People often fail to use base-rate information appropriately in decision-making. This is evident in the inverse base-rate effect, a phenomenon in which people tend to predict a rare outcome for a new and ambiguous combination of cues. While the effect was first reported in 1988, it has recently seen a renewed interest from researchers concerned with learning, attention and decision-making. However, some researchers have raised concerns that the effect arises in specific circumstances and is unlikely to provide insight into general learning and decision-making processes. In this review, we critically evaluate the evidence for and against the main explanations that have been proposed to explain the effect, and identify where this evidence is currently weak. We argue that concerns about the effect are not well supported by the data. Instead, the evidence supports the conclusion that the effect is a result of general mechanisms that provides a useful opportunity to understand the processes involved in learning and decision making. We discuss gaps in our knowledge and some promising avenues for future research, including the relevance of the effect to models of attentional change in learning, an area where the phenomenon promises to contribute new insights.

人们在做决策时常常不能适当地使用基本利率信息。这在逆基准利率效应中很明显，在这种现象中，人们倾向于预测一个新的、模棱两可的线索组合的罕见结果。虽然这种效应于 1988 年首次被报道，但最近它引起了关注学习、注意力和决策制定的研究人员的新兴趣。然而，一些研究人员担心这种影响会在特定情况下出现，并且不太可能提供对一般学习和决策过程的洞察力。在这篇综述中，我们批判性地评估了支持和反对为解释该影响而提出的主要解释的证据，并确定了目前该证据薄弱的地方。我们认为数据并没有很好地支持对效果的担忧。反而，证据支持这样的结论，即这种影响是一般机制的结果，为理解学习和决策过程所涉及的过程提供了有用的机会。我们讨论了我们的知识差距和未来研究的一些有前途的途径，包括影响与学习注意力变化模型的相关性，这一现象有望提供新的见解。