When I was a kid, I had a pair of sunglasses that had little mirrors on the side of the lenses that allowed you to see what was happening behind you. I would walk around my neighborhood feeling so cool, like a bona fide Spy Kid. James Bond had nothing on me. I thought someday […]
Statistics and Methodology
Older adults are more motivated than younger adults to do well in lab studies. What does this mean for our understanding of cognitive aging? If you’re a psychologist who studies cognitive aging, chances are you recruit younger adults (18-22 years) from the college or university and older adults (65+ years) from the community and have […]
As researchers begin to focus more and more on the factors that support replicability and replication in cognitive psychology, they are increasingly turning toward online venues for data collection. Many experiments are still run in the lab with participants recruited from convenience samples because this gives researchers more control over their participants’ behavior, and often […]
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 […]
I don’t know about you, but I remember feeling pretty smug when the large Open Science Collaboration report showing that experiments in cognitive psychology were more replicable than experiments in social psychology was published. Apologies to my social psychologist friends. Rest assured, I get my just desserts. The number of participants you need to recruit […]
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 […]
This commentary is in two parts. As a contributor to the special issue, I enjoyed reading these commentaries, and felt compelled to synthesize that enjoyment. That’s the first part. The ideas sparked by these commentaries lead to the second part. There I consider a potential next step in progress in our field, and link it […]
What were we thinking? Is it possible to discover how past cultures made decisions, prioritised issues, or which ideas were felt to be emotional or bland, offensive or pleasant? Language provides a fossil record of society, and big data has made huge progress in making historical psychology through language analysis possible and accessible. A step […]
It’s easy to get excited about the promise of big data and naturally occurring datasets. Whether you were first captivated by “culturomics” nearly a decade ago or are first discovering its potential in this special issue of the Psychonomic Society’s journal Behavior Research Methods, you are not alone in seeing big data or naturally occurring […]
Where are we? What are we going to do? During the 1880s and 1890s, Francis Galton collected one sample of response time from each of 17,000 Britons. Clearly, he had no concept of intertrial variability, so one sample seemed to suffice. Times have changed and we live in a world where not only can we […]