Abstract
Psychological science has rightly become worried about questionable practices in experimental research, with a range of recent suggestions being made about remedies for this “replication crisis”. To avoid similar problems in psychological-process modelling, Lee et al. (in review) propose ingenious adaptions of these remedies along with insightful new suggestions. Although in the main applauding of these developments, I question whether some of the lessons drawn from the replication crisis are applicable, particularly with respect to the confirmatory vs. exploratory dichotomy given the intrinsically explanatory nature of most psychological-process models.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution.
Notes
I acknowledge borrowing in my commentary from the style and substance of Alan Newell’s wonderful “You cannot play 20 questions with nature and win”. I dedicate this commentary to the memory of Doug Mewhort, who brought Newell’s commentary to my attention, and whose work and teaching inspired in me a life-long interest in psychological modelling. Doug leavened this interest with a dollop of caution borne of another idea he made me aware of, that participants should not be viewed as always the same, but instead as deploying highly flexible virtual machines that adapt to different tasks. Thanks also to Dora Matzke for discussions related to this commentary.
References
Box, G. E. P. (1979). Robustness in the strategy of scientific model building. In R. L. Launer & G. N. Wilkinson (Eds.), Robustness in statistics (pp. 201–236). Academic Press.
Dennis, S. (2005). A memory-based theory of verbal cognition. Cognitive Science, 29(2), 145–193.
Heathcote, A., Wagenmakers, E. J., & Brown, S. D. (2014). The falsifiability of actual decision-making models. Psychological Review, 121, 676–678.
Hübner, R., Steinhauser, M., & Lehle, C. (2010). A dual-stage two-phase model of selective attention. Psychological Review, 117, 759–784.
Jones, M., & Dzhafarov, E. N. (2014). Unfalsifiability and mutual translatability of major modelling schemes for choice reaction time. Psychological Review, 121, 1–32.
Newell, A. (1973). You can’t play 20 questions with nature and win: projective comments on the papers of this symposium. In W. G. Chase (Ed.), Visual information processing. New York: Academic Press.
Newell, A. (1990). Unified theories of cognition. Harvard University Press.
Rae, B., Heathcote, A., Donkin, C., Averell, L., & Brown, S. (2014). The hare and the tortoise: emphasizing speed can change the evidence used to make decisions. Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40, 1226–1243.
Smith, P. L., Ratcliff, R., & McKoon, G. (2014). The diffusion model is not a deterministic growth model: comment on Jones and Dzhafarov (2013). Psychological Review, 121, 679–688.
Walsh, M. M., Gunzelmann, G., & Van Dongen, H. P. (2017). Computational cognitive modeling of the temporal dynamics of fatigue from sleep loss. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 24, 1785–1807.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Heathcote, A. What Do the Rules for the Wrong Game Tell us About How to Play the Right Game?. Comput Brain Behav 2, 187–189 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42113-019-00061-y
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42113-019-00061-y