Young and Holsteen (YH) introduce a number of tools for evaluating model uncertainty. In so doing, they are careful to differentiate their method from existing forms of model averaging. The fundamental difference lies in the way in which the underlying estimates are weighted. Whereas standard approaches to model averaging assign higher weight to…

The authors of this article strongly advocate for a change to the current Australian model of primary education in order to, among other things, establish the concrete practicalities of systematic mathematics thinking thereby limiting the "re-teaching" time required of secondary school mathematics teachers; bring a clear focus to the…

This author has had the privilege of knowing Professor Maydeu-Olivares for almost a decade and although their paths cross only occasionally, such instances were always enjoyable and enlightening. Edwards states that Maydeu-Olivares' target article for this issue, ("Goodness-of-Fit Assessment of Item Response Theory Models") provides…

Computational models are powerful tools--too powerful, according to some. We argue that the idea that models can "do anything" is wrong, and we describe how their failures have been informative. We present new work showing surprising diversity in the effects of feedback on children's task-switching, such that some children perseverate despite this…

I discuss the recommendations and cautions in Steinley and Brusco's (2011) article on the use of finite models to cluster a data set. In their article, much use is made of comparison with the "K"-means procedure. As noted by researchers for over 30 years, the "K"-means procedure can be viewed as a special case of finite mixture modeling in which…

Koen and Yonelinas (2010; K&Y) reported that mixing classes of targets that had short (weak) or long (strong) study times had no impact on zROC slope, contradicting the predictions of the encoding variability hypothesis. We show that they actually derived their predictions from a mixture unequal-variance signal detection (UVSD) model, which…

Most biological scientists conduct experiments to look for effects, and test the results statistically. One of the commonly used test is Student's t test. However, this test concentrates on a very limited question. The authors assume that there is no effect in the experiment, and then estimate the possibility that they could have obtained these…

On the basis of earlier findings, we (Fiedler & Kareev, 2006) presented a statistical decision model that explains the conditions under which small samples of information about choice alternatives inform more correct choices than large samples. Such a small-sample advantage (SSA) is predicted for choices, not estimations. It is contingent on high…

This article addresses modeling oscillation in continuous time. It criticizes Steele and Ferrer's article "Latent Differential Equation Modeling of Self-Regulatory and Coregulatory Affective Processes" (2011), particularly the approximate estimation procedure applied. This procedure is the latent version of the local linear approximation procedure…

This article contrasts 2 approaches to analyzing transitivity of preference and other behavioral properties in choice data. The approach of Regenwetter, Dana, and Davis-Stober (2011) assumes that on each choice, a decision maker samples randomly from a mixture of preference orders to determine whether "A" is preferred to "B." In contrast, Birnbaum…

This article presents our response to Oud and Folmer's "Modeling Oscillation, Approximately or Exactly?" (2011), which criticizes aspects of our article, "Latent Differential Equation Modeling of Self-Regulatory and Coregulatory Affective Processes" (2011). In this response, we present a conceptual explanation of the derivative-based estimation…

This author has always felt a bit uneasy about the three parameter logistic (3PL) model because it seems about as prone to discovering guessing when guessing does not take place, as the Rasch model is reluctant to admit that guessing might ever take place at all. However, the author has attributed this to the prior "magic" employed when estimating…

J. S. Bowers, M. F. Damian, and C. J. Davis (2009) critiqued the computational model of serial order memory put forth in M. Botvinick and D. C. Plaut (2006), purporting to show that the model does not generalize in a way that people do. They attributed this supposed failure to the model's dependence on context-dependent representations,…

There has been a growing interest in understanding the computations involved in the processes underlying visual segmentation and interpolation in conditions of occlusion. P. J. Kellman, P. Garrigan, T. F. Shipley, and B. P. Keane and M. K. Albert defended the view that identical contour interpolation mechanisms underlie modal and amodal…

K. Rayner, A. Pollatsek, D. Drieghe, T. J. Slattery, and E. D. Reichle argued that the R. Kliegl, A. Nuthmann, and R. Engbert corpus-analytic evidence for distributed processing during reading should not be accepted because (a) there might be problems of multicollinearity, (b) the distinction between content and function words and the skipping…