Britt Lab
Welcome to the lab web site for Britt Anderson. Here you can find some posts of lab members' activities and other miscellaneous thoughts. You can find our publications and conference presentations as well.
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1. Recent Posts
1.1. Interested in a weird graduate student project?
Date: Author: Britt Anderson
The question is can we bring the language of category theory and verifiable programs to the world of cognitive modeling? To be honest, I rather doubt it, at least in the near term, but I am going to try, and I would love to have some help on this quest, but anyone contemplating it should think long and hard about the trade-offs. It will be an adventure of exploration, fun to be sure, but a risky foundation for a career. The surer path to academic stability will be to grind away in a lab that is exploiting known science to accumulate incrementally new knowledge on a socially important topic.
1.2. How Do We Update Our Probability Estimates: Trial-by trial or all at once?
Date: Author: Britt Anderson
People have been wondering about this for decades. The direct Bayesian idea would be that after every observation your mental model of the relevant parameters for whatever stochastic event you are interested in gets revised to reflect your most recent evidence. However, in the lab that doesn't seem to be what people do.
1.3. Plinko and Statistical Learning
Date: Author: Britt Anderson
How can you measure someone's prior? Alex Filipowicz, James Danckert, and I thought long and hard about this. We wanted something to reflect an entire distribution and not just a point estimate like the maximum. We also did not want to make assumptions about the shape of the distribution. Since we all have unique life histories it seemed that we should expect individual variation, and not assume consistency for an entire experimental sample. With the help of many others over a few years the paradigm we developed to address these questions took the form of Plinko, another name for Galton's Bean Machine. With writing and analysis help from Peter Diberardino a collection of experiments has just been published in the British Journal of Psychology. We report that people give consistent reports of their priors, they show learning and context effects, and that in adversarial circumstances their distributions converge towards an optimal one. There is of course much more that can be done and the main purpose of this blog post is to advertise the tool. Take a look if you have time and let me know what you think.
2. Older Posts
Here is a list of our older posts.