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Full-Text Articles in Psychology

The Statistical Properties Of The Survivor Interaction Contrast, Joseph W. Houpt, James T. Townsend Oct 2010

The Statistical Properties Of The Survivor Interaction Contrast, Joseph W. Houpt, James T. Townsend

Joseph W. Houpt

The Survivor Interaction Contrast (SIC) is a powerful tool for assessing the architecture and stopping rule of a model of mental processes. Despite its demonstrated utility, the methodology has lacked a method for statistical testing until now. In this paper we briefly describe the SIC then develop some basic statistical properties of the measure. These developments lead to a statistical test for rejecting certain classes of models based on the SIC. We verify these tests using simulated data, then demonstrate their use on data from a simple cognitive task.


Functional Principal Components Analysis And The Capacity Coefficient, D. Burns, Joseph W. Houpt, M. J. Endres, J. T. Townsend Aug 2010

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 …


A New Perspective On Visual Word Processing Efficiency, Joseph W. Houpt, James T. Townsend Jan 2010

A New Perspective On Visual Word Processing Efficiency, Joseph W. Houpt, James T. Townsend

Joseph W. Houpt

As a fundamental part of our daily lives, visual word processing has received much attention in the psychological literature. Despite the well established perceptual advantages of word and pseudoword context using accuracy, a comparable effect using response times has been elusive. Some researchers continue to question whether the advantage due to word context is perceptual. We use the capacity coefficient, a well established, response time based measure of efficiency to provide evidence of word processing as a particularly efficient perceptual process to complement those results from the accuracy domain.