Thinking about thinking

Yes­ter­day I sub­mit­ted a manusc­ript on the math of men­tal chro­mo­metry , so I upda­ted the page to con­tain this work, inc­lu­ding the LaTeX source for the manusc­ript. See the “Update” por­tion of the page.

I just pos­ted a page desc­ri­bing men­tal chro­mo­metry, an exci­ting new para­digm for mea­su­ring memory. This area is so new that the math requi­red to pur­sue it has not been made public outside the research group that ori­gi­na­ted the approach. So I went ahead and figu­red it out myself (well, with some help from a pro­fes­sio­nal sta­tis­ti­cian). Code and Monte Carlo test results are presented.

I just pos­ted rumi­na­tions on relia­bi­lity, inc­lu­ding intro­duc­tion to the con­cept, some trou­bles with its com­pu­ta­tion, some solu­tions to these trou­bles, some work I’ve done on pro­vi­ding new solu­tions, and an open ques­tion on the uti­lity of the con­cept in general.

I’ve crea­ted a page to host a draft manusc­ript desc­ri­bing my work to solve the pro­blem of corre­la­tion amidst esti­ma­ble mea­su­re­ment error.

You’ll notice a new Tools sec­tion on the site, inc­lu­ding a list of tools I made and tools I use. I hope you find them useful.

I’ve also uploa­ded code and resul­ting graphics from an attempt at repli­ca­ting Miller (1988)‘s simu­la­tions demons­tra­ting the dan­gers of using the median in the con­text of ske­wed dis­tri­bu­tions (ex. human res­ponse time data). The code demons­tra­tes Monte Carlo simu­la­tion in R using the plyr pac­kage and the use of ggplot2 for graphics.

This site aims to serve as both blog and open note­book for my research in cog­ni­tive science. As I con­duct research, I’ll create pages that desc­ribe expe­ri­ments and link to code & data for those expe­ri­ments. I’ll also create pages that dis­cuss topics that inte­rest me in cog­ni­tive science, such as com­mon expe­ri­men­tal para­digms, data analy­sis, and mode­ling the mind. New and upda­ted pages will be announ­ced by blog posts.

Subsc­ribe to the blog RSS feed and stay tuned!