On being SMARTer than Vincent

Imagine an experiment in the psychological laboratory. In the experiment, some number of participants are asked to solve problems of varying difficulty. Crucially, the participants are unique individuals and not faithful copies of one another. If that bit of fiction sounds familiar, that might be because it describes a good chunk of cognitive science and […]

Continue Reading

Detecting Bigfoot vs. brain waves: New approaches to multivariate data analysis

One of my favorite xkcd comics is Settled. See below. It’s a cool example of statistical inference. Evidence accumulates for a null hypothesis without any new data coming in. The only thing that changes over time is the expectation under the counterfactual: if Bigfoot were real, the ubiquity of cell phone cameras means that we […]

Continue Reading

You can obscure a lot by just plotting: Cognitive science of data presentation

“They began three and a half centuries ago,” writes Gernsbacher (2018, p. 403). They can delight us or frighten us, teach us and confuse us, intimidate us or encourage us. They are the base unit of productivity and the currency of academic prestige and advancement. “They,” of course, are scientific journal articles. The professional academic […]

Continue Reading

Weighting or besting? Speeded multi-attribute choice

The last few weeks, I’ve been very busy with the logistics of organizing a mid-size conference that will be held this summer.  Some of the decisions, like the city and the approximate timing, have been made for me, but I’ve had to choose between competing hotels, make a schedule with talks, workshops, symposia, keynotes, breaks, […]

Continue Reading

Freedom of choice vs. undisclosed flexibility: Researcher degrees of freedom in model-based inference

When we talk about statistical modeling, we often encounter the concept of “degrees of freedom.”  Remember?  It’s the n-1 in t[n-1] or the [1] in χ2[1].  In our off-the-shelf statistical procedures, the degrees of freedom refers to the information content of some statistical construct.  It can loosely be thought of as the number of independent […]

Continue Reading

From classical to new to real: A brief history of #BayesInPsych

The #BayesInPsych Digital Event kicked off yesterday and as the leading Guest Editor of the special issue of Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, I take this opportunity to provide more context for this week’s posts. The simple act of deciding which among competing theories is most likely—or which is most supported by the data—is the most […]

Continue Reading