Although the susceptibility to reasoning biases is often assumed to be a stable trait, the temporal stability of people's performance on popular heuristics-and-biases tasks has been rarely directly tested.The present study addressed this issue and examined a potential determinant for answer change.Participants solved the same set of "bias" tasks twice in two test sessions, two weeks apart. We used the two-response paradigm to test the stability of both initial (intuitive) and final (deliberate) responses.We hypothesized that participants who showed higher conflict detection in their initial intuitive responses at session 1 (as indexed by a relative confidence decrease compared to control problems), would be less stable in their responses between session 1 and 2. Results showed that performance on the reasoning tasks was highly, but not entirely, stable two weeks later. Notably, conflict detection in session 1 was significantly more pronounced in those cases that participants changed their answer between session 1 and 2 than when they did not change their answer between sessions. We discuss practical and theoretical implications.

The topsoil seed bank was studied in four types of agricultural bird habitats: fields with cereals, maize, clover and tilled fields of a Mediterranean plain to determine the potentially richest habitat based on food supply for the wintering farmland birds. The diversity and abundance of topsoil seeds differed between seasons but did not differ significantly between habitats. The cereal habitat was the richest in food supply for the overwintering of farmland birds. The topsoil seed bank was dominated by Chenopodium album, Polygonum aviculare and Amaranthus retroflexus. The findings of this study provide insight for low-intensity management of higher-elevation mount agricultural areas of southern Mediterranean by preserving seed-rich habitats for farmland avifauna.

Whereas people’s reasoning is often biased by intuitive stereotypical associations, recent debiasing studies suggest that performance can be boosted by short training interventions that stress the underlying problem logic. The nature of this training effect remains unclear. Does training help participants correct erroneous stereotypical intuitions through deliberation? Or does it help them develop correct intuitions? We addressed this issue in four studies with base-rate neglect and conjunction fallacy problems. We used a two-response paradigm in which participants first gave an initial intuitive response, under time pressure and cognitive load, and then gave a final response after deliberation. Studies 1A and 2A showed that training boosted performance and did so as early as the intuitive stage. After training, most participants solved the problems correctly from the outset and no longer needed to correct an initial incorrect answer through deliberation. Studies 1B and 2B indicated that this sound intuiting persisted over at least two months. The findings confirm that a short training can debias reasoning at an intuitive “System 1” stage and get reasoners to favour logical over stereotypical intuitions.