Categorization and Working Memory: Bridging two Pillars of Cognition. Categorization is a fundamental cognitive skill that underlies much expert behavior, including medical diagnosis. A given task often gives rise to widely divergent strategies across individuals, and flawed strategies have been implicated in prediction errors of experts (e.g., bush fire fighters). This project seeks to identify the underlying variables that determine an individual's strategy acquisition by relating working memo ....Categorization and Working Memory: Bridging two Pillars of Cognition. Categorization is a fundamental cognitive skill that underlies much expert behavior, including medical diagnosis. A given task often gives rise to widely divergent strategies across individuals, and flawed strategies have been implicated in prediction errors of experts (e.g., bush fire fighters). This project seeks to identify the underlying variables that determine an individual's strategy acquisition by relating working memory performance to categorization. Working memory is a core cognitive construct that is quite well understood, but its relationship to category learning has so far remained unexplored. Being able to predict the development of categorization strategies can help maximize expert performance.Read moreRead less
Are two processes one too many? An investigation of the viability of the dual-process model of recognition memory. Memory is the glue that holds together our lives and personal identities. While psychologists are developing better and more sophisticated accounts of how it works, many deep questions remain. The present research examines some of these questions in relation to how memory can be decomposed into its component processes and how we are to understand these processes. An appropriate unde ....Are two processes one too many? An investigation of the viability of the dual-process model of recognition memory. Memory is the glue that holds together our lives and personal identities. While psychologists are developing better and more sophisticated accounts of how it works, many deep questions remain. The present research examines some of these questions in relation to how memory can be decomposed into its component processes and how we are to understand these processes. An appropriate understanding of these questions is vital to the development of interventions (both psychological and pharmacological) designed to halt or even reverse memory decline associated with normal aging and age-associated brain disease (such as Alzheimer disease).Read moreRead less
Measuring and modelling the childhood determinants of human capital formation and human capability expansion. This project aims to address significant gaps in the data infrastructure needed to advance Australian's current human capital reform agenda. It will draw on existing population and longitudinal datasets and collect specific community and family data to analyse how the social, economic and ecological contexts of child development enable life-course outcomes in health and human capability ....Measuring and modelling the childhood determinants of human capital formation and human capability expansion. This project aims to address significant gaps in the data infrastructure needed to advance Australian's current human capital reform agenda. It will draw on existing population and longitudinal datasets and collect specific community and family data to analyse how the social, economic and ecological contexts of child development enable life-course outcomes in health and human capability. Existing human capital measures will be refined to develop data standards to support the monitoring of the reform agenda. New modelling techniques to predict patterns of economic, civic and social participation in individuals and populations will also be developed and tested.Read moreRead less
Towards an integrated model of reasoning and reasoning development. This project aims to identify the core cognitive processes that underlie different forms of reasoning and how they develop. The project intends to use a signal detection framework to derive detailed computational models of reasoning which can then be tested through Bayesian computational modelling as well as the first systematic investigation of developmental change in reasoning processes. Expected outcomes include a more princi ....Towards an integrated model of reasoning and reasoning development. This project aims to identify the core cognitive processes that underlie different forms of reasoning and how they develop. The project intends to use a signal detection framework to derive detailed computational models of reasoning which can then be tested through Bayesian computational modelling as well as the first systematic investigation of developmental change in reasoning processes. Expected outcomes include a more principled and comprehensive computational model of reasoning in both adults and children. The project should provide significant benefits by helping to resolve long-standing debates about how humans reason complex arguments relevant to everyday lives and guide development of more effective methods for teaching reasoning.Read moreRead less
Multidimensional unfolding: the latitude of acceptance and the structure of the single peaked response process in a multidimensional space. The latitude of acceptance and the operational function that structures the single peaked response process have only recently been understood as central to unidimensional models for the measurement of attitude, preference and choice. They have been neglected in multidimensional models. This project will formalise these two central components in a multidimens ....Multidimensional unfolding: the latitude of acceptance and the structure of the single peaked response process in a multidimensional space. The latitude of acceptance and the operational function that structures the single peaked response process have only recently been understood as central to unidimensional models for the measurement of attitude, preference and choice. They have been neglected in multidimensional models. This project will formalise these two central components in a multidimensional space. The operational function governs the relationship between any item-person distance and the latitude of acceptance defines a multidimensional hyper-sphere within which the more positive response is more likely. The project will articulate and operationalise these models for a range of typical response formats from ranking to pairwise preferences.Read moreRead less
Single and dual process models of recognition memory: Reconciliation of behavioural, electrophysiological, and neuroimaging data. Advanced brain scanning technologies are increasingly used to study human memory. As well as being important for our basic understanding of memory, they also tell us how memory is affected by normal development, ageing, disease, and injury. Unfortunately, because these technologies are so new, a gap has opened up between our psychological understanding of memory and t ....Single and dual process models of recognition memory: Reconciliation of behavioural, electrophysiological, and neuroimaging data. Advanced brain scanning technologies are increasingly used to study human memory. As well as being important for our basic understanding of memory, they also tell us how memory is affected by normal development, ageing, disease, and injury. Unfortunately, because these technologies are so new, a gap has opened up between our psychological understanding of memory and the physiological events measured by the scanning technologies. This has created a problem for how we should interpret the results that are found. The present project aims to close this gap by applying new research methodologies and theoretical insights based on our previous research.Read moreRead less
State-trace analysis: theory and application. A fundamental question for the science of psychology is: how can we identify the functional components of the human mind from observed behaviour and bodily states? This project explores this question through a new methodology called state-trace analysis and apply it to a basic cognitive ability - the capacity to learn to classify different objects.