In his influential book, Understanding the New Statistics, Geoff Cumming makes the case that psychologists should change the way they report their statistics. Psychologists, he argues, would be far better off if they stopped reporting p-values and started reporting confidence intervals. When I read his book I was struck by the information presented about p-value misconceptions based on a survey in […]
In yesterday’s post, I showed that conventional frequentist confidence intervals are far from straightforward and often do not permit the inference one wants to make. Typically, we would like to use confidence intervals to infer something about a population parameter: if we have a 95% confidence interval, we would like to conclude that there is a […]
What could be more straightforward than the confidence interval? I compute the mean shoe size of a random sample of first-graders and surround it by whiskers that are roughly twice the standard error of that mean. Presumably I can now have 95% confidence that the “true” value of first-graders’ shoe size, in the population at […]
The annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society in Chicago drew to a close on Sunday. Our Twitter feed provides a record of the meeting with the hashtag #Psynom15. As always, the meeting included a number of poster sessions, and on the Saturday evening Cassie Jacobs and I approached a number of student authors at their posters at random (technically […]
The annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society will go under way in about 99 hours, give or take 12 hours depending on your time zone. The program has been available for some time, and here I only briefly review the digital aspects of the meeting. Microblogging Quite a few of the digital team will be in attendance […]
Traces of our evolutionary history linger within us and can be detected in many circumstances. For example, some time ago we noted on this website that processing information with respect to its survival value—that is, whether a knife or a sofa might be of greater use when you are stranded on an island—provides you with a memorial […]
We have no difficulty picking “rat” as the odd one out from the set “goat – deer – rat”. This ready access to semantic structure in our memories supports many essential cognitive capabilities. It allows us to be guided in our current understanding and behavior by prior knowledge and experience. For example, if we learned […]
One of the most important functions of perception is to help organisms navigate through their environments. Different animals navigate through very different environments: think of birds flying at thousands of feet above the ground, bats catching moths in pitch darkness mid-flight, whales crossing entire oceans, bees finding nectar-rich flowers, monkeys scampering through dense tree foliage. […]
All aspects of animal behaviour are the result of a choice. By choosing to do one thing an animal is therefore not doing something else. These decisions need to be made in a manner that maximizes the likelihood of survival. Because of this emphasis on survival, decisions are generally studied from an ecological perspective; however, […]
Human beings are not perfect and our cognitive flaws are legendary—for example, we are not aware of how dangerous our distracted driving is and tend to think that it is others who are bad drivers. People can, however, hold an immense amount of information in mind and use this to navigate space more efficiently and accurately than […]