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.
If you want to be alerted for new posts you can add this page to your feedreader.
1. Recent Posts
1.1. 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.
1.2. 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.
1.3. Cog Sci 2024 - Rotterdam: Negative Ranking Theory
Date: Author: Britt Anderson
Hanbin Go and I have spent a lot of the last couple of years trying to come up with ways to probe belief that depart from the conventional subjective probability model. That model is incomplete at best, and probably wrong for many of the most interesting cases: such as when you have to consider counterfactuals or one-off scenarios. We came across the negative ranking theory of Wolfgang Spohn and found it appealing in that it limits much of the computational burden of comparing and updating degrees of belief. But do people actually adhere to this formalism? That has been Hanbin's project for the last few years and he is sharing his first comprehensive overview at this month's (July 2024) Cognitive Science Society meeting in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Come by and let us know what you think or take a look at the attached poster/paper combo and send us an email. We would love to get feedback on this work.
2. Older Posts
Here is a list of our older posts.