A generally-educated individual should have some insight into how decisions are made in the very wide range of fields that employ statistical and probabilistic reasoning. Also, students of introductory probability and statistics are often best motivated by specific applications rather than by theory and mathematical development, because most…

This article offers an engaging student activity that allows them to make a connection between seemingly different topics of drug testing procedure, logistic model, and iterations.

An introduction to hypothesis testing using a mathematician's claim that his dog knows calculus and can intuit a minimum path.

The authors present a method that ensures control over the Type I error rate for those who visually analyze the data from response-guided multiple-baseline designs. The method can be seen as a modification of visual analysis methods to incorporate a mechanism to control Type I errors or as a modification of randomization test methods to allow…

Under the suppositional account of conditionals, when people think about a conditional assertion, "if p then q," they engage in a mental simulation in which they imagine p holds and evaluate the probability that q holds under this supposition. One implication of this account is that belief in a conditional equates to conditional probability…

The authors present a comprehensive consideration of the process characteristics of visual search in contexts that vary in their meaningfulness. The authors frame hypotheses regarding process architecture, stopping rule, capacity, and channel independence, using analytic results and a rigorously specified dynamic system to characterize a set of…

In a previous study, it was shown that the attentional blink (AB)--the failure to recall the 2nd of 2 visual targets (T1 and T2) presented within 500 ms in rapid serial visual presentation--is reduced when T2 is preceded by a distractor that shares a feature with T2 (e.g., color; Nieuwenstein, Chun, van der Lubbe & Hooge, 2005). Here, this cuing…

Persons with mental retardation often exhibit greater interference in visual selective attention tasks than do persons matched with them on CA. My goal here was to evaluate whether differences in distractor interference between persons with and without mental retardation may be related to differences in negative priming. Fifteen participants with…

High-stakes testing and accountability in the United States cloak the real purpose of assessment--diagnosing learning to inform instruction. Standardized testing drives curricula in many states. Teachers may feel pressured to "teach to the test," although they know it is not best practice. The authors discuss how using several…

This article presents findings from two projects designed to improve evaluations of technical quality of alternate assessments for students with the most significant cognitive disabilities. We argue that assessment technical documents should allow for the evaluation of the construct validity of the alternate assessments following the traditions of…

Translation accounts have argued that the presence of a Stroop effect in the context of a nonvocal untranslated response is caused by verbal mediation. In its simplest form, color-labeled buttons are translated into a verbal code that interferes with color responses. On this logic, in the reverse Stroop task (identify the word; ignore the color),…

Purpose: To investigate the effects of talker variability on vowel recognition by cochlear implant (CI) users and by normal-hearing (NH) participants listening to 4-channel acoustic CI simulations. Method: CI users were tested with their clinically assigned speech processors. For NH participants, 3 CI processors were simulated, using different…

In the field of educational assessment, the "validity of assessment" can be defined as the degree to which evidence and theory support the interpretations of test scores that are entailed by proposed uses of the test. Many concerns have arisen over what is termed the "consequential basis" of validity, the intended and…

If an organism is explicitly taught an A[arrow right]B association, then might it also spontaneously learn the symmetrical B[arrow right]A association? Little evidence attests to such "associative symmetry" in nonhuman animals. We report for the first time a clear case of associative symmetry in the pigeon. Experiment 1 used a successive go/no go…

The sunk cost effect is the increased tendency to persist in an endeavor once an investment of money, effort, or time has been made. To date, humans are the only animal in which this effect has been observed unambiguously. We developed a behavior-analytic model of the sunk cost effect to explore the potential for this behavior in pigeons as well…