Using detailed individual-level data from public universities in the state of Ohio, I estimate the effect of various institutional expenditures on the probability of graduating from college. Using a competing risks regression framework, I find differential impacts of expenditure categories across student characteristics. I estimate that student…

In a simulated casino environment, 6 nonpathological women played concurrently available commercial slot machines programmed to pay out at different rates. Participants did not always demonstrate preferences for the higher paying machine. The data suggest that factors other than programmed or obtained rate of reinforcement may control gambling…

The relationship between nonword repetition ability and vocabulary size and vocabulary learning has been a topic of intense research interest and investigation over the last two decades, following the demonstration that nonword repetition accuracy is predictive of vocabulary size (Gathercole & Baddeley, 1989). However, the nature of this…

Numeracy--that is, how facile people are with mathematical concepts and their applications--is gaining importance in medical decision making and risk communication. This article proposes six critical functions of health numeracy. These functions are integrated into a theoretical framework on health numeracy that has implications for risk…

Subjective expected relative similarity (SERS) is a descriptive theory that explains cooperation levels in single-step prisoner's dilemma (PD) games. SERS predicts that individuals cooperate whenever their "subjectively perceived similarity" with their opponent exceeds a situational index, namely the game's "similarity threshold." A thought…

Two diverging hypotheses concerning the influence of surprising events on hindsight effects have been proposed: Although some authors believe that surprising events lead to a reversal of hindsight bias, others have proposed that surprise increases hindsight bias. Drawing on the separate-components view of the hindsight bias (which argues that…

The Statistics Online Computational Resource (http://www.SOCR.ucla.edu) provides one of the largest collections of free Internet-based resources for probability and statistics education. SOCR develops, validates and disseminates two core types of materials--instructional resources and computational libraries. (Contains 2 figures.)

Numerous recent studies suggest that human learners, including both infants and adults, readily track sequential statistics computed between adjacent elements. One such statistic, transitional probability, is typically calculated as the likelihood that one element predicts another. However, little is known about whether listeners are sensitive to…

The present study explored the delay discounting of future and past monetary rewards by pathological gamblers. Using a multiple baseline design, following repeated exposure to choices between smaller immediate and larger delayed consequences, participants completed a relational responding task that attempted to alter the psychological functions of…

Comparisons of results from descriptive and functional analyses of problem behavior generally have shown poor correspondence. Most descriptive analyses have focused on relations between consequent events and behavior, and it has been noted that attention is a common consequence for problem behavior even though it may not be a functional…

Distinguishing trajectories of criminal offending over the life course, especially the prediction of high-rate offenders, has received considerable attention over the past two decades. Motivated by a recent study by Sampson and Laub (2003), this study uses longitudinal data on conviction histories from the Dutch Criminal Career and Life-Course…

The older one gets, the more one's life expectancy exceeds the population's given expectancy (at birth). Yet longevity is finite. This apparent paradox is analysed probabilistically with reference to empirical demographic data.

The few studies that have examined associations between measured interests and abilities have suffered from small sample sizes, restricted ranges of ability and background, preconceived groupings of interests, and measures of ability that confound general and specific cognitive abilities. In this study of 425 adults from diverse backgrounds, the…

Null hypotheses are simple, precise, and theoretically important. Conventional statistical analysis cannot support them; Bayesian analysis can. The challenge in a Bayesian analysis is to formulate a suitably vague alternative, because the vaguer the alternative is (the more it spreads out the unit mass of prior probability), the more the null is…

In demand paging virtual memory systems, the page fault rate of a process varies with the number of memory frames allocated to the process. When an increase in the number of allocated frames leads to an increase in the number of page faults, Belady's anomaly is said to occur. In this paper, we present a probability model for Belady's anomaly. We…