Category: Research

Interpreting nulls, even surprising ones, is not trivial

March 19, 2016 Measurement Research No Comments
Sometimes I design an experiment really wondering what will happen, but that wasn’t the case when I first decided to compare proactive interference effects for verbal and visual memoranda. Proactive interference occurs when some information you have previously memorized disrupts your ability to learn new information. For example, having studied…

Eye movements as retrieval cues?

February 2, 2016 Research No Comments
I’ll be speaking on Friday in the International Colloquia Series at the School of Psychology at Cardiff University on my newest line of research: figuring out whether eye movements cue memory retrieval. Eye movements have been proposed as a possible analog to speech-based verbal rehearsal, potentially useful for retrieving ordered…

A visit from the Ghost of Research Past

November 19, 2015 Measurement Research 3 Comments
A request for an old data set recently afforded me the opportunity, much like Ebenezer Scrooge, of revisiting my Past-Self when I was a brand-new post-graduate student, and allowing Past-Self and Future-Self to help me critique how my lab curates our data and materials in the present day. Both Past-Self…

Bayesian methods and experimental design

September 24, 2015 Measurement Research No Comments
At our symposium on Bayesian Methods in Cognitive Science at the meeting of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology, we talked about the advantages using Bayes factors for inference. I talked about a logical hypothesis test about the role of attention in binding that has frequently resulted in non-significant interactions…

Cases of auditory short-term memory loss?

September 12, 2015 Research 2 Comments
One reason why so many psychologists believe in separate, specialized auditory and visual short-term memory systems is that occasionally a patient presents with deficits that seem consistent with the selective loss of one or the other of these functions. I recently looked into this in depth because I wanted to…