I will be presenting a talk called ” Did Your Subjects Eat Breakfast? Individual and Uncontrolled Variables Can Affect Performance.” A copy of the slides are available here. If would like a copy of the questionare that we used, please click here. If you use this questionnaire in your research please cite my Psychonomics talk…a full publication will be available soon.
Ruby Nadler (3rd year Ph.D.), Rachel Rabi (1st year MSc) and Dr. Minda recently published a paper on how positive affect seems to enhance cognitive flexibility and enhance the learning of rule-defined categories. You can read the paper here.
Sarah Miles will be presenting our work on how adults and children differ in their tendency to learn rules (for classification) at the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society next week (July 29-August 1) in Amsterdam. You can read the paper here, and if you happen to be at the Conference, please stop by to see the poster.
Rachel Rabi will discuss the preliminary analyses of her summer NSERC project. She is examining the effects of mood on classification learning. We predicted that positive mood should enhance learning of rules and hypothesis testing. We also predicted negative mood would reduce performance for the same kinds of categories, relative to a baseline condition. We do not expect an effect of mood for non rule-described categories. So far, our predictions have held up (you can see a graph of the data here)
Sarah Devantier’s study of of thinking by medical experts and novices was recently published in PLosONE. We designed a forced-choice triad task in which we asked our subjects to choose which one of two hypothetical patients best matched a target patient. Targets and potential matches were related in terms of deep features (related to a concurrent diagnosis or related to how the patients should be managed) or in terms of surface features (aspects of the patient that were evident from the description). We found that experts were more likely than novices to match patients on deep features, and that this pattern held for diagnostic triads and management triads.
Members of the Categorization Lab will be presenting three posters at the Southern Ontario Behavioral Decision Research Conference (SOBDR) at Brock University this Thursday (May 7th). Sarah Devantier will be presenting her research on goal-oriented categories in clinical thinking, Ruby Nadler will be presenting her research on Mood and category learning and Sarah Miles will be presenting her research on the visual-spatial aspects of category learning. If you happen to be at the conference, please stop by to see our posters.
We will meet on April 16th at 11:45 (the usual place). Ruby N. will discuss some data she has been collecting regarding motivation factors and a perceptual triad-classification task.
We will meet on April 2nd in room 8409 at 11:45. Sarah Miles will present data from her ongoing thesis work on category learning and visuo-spatial memory
Sarah Devantier will give a preliminary version of her brown-bag talk about some of the data we have collected in a think-aloud task with physicians. As always, we will meet at 11:45 in room 8409.
The Minda Lab 