Psychonomic Society blog covers our research - In addition to the excellent g-distance paper, recently published in Psychological Review, the other main output from Lenard Dome’s Ph.D. was a paper on the effect of concurrent load on the inverse base-rate effect (IBRE). In the IBRE, one pair of cues (AB) predict a common outcome, while an overlapping...
What research culture in UK universities has lost, and what will replace it. - I’ve been based at the University of Exeter this week, a place I worked for 12 years and where I’ve maintained good relationships with several people ever since. In the 12 years I worked here, it was a good, bad, and indifferent experience for me, at various points. But there...
Industrial Action in UK Higher Education - TL;DR: Due to Industrial Action, I am currently limiting the number of new, external, unpaid peer-review jobs I take on. I will still take on some unpaid reviews, proportionate to my own use of the peer review system. Beyond that, I’ll decline requests for unpaid reviews. If you’d like to...
You have done something you consider to be impossible, what do you conclude from this? - Having mainly focussed on object classification in my career, I thought I’d have a peek at what AI language models have been up to in the last few years. I started by asking it some questions related to immigration, which I won’t post here because one of the answers was...
It seems to be increasingly common to use the price of a take-away cup of coffee as a way of saying something is affordable - the most recent example I came across is that COVID tests, which were free in England until today, are now “less than the price of...
The difference between knowing that it fails, and why it fails. - In a peer review I got a while back, someone wrote “Sometimes understanding why a simple model fails is far more informative than showing that a complex model succeeds”. (You know who you are, if you’d prefer to be named, drop me an email). I wrote a paragraph in response...
Kruschke's EXIT model and the inverse base-rate effect - I’m happy to announce that Human Brain Mapping published our paper on the neural correlates of the inverse base-rate effect on Friday; it’s available as open access here. The lead author was Angus Inkster. The inverse base-rate effect is an example of irrational decision making. Participants learn that two symptoms...
A new formal theory of category learning - I’m pleased to announce that our paper on the CAL model has been accepted for publication, at Psychological Review (lead author: René Schlegelmilch). You can read the preprint here. CAL is a new formal theory of category learning, which assumes both rule and exemplar-like processes. In this regard, it has...
Basic object classification still hard for AI - In recent years, there have been quite a few claims that state-of-the-art AI has reached human levels of performance in object recognition. In a recent talk, I briefly discuss some of the evidence against that view, including some preliminary unpublished work from my lab. You can now view that talk...
Take back control - Having recently acquired a ‘regular’ Android phone, after several years either without a smart phone or with a de-Googled one (that’s a whole other story…) I got a slice of the default behaviour of these devices. Push notifications - constantly. I had a BlackBerry a decade ago - the device...
Global model analysis - Lenard Dome, currently a graduate student in my lab, has just released an R package for parameter space partitioning onto CRAN (psp). I helped a little bit. But, what is parameter space partitoning? It’s easiest to start by talking about what it is not. It’s not model fitting, at least...
Drift into the horizon with precision melodies... - Today, I’m listening to Myrakaru’s excellent Tammetoru - again. From 2004, it’s an ambient, downtempo, somewhat glitch-based electronic instrumental album. Beautiful and relaxing, I think I must have listened to this while working more than 100 times over the years. I’ve always assumed, on no particular basis, that Myrakaru was...
Business models in a post-scarcity digital world - Just got my Patreon invoice for June, which reminds me to blog briefly about patronage as one business model when what is being produced is digital, and hence has basically zero marginal cost per additional consumer. Patreon is a system for making regular (monthly) payments to creators you want to...
The gender data gap - I came across this 2019 book in a second hand bookstore in Salisbury in the summer of 2020, and rediscovered it on my home office bookshelf a month or so back. Written by Caroline Criado Perez it’s an accessible and scholarly list of the very many ways in which the...
Or...the hyperactive hive mind - I heard Cal Newport talking about his new book, A World Without Email on Lex Fridman’s podcast, where Cal said the book really should have been called The Hyperactive Hive Mind, but that wouldn’t have sold as many copies. An even less exciting but yet more accurate title would have...
Twenty-seven stories from the Campbell years - Bought this three-volume set in The Book Cupboard shortly after first lockdown, and finally finished them (in between several other books) last night. An interesting and varied collection of early writings from the science fiction writer I have probably read the most over the years, but if you’ve not read...
Very, very hard - Patricia Rich and colleagues (Rich et al., 2021) ask us to imagine what, for most theorists in cognitive science, would seem to be an ideal working environment. It’s a world where there is no uncertainty about observations (no replication crisis). It’s also a world where there is no problem of...
Another decade, another web technology... - I’ve maintained a personal website since 2000. It was entirely hand-coded HTML until around 2014, when I added the bibtexbrowser PHP script to handle my publication list. Oh, and in 2012, I added a link to a blogspot blog. It’s now 2021, and the website looks awful on both desktops...