I see four benefits to the use of Bayesian inference: Inclusion of prior information. Regularization. Handling models with many parameters or latent variables. Propagation of uncertainty. Another selling point is a purported logical coherence – but I don’t really buy that argument so I’ll forget that, just as I’ll also set aside philosophical objections against […]
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 […]
Your brilliant PhD student ran an experiment last week that investigated whether chanting the words “unicorns, Brexit, fairies” repeatedly every morning before dawn raises people’s estimates of the likelihood that they will win the next lottery in comparison to a control group that instead chants “reality, reality, reality”. The manipulation seems to have worked, as […]
Human beings have an incredible capability to communicate. Unlike other species, humans have evolved to use language to express our states, desires, observations, and, I guess, tweet about them. Language is a powerful system of communication because it allows the expression of counterfactuals: we can easily discuss the past and future; distant, unseen locations; complex […]
There are many ways to become famous. Phineas Gage, an American railway construction foreman in the mid-19th century, experienced one of the most improbable (and least recommended) paths to eternal fame. Few first-year psychology students around the world will have escaped the story of Phineas, and his mishap with an iron rod used to tamp […]
“Working memory” is a broad term that describes what we do with information that is consciously accessible. For instance, when students take notes in class, they are hearing the lecturer’s sentences, placing them in the context of what they know about the topic, and synthesizing both to form the note they ultimately write on the […]
Is a picture necessarily worth a thousand words? Do bilinguals always find some grammatical features in their second language to be more difficult than native speakers of that language? Is the Stroop effect necessarily larger when the task is to name the color ink of a color word than when the task is to read […]
What is it we remember, and why? Research in cognitive psychology has provided a broad and often very reliable sketch of the variables that determine memory performance. For example, recall of words is better when word repetitions are spaced rather than massed. To learn the Lithuanian word for cookie, you are better off spreading apart […]
If you had to bet on a psychological effect replicating, what effect would you bet on? Though it seems like an unlikely bet to be asked to make, it’s a reality for anyone conducting a psychology class demo. You want an effect that holds up no matter who your students are. You don’t want an […]
Although I typically do not submit grants to NIH, I recently was perusing their Funding Opportunity Announcements (FOAs) to find out if any would align with my educationally relevant research. The great news is that I found some promising announcements, but the “Clinical Trial Not Allowed” warning made me flash back to NIH’s recent decision […]