Compares four methods that map outlier statistics to a familiarity probability scale (a "P" value). Explored these methods in the context of computerized adaptive test data from a 1995 nationally administered computerized examination for professionals in the medical industry. (SLD)

The purpose of this note is to give a construction method for measures of central tendency and dispersion of a set of data on the basis of some symmetric multivariate functions and distance functions. Several examples regarding the known and new measures are presented. (Author/MM)

Statistics are offered to "prove" odds against the origin of life. Presents a summary analysis of all known examples to be used to check these claims whenever they are brought up in conversations, debates, books, or articles. Addresses scientific work misused by anti-evolutionists and the pseudoscientific assertions of the…

Rats obtained food pellets on a variable-interval schedule of reinforcement by nose poking a lighted key. After training to establish baseline performance (with the mean variable interval set at either 60, 120, or 240 s), the rats were given free access to food during the hour just before their daily session. This satiation operation reduced the…

In 1987 the federal government permitted states to raise the speed limit on their rural interstate roads, but not on their urban interstate roads, from 55 mph to 65 mph. Since the states that adopted the higher speed limit must have valued the travel hours they saved more than the fatalities incurred, this institutional change provides an…

The present study was conducted to show how responding in accord with equivalence relations changes as a function of position of familiar stimuli, pictures, and with the use of nonsense syllables in an MTO-training structure. Fifty college students were tested for responding in accord with equivalence in an AB, CB, DB, and EB training structure.…

A scheme is described for locally Bayesian parameter updating in models structured as successions of component functions. The essential idea is to back-propagate the target data to interior modules, such that an interior component's target is the input to the next component that maximizes the probability of the next component's target. Each layer…

Sequential theory's memory model of learning has been successfully applied in response contingent instrumental conditioning experiments (Capaldi, 1966, 1967, 1994; Capaldi & Miller, 2003). However, it has not been systematically tested in nonresponse contingent Pavlovian conditioning experiments. The present experiments attempted to determine if…

Mixture models are appropriate for data that arise from a set of qualitatively different subpopulations. In this study, latent class analysis was applied to observational data from a laboratory assessment of infant temperament at four months of age. The EM algorithm was used to fit the models, and the Bayesian method of posterior predictive checks…

In insurance, the analyst is often faced with a large number of inter-related variables for which correlations need to be estimated. Clearly, all correlations lie in the interval [-1, 1], but the numbers cannot be assigned independently. Here, the choices left to the analyst are considered from both a geometric and a probabilistic viewpoint. In…

The national lottery is often portrayed as a game of pure chance with no room for strategy. This misperception seems to stem from the application of probability instead of expectancy considerations, and can be utilized to introduce the statistical concept of expectation.

In this article, we define the inversion vector of a permutation of the integers 1, 2,..., n. We set up a particular kind of permutation, called a partial random permutation. The sum of the elements of the inversion vector of such a permutation is a random variable of interest.

Four experiments are presented that competitively test rule- and exemplar-based models of human categorization behavior. Participants classified stimuli that varied on a unidimensional axis into 2 categories. The stimuli did not consistently belong to a category; instead, they were probabilistically assigned. By manipulating these assignment…

The authors provide evidence that people typically evaluate conditional probabilities by subjectively partitioning the sample space into n interchangeable events, editing out events that can be eliminated on the basis of conditioning information, counting remaining events, then reporting probabilities as a ratio of the number of focal to total…

The relationship between luminance (i.e., the photometric intensity of light) and its perception (i.e., sensations of lightness or brightness) has long been a puzzle. In addition to the mystery of why these perceptual qualities do not scale with luminance in any simple way, "illusions" such as simultaneous brightness contrast, Mach bands,…