Harvesting heterogeneity: Selective expertise versus machine learning.

The heterogeneity of outcomes in behavioral research has long been perceived as a challenge for the validity of various theoretical models. More recently, however, researchers have started perceiving heterogeneity as something that needs to be not only acknowledged but also actively addressed, particularly in applied research. A serious challenge, however, is that classical psychological methods are not well suited for making practical recommendations when heterogeneous outcomes are expected.

Knowing where is different from knowing what: Distinct response time profiles and accuracy effects for target location, orientation, and color probability.

When a location is cued, targets appearing at that location are detected more quickly. When a target feature is cued, targets bearing that feature are detected more quickly. These attentional cueing effects are only superficially similar.

Tuned by experience: How orientation probability modulates early perceptual processing.

Probable stimuli are more often and more quickly detected. While stimulus probability is known to affect decision-making, it can also be explained as a perceptual phenomenon. Using spatial gratings, we have previously shown that probable orientations are also more precisely estimated, even while participants remained naive to the manipulation.

Adapting to change: The role of the right hemisphere in mental model building and updating.

We recently proposed that the right hemisphere plays a crucial role in the processes underlying mental model building and updating. Here, we review the evidence we and others have garnered to support this novel account of right hemisphere function. We begin by presenting evidence from patient work that suggests a critical role for the right hemisphere in the ability to learn from the statistics in the environment (model building) and adapt to environmental change (model updating).

A cortical network that marks the moment when conscious representations are updated.

In order to survive in a complex, noisy and constantly changing environment we need to categorize the world (e.g., Is this food edible or poisonous?) and we need to update our interpretations when things change.

The effects of prior learned strategies on updating an opponent's strategy in the rock, paper, scissors game.

To explore how model building adapts to changing environments, we had participants play "rock-paper-scissors" against a computer that played a frequency bias or a player-dependent bias and then switched. Participants demonstrated their use of prior experience in how quickly they recognized and exploited changes in the computer's play strategy; in general, the more similar the strategies, the more efficient the updating. These findings inform our understanding of previously reported updating impairments in right-brain damaged patients.

Statistical and perceptual updating: correlated impairments in right brain injury.

It has been hypothesized that many of the cognitive impairments commonly seen after right brain damage (RBD) can be characterized as a failure to build or update mental models. We (Danckert et al. in Neglect as a disorder of representational updating.

Learning what from where: Effects of spatial regularity on nonspatial sequence learning and updating.

The current study examined the influence of redundant stimulus features on our ability to build and update representations of our environment. We hypothesized that our ability to process redundant spatial features would speed our ability to adapt to changing nonspatial regularities. Using a computerized version of the children's game "rock-paper-scissors", undergraduates were instructed to win as often as possible against a computer opponent.