Pueblo Serna

Our department just had its first ever town hall event. The goal was to have an open discussion of issues surrounding reproducibility and other methodological challenges. Here's the announcement:  Please join us for a special Psychology Colloquium event: Town Hall on Contemporary Methodological Issues in Psychological Science. Professors Lee Ross, Mike Frank, and Russ Poldrack will each give a ten-minute talk, sharing their perspectives on contemporary methodological issues within their respective fields. There will be opportunities for both small and large group discussion. I gave a talk on my evolving views on reproducibility, many summarized here , specifically focusing on the issue that individual studies tend not to be definitive. I advocated for a series of changes to our default practice, including:  Larger Ns Multiple internal replications Measurement and estimation, rather than statistical significance Experimental �debugging� tools (e.g., manipulation checks, n...

tl;dr: Adventures in using different platforms/methods to fit drift diffusion models to data.  The drift diffusion model (DDM) is increasingly a mainstay of research on decision-making, both in neuroscience and cognitive science. The classic DDM defines a pseudo random-walk decision process that describes a distribution on both accuracies and reaction times. This kind of joint distribution is really useful for capturing tasks where there could be speed-accuracy tradeoffs, and hence where classic univariate analyses are uninformative. Here's the classic DDM picture, this version from Vandekerckhove, Tuerlinckx, & Lee (2010) , who have a nice tutorial on hierarchical DDMs: We recently started using DDM to try and understand decision-making behavior in the kinds of complex inference tasks that my lab and I have been studying for the past couple of years. For example, in one recently-submitted paper , we use DDM to look at decision processes for inhibition, negat...