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. 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.
1.2. Navigating Mazes: Local and Global Probabilities
Date: Author: Britt Anderson
Sixuan Chen has just had accepted at the Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology her manuscript on the use of statistical structure in maze navigation. This is a condensed and improved account of work detailed in her masters' thesis. Sixuan's work builds on other work from the lab in which we tried to determine whether people have distinct probabilistic representations for various aspects of their environments. Sixuan was interested in spatial behavior and so designed an experiment where mazes were built programmatically. She could manipulate the reliability of local cues and the consistency of the location of the maze goal's, thus having a "local" and "global" probability. She demonstrated that both probabilistic structures independently affected participant choices, but that there was a strong bias to the use of local information even when that policy was sub-optimal.
1.3. Is Intermittent Updating of Probability Estimates Due to Motor Costs?
Date: Author: Britt Anderson
A decade ago an excellent article with an educational reminder of some forgotten history was published by Gallistel and colleagues. The main method was to observe the trial by trial reports of participants estimating the Bernoulli parameter while observing a sequence of "coin flips" with intermittent changes in the underlying, true, parameter. The main conclusion was that participants were not doing trial-by-trial updating, because their reports showed a step-and-hold pattern of updating. What Julia Schirmeister investigated was a possible motor confound, identified by Forsgren in their rebuttal.
2. Older Posts
Here is a list of our older posts.