Many of us have the impression that gestures and exaggerated facial expressions help us understand others in loud environments such as bars or conference parties. Speech perception in many contexts is multimodal – we incorporate visual information when trying to make sense of what someone else is saying. These cues are so consistently predictive of […]
It’s hot, very hot. And you are traipsing through the jungles of Sumatra in pursuit of that final bilingual participant who is as conversant in Minangkabau as she is in English. You need to test her in your lexical decision task to fulfil the sample size requirements of your OSF preregistration. You nervously scan the […]
William James famously said that the world is “one great blooming, buzzing confusion” to an infant whose sensory apparatus is “assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once.” As adults, we continue to be assailed by stimuli, but out attentional apparatus permits us to deal with the blooming and buzzing confusion quite well. […]
If we want something, we tend to strive for it. With some combination of luck and skill, we sometimes achieve it. Goods such as a new car or a new house, positive life-changing events such as a new job or a promotion, are all within reach if we try hard enough. Or so said Horatio […]
Sir Winston Churchill once made the following statement: “I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.” While Sir Churchill’s perspective may be indicating the direction of a partnership, it also reminds us that we must be mindful of the biases and assets that […]
In October 2010, an elderly white man boarded an Air Canada flight bound from Hong Kong to Vancouver. During the flight, this passenger visited the bathroom and emerged an Asian man in his early 20s. No, this wasn’t an episode of Scooby Doo, this was an actual case where a hyperrealistic mask was used to […]
There are a number of factors that make us fundamentally human. We eat. We sleep. We experience emotions. And unfortunately at some point, we all become sick. Where we tend to diverge is how we process and treat our sicknesses. Some people run immediately to the doctor’s office, or if you are anything like me, […]
(This post was co-authored with Brandon Turner). Sharon Bertsch McGrayne’s 2012 book, The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes’ Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy, traces the difficulties that statisticians and empirical researchers alike have had in embracing Bayesian methods. Despite the obvious […]
I recently finished reading Suzanne Buffam’s, A Pillow Book. This is a book of non-fiction poetry about thoughts and musings that may enter the mind as one drifts off to sleep, ranging from the historical consideration of pillows to comprehensive lists of sleeping aids. I’ve spent more than a few nights drifting off to sleep considering […]
One of the unique features of Bayesian statistical and computational modelling is the prior distribution. A prior distribution is both conceptually and formally necessary to do any sort of Bayesian modelling. If we are estimating the values of model parameters (e.g., regression coefficients), we do this by updating our prior beliefs about the parameter values […]