Journal of Mathematical Psychology最新文献

The APA encourages authors to thoroughly report their results, including confidence intervals. However, considerable debate exists regarding the computation of confidence intervals in within-subject designs. Nathoo et al.’s (2018) recently proposed a Bayesian within-subject credible interval, which has faced criticism for not accounting for the uncertainty associated with estimating subject-specific effects. In this article, we show how Nathoo et al.’s within-subject credible interval can be easily corrected by utilizing the theory of degrees of freedom. This correction obviates the necessity for estimates of subject-specific effects that offer shrinkage. Instead, it involves a straightforward adjustment in degrees of freedom in both the interaction mean squares and the $t$-distribution used to compute the interval. Therefore, our proposed interval, being easily computable through a simple formula, eliminates the need for fully Bayesian approaches. It accurately represents uncertainty and offers the interpretational benefit of Bayesian intervals.

Two intriguing papers of the late 1990’s and early 2000s by J. Tanaka and colleagues put forth the hypothesis that a repository of face memories can be viewed as a vector space where points in the space represent faces and each of these is surrounded by an attractor field. This hypothesis broadens the thesis of T. Valentine that face space is constituted of feature vectors in a finite dimensional vector space (e.g., Valentine, 2001). The attractor fields in the atypical part of face space are broader and stronger than those in typical face regions. This notion makes the substantiated prediction that a morphed midway face between a typical and atypical parent will be perceptually more similar to the atypical face. We propose an alternative interpretation that takes a more standard geometrical approach but also departs from the popular types of metrics assumed in almost all multidimensional scaling studies. Rather we propose a theoretical structure based on our earlier investigations of non-Euclidean and especially, Riemannian Face Manifolds (e.g., Townsend, Solomon, & Spencer-Smith, 2001). We assert that this approach avoids some of the issues involved in the gradient theme by working directly with the type of metric inherently associated with the face space. Our approach emphasizes a shift towards a greater emphasis on non-Euclidean geometries, especially Riemannian manifolds, integrating these geometric concepts with processing-oriented modeling. We note that while fields like probability theory, stochastic process theory, and mathematical statistics are commonly studied in mathematical psychology, there is less focus on areas like topology, non-Euclidean geometry, and functional analysis. Therefore, both to elevate comprehension as well as to propagate the latter topics as critical for our present and future enterprises, our exposition moves forward in a highly tutorial fashion, and we embed the material in its proper historical context.

In the past years, several theories for assessment have been developed within the overlapping fields of Psychometrics and Mathematical Psychology. The most notable are Item Response Theory (IRT), Cognitive Diagnostic Assessment (CDA), and Knowledge Structure Theory (KST). In spite of their common goals, these frameworks have been developed largely independently, focusing on slightly different aspects. Yet various connections between them can be found in literature. In this contribution, Part I of a three-part work, a unified perspective is suggested that uses two primitives (structure and process) and two operations (factorization and reparametrization) to derive IRT, CDA, and KST models. A Taxonomy of models is built using a two-processes sequential approach that captures the similarities between the conditional probabilities featured in these models and separates them into a first process modeling the effects of individual ability on item mastering, and a second process representing the effects of pure chance on item solving.

This paper explores a relationship between lexicographic and majority preferences as a novel explanation of preference cycles in choice. Already May (1954) notes that, among subjects in his experiment who did not display a (majority) preference cycle, a vast majority ordered alternatives according to an attribute that they found overridingly important, suggesting that a lexicographic heuristic was used. Our model, Lexicographic Majority, reconciles these findings by providing a unified framework for lexicographic and simple majority preferences. We justify lexicographic majority preferences by providing an axiomatization in terms of behavioral properties.

The multiplicative inequality (MI) introduced by Sattath and Tversky (1976) is a rare example of a simple and intuitively appealing condition relating choice probabilities across choice sets of different sizes. It is also a testable implication of two models of stochastic discrete choice: the Elimination by Aspects model of Tversky (1972b) and the independent random utility model. We prove several results on the multiplicative inequality and its relationship to the regularity condition. One major result illustrates how little the MI constrains binary choice probabilities: it implies that every system of binary choice probabilities on a universe of choice objects can be extended to a complete system of choice probabilities satisfying the MI. In this sense, the MI is complementary to axioms for binary choice probabilities, of which many have been proposed. We also discuss choice environments where the multiplicative inequality is implausible.

Action-feedback delay during operation reduces sense of agency (SoA). In this study, using information-theoretic free energy, we formalized a novel mathematical model for explaining the influence of delay on SoA in continuous operations. Based on the mathematical model, we propose that visualization of predicted future outcomes prevents SoA degradation resulting from response delays. Model-based simulations and operational experiments with participants confirmed that operational delay considerably reduces SoA. Furthermore, the proposed visualization mitigates these problems. Our findings support the model-based interface design for continuous operations with delay to prevent SoA degradation.

We propose an extension of the widely used class of multinomial processing tree models by incorporating response times via diffusion-model kernels. Multinomial processing tree models are models of categorical data in terms of a number of cognitive and guessing processes estimating the probabilities with which each process outcome occurs. The new method allows one to estimate completion times of each process along with outcome probability and thereby provides process-oriented accounts of accuracy and latency data in all domains in which multinomial processing tree models have been applied. Furthermore, the new models are implemented hierarchically so that individual differences are explicitly accounted for and do not bias the population-level estimates. The new approach overcomes a number of shortcomings of previous extensions of multinomial models to incorporate response times. We evaluate the new method’s performance via a recovery study and simulation-based calibration. The method allows one to test hypotheses about processing architecture, and it provides an extension of traditional diffusion model analyses where multinomial models have been proposed for the modeled paradigm. We illustrate these and other benefits of the new model class using five existing data sets from recognition memory.

In this paper, we establish a formal connection between two dynamic modeling approaches that are often taken to study affect dynamics. More specifically, we show that the exponential discounting model can be rewritten to a specific case of the VARMAX, thereby shedding light on the underlying similarities and assumptions of the two models. This derivation has some important consequences for research. First, it allows researchers who use discounting models in their studies to use the tools established within the broader time series literature to evaluate the applicability of their models. Second, it lays bare some of the implicit restrictions discounting models put on their parameters and, therefore, provides a foundation for empirical testing and validation of these models. One of these restrictions concerns the exponential shape of the discounting function that is often assumed in the affect dynamical literature. As an alternative, we briefly introduce the quasi-hyperbolic discounting function.

In classical psychophysics, the study of threshold and underlying representations is of theoretical interest, and the relevant issue of finding the stimulus intensity corresponding to a certain threshold level is an important topic. In the literature, researchers have developed various adaptive (also known as ‘up-down’) methods, including the fixed step-size and variable step-size methods, for the estimation of threshold. A common feature of this family of methods is that the stimulus to be assigned to the current trial depends upon the participant’s response in the previous trial(s), and very often a binary response format is adopted. A well-known earlier work of the variable step-size adaptive methods is the Robbins–Monro process (and its accelerated version). However, previous studies have paid little attention to other facets of response variables (in addition to the binary response variable) that could be jointly embedded into the process. This article concerns a generalization of the Robbins–Monro process by incorporating an additional response variable, such as the response time or the response confidence, into the process. We first prove the consistency of the estimator from the generalized method. We then conduct a Monte Carlo simulation study to explore some finite-sample properties of the estimator from the generalized method with either the response time or the response confidence as the variable of interest, and compare its performance with the original method. The results show that the two methods (and their accelerated version) are comparable. The issue of relative efficiency is also discussed.