On Sunday May, 15th, I’ll be participating in the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention‘s (AFSP) “Out of the Darkness” 5k walk at UC San Diego.
Though I have not lost someone to suicide, I believe that destigmatizing mental health struggles is important for the wellness of our communities. (To me, that means showing up for causes that don’t personally affect me. One day, they may.)
Law and Human Behavior chose to highlight a recent paper of mine in their “Research Highlight” series. The paper explores the viability of new police lineup procedure — a “Reveal” procedure — that enhances evidence of suspect innocence in a police lineup. (Lineups are typically designed to gather information about a suspect’s guilt.) This exploration was done using signal-detection-based model of eyewitness memory. LHB created a nifty graphic in their tweet below that explains what the paper is about, whom the paper is for, and why the paper is important. (Links to the original tweet and paper are below if the embed ever fails.)
I will be presenting a flash talk at CogSci 2022! The talk is entitled: “Decision Variables in the Case of Police Lineup Rejections.” If you’re interested in learning about the decision rules which participants may use when rejecting a set of stimuli for a recognition memory task, come on by. The 4-5 minute talk will be uploaded virtually for those not going to the in-person conference in Toronto, Canada.
This poster will presented live during the Decision Making 3 session (1:50-2:35pm EST). If you miss the presentation, slides will be posted on the conference website, but a recording will not be available.
Data science proficiency goes hand-in-hand with Ph.D-level research. For most of us, however, we don’t enter graduate school with strong programming skills. Instead, we’re likely thrown into a two-in-one, programming-and-statistical-methods course during our first year of graduate school, using any number of possible languages (MatLab, R, SPSS, etc.). Personally, I’m of the belief that learning R is invaluable. I think the learning curve is steeper compared to other languages, but as you develop proficiency and confidence, I find it to be a dynamic language that can do most-anything you’ll need within the scope of a Ph.D program. (A bonus: It’s heavily used in industry as well.)
Since proficiency comes with practice, I take coding workshops as frequently as they’re available. It solidifies what I already know and keeps me from forgetting methods that I may not use regularly when doing my own research and analyses. Sometimes, I’ll learn more efficient ways to do things too. Also, learning from different teachers has the benefit of having concepts explained in a different ways—things that seemed ‘fuzzy’ when explained by one professor may be crystal clear when explained in a different manner.
I advocate for a general literacy across a few languages — after all, you’ll have little control over the format of materials sent over by colleagues — but here I thought I’d focus on my favorite beginner-level resources for R programming.
I want to try something new here. Instead of posting purely about academic work or things relating to my research, I want to try posting about some of the events I attend within my community. Graduate school takes up a lot of my time, but I still support causes I care about when time allows. (On my CV, you’ll find a long history of volunteer work and presence at community events.) I won’t post about smaller events or those that occur somewhat frequently (e.g., trail or beach clean-ups). I want to highlight larger events instead.
This June, I’ll be presenting “A comparison between a rate-them-all simultaneous lineup procedure vs. standard simultaneous and show-up procedures” as a virtual poster at V-VSS.
The conference date is June 1-2nd. The poster will be presented in Poster Session 5 on Thursday, June 2nd at 7-9am (PDT).
By Alexander Piel and Fiona Stewart
This article was originally published at The Conversation and has been republished under Creative Commons.
Tomorrow, Nov. 16 @ 10am PST, I’ll be attending “Eyewitness Identification from a Different Angle,” a seminar part of the greater ESRC Festival of Social Science hosted by the University of Birmingham in the UK. The seminar hosts an all-star panel of researchers prominent in the fields of facial recognition and memory.
For those interested in eyewitness memory from a basic science perspective, I recommend attending! The event is free and open to the public, and will most certainly contain interesting discourse in the Q&A portion. The Q&A is live, but some prerecorded talks are available for viewing at the link above.
Speakers and Panelists:
I will present the poster “The Psychology and Neuroscience of Confidence in Memory and Perception” at Psychonomic Society’s annual convention. This poster (2427) is based on an expansion of my qualifying paper, and will be co-authored between myself and Dr. John T. Wixted.
This year’s meeting will take place on November 4-7. I will be available for live discussion within the meeting platform on November 6th, 12-1pm Central Time. Or, as always, contact me with any questions.
Abstract:
The solution to real-world problems often requires a deep, basic-science understanding of the problem at hand. Confidence and decision time are issues that matter in the real-world and have been intensively investigated in the past 20 years in both psychological science and neuroscience. In cognitive psychology, confidence is usually conceptualized in terms of signal detection theory while speeded decision-making is conceptualized in terms of evidence accumulation modeling. However, no singular model of confidence for a perceptual decision dominates. In mathematical psychology, accounts of speeded decision-making in terms of a balance-of-evidence decision variable has gained currency in recent years. In neuroscience, the field tends to approach evidence accumulation and confidence in relation to lateral intraparietal cortex (the role of which is debated) and reaction time, with some research indicating a balance-of-evidence decision variable. A review of these largely independent lines of research suggests a potentially fruitful way to naturally integrate signal detection theory and evidence accumulation models in a way that comports with the relevant neuroscience evidence.
Update: The abstract number was previously 5117. Renumbering occurred when this year’s annual convention moved from a hybrid format to strictly online. You can view a PDF of the poster here.
The Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny (CARTA) has graciously awarded me another year of funding through their fellowship!
Thank you to Drs. Fred Gage (CARTA Co-Director), Margaret Schoeninger (CARTA Co-Director), Ajit Varki (CARTA Co-Director) and Pascal Gagneux (CARTA Associate Director) for their continued support. Also, thank you Salk Institute for Biological Studies for supporting CARTA and young researchers.
My first year of CARTA was spent working from home and attending virtual symposia. I learned a lot about human origins, but I did miss the camaraderie and richness of thought-exchange that is present in an in-person environment. Personally, in the coming year, I look forward to deepening my understanding of human migration and group dynamics (both may provide information about settings that could facilitate the development of certain recognition memory processes), as well as my understanding of how virology changes the genome in ways that may impact attention, stress, or memory.
I look forward to another year of research — this time back on campus!
Thank you again to the funders of this fellowship and to the selection committee for their continued faith and support.
-A.Y.