogre-like. If a person had a slender nose, then it looked remarkably thin. The faces appeared to be almost like caricatures. When Sean stopped, the faces appeared normal again. We described this basic finding as a flashed face distortion effect (Tangen, Murphy, & Thompson, 2011), and uploaded a simple demonstration to YouTube, which attracted a lot of attention so we posted another video shortly after using celebrity faces. We have conducted dozens of experiments since then to figure out how to optimise the effect; we developed an elegant way to quantify its strength, and used multidimensional scaling to predict which faces would appear most distorted. Unfortunately, these experiments were fairly basic in order to fit within the scope of a one-year honours project, so we haven’t yet published the results. We’re hoping to find an enthusiastic PhD student who’s willing to spend a few years working on this project so we can properly investigate this interesting effect.
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The Style of a Category
Humans and non-humans are remarkably sensitive to style. We recognise the works of artists and composers, a sense of what does and does not belong to a particular genre of writing, what drivers in the right lane are likely to do that drivers in the left are not, or what a normal interaction with a teller at our bank is like. Often this sensitivity develops effortlessly and without any intention to learn them. Many animals, such as chimpanzees, rats, pigeons, and fish can demonstrate similar sensitivities to style in art, music, and even handwriting. For example, we demonstrated that even honeybees can learn to distinguish paintings by Monet from those by Picasso (Wu, Moreno, Tangen, & Reinhard, 2013). The visual style of a category refers to the features and visual cues that covary across images. For example, Monet was certainly fond of waterlilies, but this feature certainly doesn’t define his artistic style. It’s the same notion as Wittgenstein’s description of various “games” — board games and ball games have some commonalities, but also many differences. It is only when you look across several instances that a resemblance emerges. For example, we demonstrated that people are able to remember images that have been downscaled to a single pixel and can distinguish between categories well above chance with images that are only 2x2 pixels (Searston, Thompson, Vokey, French, & Tangen, 2019). Much of the research in our lab is based on this notion of style since this sensitivity influences our performance in virtually every task that we undertake.
Research impacts
Accurate and timely identification of criminals and crime scene evidence is an important issue for Australia’s law enforcement agencies. Upholding legal processes and criminal justice social legitimacy through more reliable forensic evidence will help to prevent wrongful convictions and permit rightful convictions. Indeed, the consequences of misses and false identifications in forensics are potentially devastating – innocent people could be wrongly convicted, and guilty people could pass undetected or be wrongly acquitted. Our research has resulted in a better understanding of the source of identification errors, the factors that influence performance, and the nature of expertise in fingerprint identification. We provide a scientific basis for demonstrating the validity of forensic methods and measures of uncertainty in the conclusions of forensic analyses. This research allows police, intelligence systems and investigators to interpret evidence more effectively and efficiently, help to reduce the amount of time that it takes to train novices to experts, assist forensic examiners in the development of evidence-based training programs, discourage exaggerated interpretations of forensic evidence, and help in the development of a model of expert testimony that does not extend beyond the capabilities of examiners or beyond the scope of our experimental findings.
Works
Search Professor Jason Tangen’s works on UQ eSpace
2007
Conference Publication
The impact of situational framing on judgments of covariation
Perry, L., Young, M. E., Tangen, J. M. and Eva, K. W. (2007). The impact of situational framing on judgments of covariation. International Women's Conference 2007, New York, USA, March 2007.
2007
Conference Publication
Covariation judgments and implicit associations: An investigation into differential susceptibility to information order and expectation in senior and young adults
Young, Meredith, Tangen, Jason and Eva, Kevin (2007). Covariation judgments and implicit associations: An investigation into differential susceptibility to information order and expectation in senior and young adults. CSBBCS 2007: Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour and Cognitive Science 17th Annual Meeting, Victoria, BC, Canada, 15-17 June 2007. Ottawa, ON, Canada: Canadian Psychological Association. doi: 10.1037/cjep2007034
2007
Conference Publication
Editing outliers and distorting data: The role of variability in human contingency judgements
Tangen, J. M. (2007). Editing outliers and distorting data: The role of variability in human contingency judgements. 48th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Long Beach, California, USA, 15-18 November 2007.
2006
Conference Publication
Reaction to change: Differential performance of young and senior adults in covariation judgments
Young, M., Tangen, J. M. and Eva, K. W. (2006). Reaction to change: Differential performance of young and senior adults in covariation judgments. Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour, and Cognitive Science, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, 22-24 June 2006.
2006
Conference Publication
Data distortion in human covariation assessment
Tangen, J. M. (2006). Data distortion in human covariation assessment. 4th International Conference on Memory, Sydney, Australia, 16-21 July 2006.
2005
Journal Article
A signal detection analysis of contingency data
Allan, L. G., Siegel, S. and Tangen, J. M. (2005). A signal detection analysis of contingency data. Learning and Behavior, 33 (2), 250-263. doi: 10.3758/bf03196067
2005
Journal Article
Judging relationships between events: How do we do it?
Allan, Lorraine G. and Tangen, Jason M. (2005). Judging relationships between events: How do we do it?. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 59 (1), 22-27. doi: 10.1037/h0087456
2005
Conference Publication
The application of psychophysics to the perception of contingency
Allan, L. G., Siegel, S., Tangen, J. M. and Hannah, S. (2005). The application of psychophysics to the perception of contingency. Annual meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association, Boston, MA, USA, March 2005.
2004
Book Chapter
Assessing (in)sensitivity to causal asymmetry: A matter of degree
Tangen, Jason M., Allan, Lorraine G. and Sadeghi, Hedyeh (2004). Assessing (in)sensitivity to causal asymmetry: A matter of degree. New Directions in Human Associative Learning. (pp. 65-93) Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. doi: 10.4324/9781410612113
2004
Conference Publication
On the identification of latent fingerprints
Vokey, J. R., Tangen, J. M. and Boychuk, J. (2004). On the identification of latent fingerprints. Canadian Society for Brain Behaviour and Cognitive Science 18th Annual Meeting, St. John's, Newfoundland & Labrador, June 2004.
2004
Journal Article
Visual kin recognition and family resemblance in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes)
Vokey, John R., Rendall, Drew, Tangen, Jason M., Parr, Lisa A. and de Waal, Frans B. M. (2004). Visual kin recognition and family resemblance in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). Journal of Comparative Psychology, 118 (2), 194-199. doi: 10.1037/0735-7036.118.2.194
2004
Conference Publication
Temporal contiguity and contingency
Allan, L. G. and Tangen, J. M. (2004). Temporal contiguity and contingency. Winter Conference on Animal Learning and Behavior, Winter Park, Colorado, USA, 7-11 February 2004.
2004
Conference Publication
A signal detection analysis of contingency data
Allan, Lorraine G., Siegel, Shepard and Tangen, Jason M. (2004). A signal detection analysis of contingency data. 14th Annual Meeting of the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour, and Cognitive Science, St. John's, Newfoundland & Labrador, 12-14 June, 2004.
2004
Book Chapter
Assessing (in)sensitivity to causal asymmetry: A matter of degree
Tangen, Jason M., Allan, Lorraine G. and Sadeghi, Hedyeh (2004). Assessing (in)sensitivity to causal asymmetry: A matter of degree. New directions in human associative learning. (pp. 65-95) edited by Andy J. Wills. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.
2004
Journal Article
Cue interaction and judgments of causality: Contributions of causal and associative processes
Tangen, Jason M. and Allan, Lorraine G. (2004). Cue interaction and judgments of causality: Contributions of causal and associative processes. Memory and Cognition, 32 (1), 107-124. doi: 10.3758/BF03195824
2004
Conference Publication
Judging binary and continuous variables: Cue-interaction and the role of the outlier
Tangen, Jason M., Allan, Lorraine G., Shields, Steve and Moskal, Alexis B. (2004). Judging binary and continuous variables: Cue-interaction and the role of the outlier. Special Interest Meeting on Human Contingency Learning, Leuven, Belgium, 24-26 May 2004.
2003
Journal Article
Temporal contiguity and contingency judgments: A Pavlovian analogue
Allan, L. G., Tangen, J. M., Wood, R. and Shah, T. (2003). Temporal contiguity and contingency judgments: A Pavlovian analogue. Integrative Physiological And Behavioral Science, 38 (3), 214-229. doi: 10.1007/BF02688855
2003
Conference Publication
The relative effect of cue-interaction on human judgements of causality
Tangen, J. M. and Allan, L. G. (2003). The relative effect of cue-interaction on human judgements of causality. Annual Meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association, Baltimore, Maryland, USA, 13-16 March, 2003.
2003
Journal Article
The relative effect of cue interaction
Tangen, Jason M. and Allan, Lorraine G. (2003). The relative effect of cue interaction. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section B-comparative And Physiological Psychology, 56 (3), 279-300. doi: 10.1080/02724990244000278
2003
Conference Publication
Temporal contiguity and contingency judgements
Tangen, J. M. and Allan, L. G. (2003). Temporal contiguity and contingency judgements. Gregynog Associative Learning Symposium, Wales, United Kingdom, 15-17 April 2003.
Funding
Current funding
Supervision
Availability
- Professor Jason Tangen is:
- Available for supervision
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Available projects
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Tangen Lab Research
If you'd like to join the lab, please read through some of our projects descriptions and papers to see if you're interested in the research questions we're asking.
Supervision history
Current supervision
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Doctor Philosophy
Resilience in traumatic work situations.
Principal Advisor
Other advisors: Dr Samuel Pearson
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Doctor Philosophy
Holding up a mirror to The Cognitive Reflection Test: Investigating the roles of intuition, reflection and insight in test performance
Principal Advisor
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Doctor Philosophy
Balancing Efficiency with Equity: Exploring the Impact of AI-Driven Tutors on Learning in Higher Education
Principal Advisor
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Doctor Philosophy
AI Tutors As 'Metacognitive Pumps' For Learning and Calibrating Confidence
Principal Advisor
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Doctor Philosophy
Improving adolescents' rationality to improve career decision-making skills and promote wellbeing
Associate Advisor
Other advisors: Dr Michael Noetel
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Doctor Philosophy
Arousal Coherence: Feeling our way through uncertainty
Associate Advisor
Completed supervision
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2024
Doctor Philosophy
Reverse engineering expertise in fingerprint identification
Principal Advisor
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2023
Doctor Philosophy
When "Aha!" moments are wrong: A new paradigm for experimentally induced false insights
Principal Advisor
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2022
Doctor Philosophy
The relationship between visual expertise and learned attention
Principal Advisor
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2020
Doctor Philosophy
Communicating error and expertise in forensic expert testimony
Principal Advisor
Other advisors: Professor Blake McKimmie
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2019
Doctor Philosophy
The Phenomenology of Truth: The Psychological Functions of the Insight Experience
Principal Advisor
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2016
Doctor Philosophy
The Emergence of Expertise with Novel Objects
Principal Advisor
Other advisors: Dr Jenny Burt
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2014
Doctor Philosophy
Visual discrimination on the basis of style: Evaluation of low-levels of awareness in human discrimination
Principal Advisor
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2014
Doctor Philosophy
On expertise in fingerprint identification
Principal Advisor
Other advisors: Professor Penelope Sanderson
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2024
Doctor Philosophy
The Highs and Lows of Visual Categorisation: Insights from Response Time Modeling
Associate Advisor
Other advisors: Dr David Sewell
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2022
Doctor Philosophy
Rethinking Auditory Alarms: Examining the potential for novel auditory displays to overcome the limitations of conventional alarms
Associate Advisor
Other advisors: Professor Penelope Sanderson
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2022
Doctor Philosophy
Understanding the Impact of Schemas on Victim Credibility in Rape Trials
Associate Advisor
Other advisors: Professor Barbara Masser, Professor Blake McKimmie
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2015
Doctor Philosophy
Violent video games and prosocial behavior
Associate Advisor
Other advisors: Professor Mark Nielsen
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2014
Doctor Philosophy
Examining the utility of visual search tasks in assessing preferential attention to fear-relevant stimuli
Associate Advisor
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2014
Doctor Philosophy
Modelling Dynamic Affective and Decision Making Processes during Approach and Avoidance Goal Striving
Associate Advisor
Other advisors: Professor Andrew Neal
Media
Enquiries
Contact Professor Jason Tangen directly for media enquiries about:
- Bias
- Categorisation
- Cognition
- Decision Making
- Discrimination
- Education
- Evidence
- Expertise
- Forensics
- Identification
- Insight
- Instruction
- Judgement
- Learning
- Memory
- Metascience
- Misinformation
- Performance
- Problem Solving
- Rationality
- Reasoning
- Thinking
- Training
- Validation
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