Lecture 1

Question 1

What is behavioural data science?

Answer 1

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

Question 2

Many things can be studies with large data sets, what is something that is commonly seen on social media that is being researched?

Answer 2

Polarization because of segregated networks

Question 3

What does social media provide for large scale segregated networks?

Answer 3

Echochambers

Question 4

What is data? Substantiate this with an example

Answer 4

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

Question 5

What are phenomena?

Answer 5

Robust features of the world, they are not data, but evidenced by patterns in the data (general)

Question 6

The positive manifold is an example of something, what is it and what is it an example of?

Answer 6

The phenomena that all scores on cognitive assessments are highly positively correlated with one another

Question 7

There are many types of theories, which theory does psychology usually aim for and what is it?

Answer 7

Explanatory theories, which is a set of principles that aims to explain phenomena

Question 8

What is the preferrable method of theory in BDS?

Answer 8

mathematically formulated models

Question 9

Identical twins’ cognitive test scores are more similar than those of fraternal twins. This feature is best represented as?

Answer 9

phenomena (this is an exam question)

Question 10

What is the lexical decision task?

Answer 10

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

Question 11

What is the lexical decision task supposed to measure?

Answer 11

The ease in which lexical representations are retrieved from memory. Performance is better for high frequency words than for low frequency words

Question 12

Which are key variables in the lexical decision task?

Answer 12

Reaction time and accuracy

Question 13

The results of the reaction time variable in the lexical decision task are explained by a certain hypothesis, which is?

Answer 13

Global slowing hypothesis, which means older adults are generally slower than younger adults

Question 14

The global slowing hypothesis is an example of standard analysis, what does this mean exactly?

Answer 14

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

Question 15

What is a process model that looks at the same data as the global slowing hypothesis?

Answer 15

Ratcliff’s diffusion model

Question 16

What does the diffusion model describe?

Answer 16

How noisy evidence is accumulated over time. It allows manifested behaviour to be decomposted into latent psychological processes

Question 17

There are several concepts within the diffusion model, what is the drift rate?

Answer 17

The drift rate is the amount of time it takes to reach a certain threshold

Question 18

There are several concepts within the diffusion model, what is the treshold?

Answer 18

It basically is the line that indicates when the drift rate touches it, a decision is made (figures in notebook may make this easier)

Question 19

There are several concepts within the diffusion model, what is the starting point?

Answer 19

It is where on the x axis one starts the decision making process

Question 20

Besides the general processes within the model, there is also an extra process in the diffusion model that adds to the decision time, what is this?

Answer 20

The non-decision time, time needed for encoding and motor processes

Question 21

What does the drift rate quantify?

Answer 21

Task difficulty or subject ability (time it takes to reach threshold)

Question 22

What does the boundary seperation quantify?

Answer 22

Response caution and is responsible for the speed-accuracy tradeoff

Question 23

What is a unique quality of the boundaries in the diffusion model and what does this do?

Answer 23

The boundaries can be further or closer, the further they are, the less mistakes one makes, BUT the longer it take to make a decision

Question 24

What does the starting point reflect?

Answer 24

A priori biasis that depends on the history of what happened before (i.e. mostly nonwords in previous conditions mean a bias towards nonwords). Aka when something is a nonword this decision is takes quicker than word

Question 25

What is the speed-accuracy tradeoff (SAT) and how does the diffusion model account for it?

Answer 25

The general ability of people to increase accuracy at the cost of taking more time.

Accuracy can be increased by widening the distance between the two response thresholds; decisions will take longer to terminate at a boundary but those that do are less likely to do so in error.

Question 26

What is it that process models help us do?

Answer 26

Helps us understand human cognition, decompose and measure underlying psychological processes and may help predict decisions (not the diffusion model)

Question 27

What does the lecture mean by psychology not having a theoretical field?

Answer 27

There is no division of labor in psychology, a lack of theories and the people that make theories are also the ones that test them

Question 28

What is characteristic of most theories in psychology?

Answer 28

They are verbal in character, meaning intuitive theories based on empirical observations (usually it is the other way around, theory construction and them empirical research)

Question 29

What is a difference between theories in other fields vs. ones in psychology

Answer 29

Psychology forgoes the importance of what the theory actually says because the theorist themselves hold the phenomena together, thus the theorist is the one making predictions, not the theory (importance of preregistration)

Question 30

Theory is generally regarded as an art in psychology, what does the lecture argue

Answer 30

That it is actually a skill and that it can be systematized, practiced and taught

Question 31

There are five stepts in the proposed theory methodology, which are these?

Answer 31

1. Identify a set of phenomena you aim to explain
2. Come up with a proto-theory
3. Formalize both the proto-theory and the phenomena
4. Evaluate how well the theory actually predicts
5. Overall evaluation of theory

Question 32

The slides give an example of a current “theory” that is actually not really a theory but just names gives to a bunch of phenomena, which is it?

Answer 32

The big five

Question 33

What does Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) do?

Answer 33

Tries to find the number of latent variables needed to explain the correlations

Question 34

What is induction?

Answer 34

To generalize from known cases to other cases of the same kind (on the basis of said sample, this correlation in population). Aka induction established empirical phenomena

Question 35

What is abduction?

Answer 35

To explain phenomena by postulating hypothetical things (erratic behaviour of person is because of drugs). Aka abduction generates explanatory theories

Question 36

What is deduction?

Answer 36

To derive specific implications for cases from
general laws that subsume those cases. (if i give this person drugs they will behave errativcly as the theory states). Aka generates testable predictions from explanatory theories

Question 37

What is anological abduction?

Answer 37

To seek similar phenomena in other fields and use models from other domain to establish explanatory theories