Psychology Commons^™

Functional Principal Components Analysis And The Capacity Coefficient, D. Burns, Joseph W. Houpt, M. J. Endres, J. T. Townsend

Joseph W. Houpt

The capacity coefficient is a well established measure of the efficiency of processing combined sources of information. It has been applied to measure cognitive processes ranging from audio-visual integration to face perception. Recently, the capacity coefficient has also been applied in various clinical situations. Typical clinical analysis, such as structural equation modeling, use scalar values or vectors with limited length as input. We explored the use of functional principal component analysis (fPCA) to allow researchers to describe the capacity coefficient, a continuous function of time, with a small set of discrete values. The fPCA approach was compared with two simple …