Despite having drawn from empirical evidence and cumulative prior expertise in the formulation of research questions as well as study design, each study is treated as a stand-alone product rather than positioned within a sequence of cumulative evidence. While results of prior studies are typically cited within the body of prior literature review,…

In this essay, the author tries to look forward into the 21st century to divine three things: (i) What skills will researchers in the future need to solve the most pressing problems? (ii) What are some of the most likely candidates to be those problems? and (iii) What are some current areas of research that seem mined out and should not distract…

The randomized response technique ensures that individual item responses, denoted as true item responses, are randomized before observing them and so-called randomized item responses are observed. A relationship is specified between randomized item response data and true item response data. True item response data are modeled with a (non)linear…

The authors explore priming effects of pitch repetition in music in 3 experiments. Musically untrained participants heard a short melody and sang the last pitch of the melody as quickly as possible. Each experiment manipulated (a) whether or not the tone to be sung (target) was heard earlier in the melody (primed) and (b) the prime-target distance…

The authors tested the hypothesis that a match between the gender relevance of a stressor and one's sex or gender role identification would elicit higher cardiovascular responses. Healthy female and male undergraduates (n = 108) were exposed to two stressors: the Cold Pressor Test (CPT) and the n-back task. Stressor relevance was manipulated to be…

The authors propose a concise formula to evaluate the standard error of the estimated latent variable score when the true values of the structural parameters are not known and must be estimated. The formula can be applied to factor scores in factor analysis or ability parameters in item response theory, without bootstrap or Markov chain Monte…

The authors respond to the article by H. F. Coelho, P. H. Canter, and E. Ernst (2007), which reviewed the current status of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT). First, they clarify the randomization procedures in the 2 main MBCT trials. Second, they report posttreatment and follow-up data to show that trial participants allocated to…

In his 1979 "Human Development" article reprinted in this anniversary issue, James Wertsch presented an approach to genetic analysis of the shifting regulation of problem-solving behavior in early childhood. In my reflections on Wertsch's seminal contribution, I discuss ways that subsequent inquiry built upon ideas he elaborated in the…

Reports an error in "Finding Useful Questions: On Bayesian Diagnosticity, Probability, Impact, and Information Gain" by Jonathan D. Nelson (Psychological Review, 2005[Oct], Vol 112[4], 979-999). In Table 13, the data should indicate that 7% of females had short hair and 93% of females had long hair. The calculations and discussion in the article…

This article presents new methods for modeling the strength of association between multiple behaviors in a behavioral sequence, particularly those involving substantively important interaction patterns. Modeling and identifying such interaction patterns becomes more complex when behaviors are assigned to more than two categories, as is the case…

The theory of signal detection is convenient for measuring mnemonic ability in recognition memory paradigms. In these paradigms, randomly selected participants are asked to study randomly selected items. In practice, researchers aggregate data across items or participants or both. The signal detection model is nonlinear; consequently, analysis…

In this study, the authors assess several strategies created on the basis of the Mantel-Haenszel (MH) procedure for conducting differential item functioning (DIF) analysis with small samples. One of the analytical strategies is a loss function (LF) that uses empirical Bayes Mantel-Haenszel estimators, whereas the other strategies use the classical…

People's reactions to coincidences are often cited as an illustration of the irrationality of human reasoning about chance. We argue that coincidences may be better understood in terms of rational statistical inference, based on their functional role in processes of causal discovery and theory revision. We present a formal definition of…

D. von Winterfeldt, N.-K. Chung, R. D. Luce, and Y. Cho (see record 1997-03378-008) provided several tests for consequence monotonicity of choice or judgment, using certainty equivalents of gambles. The authors reaxiomatized consequence monotonicity in a probabilistic framework and reanalyzed von Winterfeldt et al.'s main experiment via a…

In this note, we demonstrate an interesting use of the posterior distributions (and corresponding posterior samples of proficiency) that are yielded by fitting a fully Bayesian test scoring model to a complex assessment. Specifically, we examine the efficacy of the test in combination with the specific passing score that was chosen through expert…