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
What does the diffusion model describe?
How noisy evidence is accumulated over time. It allows manifested behaviour to be decomposted into latent psychological processes
There are several concepts within the diffusion model, what is the drift rate?
The drift rate is the amount of time it takes to reach a certain threshold
There are several concepts within the diffusion model, what is the treshold?
It basically is the line that indicates when the drift rate touches it, a decision is made (figures in notebook may make this easier)
There are several concepts within the diffusion model, what is the starting point?
It is where on the x axis one starts the decision making process
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?
The non-decision time, time needed for encoding and motor processes
What does the drift rate quantify?
Task difficulty or subject ability (time it takes to reach threshold)
What does the boundary seperation quantify?
Response caution and is responsible for the speed-accuracy tradeoff
What is a unique quality of the boundaries in the diffusion model and what does this do?
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
What does the starting point reflect?
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
What is the speed-accuracy tradeoff (SAT) and how does the diffusion model account for it?
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.
What is it that process models help us do?
Helps us understand human cognition, decompose and measure underlying psychological processes and may help predict decisions (not the diffusion model)
What does the lecture mean by psychology not having a theoretical field?
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
What is characteristic of most theories in psychology?
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)
What is a difference between theories in other fields vs. ones in psychology
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)
Theory is generally regarded as an art in psychology, what does the lecture argue
That it is actually a skill and that it can be systematized, practiced and taught
There are five stepts in the proposed theory methodology, which are these?
- Identify a set of phenomena you aim to explain
- Come up with a proto-theory
- Formalize both the proto-theory and the phenomena
- Evaluate how well the theory actually predicts
- Overall evaluation of theory
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?
The big five
What does Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) do?
Tries to find the number of latent variables needed to explain the correlations
What is induction?
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
What is abduction?
To explain phenomena by postulating hypothetical things (erratic behaviour of person is because of drugs). Aka abduction generates explanatory theories
What is deduction?
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
What is anological abduction?
To seek similar phenomena in other fields and use models from other domain to establish explanatory theories
