Models of Psychological Processes (PSYC40012)

Knowledge

On completion of this subject, students should demonstrate an understanding of:

• The concepts and methods involved in the development, testing, and evaluation of quantitative models for psychological data.
• The philosophical and methodological distinction between hypothesis-testing and model evaluation.
• The trade-off between goodness-of-fit and model flexibility and its implications for psychological inference.
• The distinction between process models and empirical models of psychological data.

Skills

On completion of this subject, students should be able to:

• Use quantitative modelling software to fit models to selected data sets from the cognitive literature.
• Use model-selection methods to compare the performance of alternative models and interpret the results.
• Communicate the results of a model-based evaluation of cognitive performance effectively in written form.
• Make use of both graphical and quantitative measures of fit to reason effectively about the psychological processes underlying particular patterns of experimental data.

Application of Knowledge and Skills

On completion of this subject, students should be able to:

• Evaluate and critically assess model-based studies in the published research literature
•  Apply model-based methods to their own independent research
• Bring a model-based perspective to the critical analysis of published research that uses traditional hypothesis-testing methods.