Lecture 1 Flashcards
What is behavioural data science?
multidisciplinary scientific field that aims to facilitate understanding, prediction, and change of human behavior through the analysis of behaviorally defined variables as they arise in large datasets
Many things can be studies with large data sets, what is something that is commonly seen on social media that is being researched?
Polarization because of segregated networks
What does social media provide for large scale segregated networks?
Echochambers
What is data? Substantiate this with an example
representations of observations (specific)
Observation: Dana scored X on test Y
Representation: one of the rows represents Dana (a single case) and the columns represent variables
What are phenomena?
Robust features of the world, they are not data, but evidenced by patterns in the data (general)
The positive manifold is an example of something, what is it and what is it an example of?
The phenomena that all scores on cognitive assessments are highly positively correlated with one another
There are many types of theories, which theory does psychology usually aim for and what is it?
Explanatory theories, which is a set of principles that aims to explain phenomena
What is the preferrable method of theory in BDS?
mathematically formulated models
Identical twins’ cognitive test scores are more similar than those of fraternal twins. This feature is best represented as?
phenomena (this is an exam question)
What is the lexical decision task?
Participants have to decide whether a string of letters is a word or a nonword, often times thousands of strings have to be judged very quickly
What is the lexical decision task supposed to measure?
The ease in which lexical representations are retrieved from memory. Performance is better for high frequency words than for low frequency words
Which are key variables in the lexical decision task?
Reaction time and accuracy
The results of the reaction time variable in the lexical decision task are explained by a certain hypothesis, which is?
Global slowing hypothesis, which means older adults are generally slower than younger adults
The global slowing hypothesis is an example of standard analysis, what does this mean exactly?
It looks at one variable (in this case, reaction time) forgoing that there is a speed-accuracy tradeoff and it lacks a process model, meaning that you know nothing about the generation of data
What is a process model that looks at the same data as the global slowing hypothesis?
Ratcliff’s diffusion model