Recently added articles from Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers:

Parameterization of connectionist models

Nov 01, 2004; Bogacz, Rafal; Cohen, Jonathan D ... We present a method for estimating parameters of connectionist models that allows the model's output to fit as closely as possible to empirical data. The method minimizes a cost function that measures the difference between statistics computed from the model's output and statistics computed from ...

Tracking the line of primary gaze in a walking simulator: Modeling and calibration

Nov 01, 2004; Barabas, James; Goldstein, Robert B; Apfelbaum, Henry; Woods, Russell L; Et al ... This article describes a system for tracking the line of primary gaze (LoPG) of participants as they view a large projection screen. Using a magnetic head tracker and a tracking algorithm, we find the onscreen location at which a participant is pointing a head-mounted crosshair. The algorithm ...

An open-source LabVIEW application toolkit for phasic heart rate analysis in psychophysiological research

Nov 01, 2004; Duley, Aaron R; Janelle, Christopher M; Coombes, Stephen A ... The cardiovascular system has been extensively measured in a variety of research and clinical domains. Despite technological and methodological advances in cardiovascular science, the analysis and evaluation of phasic changes in heart rate persists as a way to assess numerous psychological ...

Fast Fourier-based DSP algorithm for auditory motion experiments

Nov 01, 2004; Saberi, Kourosh ... A digital signal-processing (DSP) technique for rapid generation of complex auditory motion stimuli based on dynamic linear changes in interaural delay is described. In this technique, a pair of complementary discrete Fourier transforms (DFTs) for which the component spacing in one series is ...

How to select stimuli for environmental sound research and where to find them

Nov 01, 2004; Shafiro, Valeriy; Gygi, Brian ... A major methodological challenge in environmental sound research is to select appropriate stimuli. When an experiment involves a large number of sound sources, making custom recordings or producing sounds live is frequently impractical or, for certain sounds, impossible. Existing databases of ...

Space aliens and nonwords: Stimuli for investigating the learning of novel word-meaning pairs

Nov 01, 2004; Ludden, David; Martin, Nadine; Newman, Rochelle ... We describe a set of pictorial and auditory stimuli that we have developed for use in word learning tasks in which the participant learns pairings of novel auditory sound patterns (names) with pictorial depictions of novel objects (referents). The pictorial referents are drawings of "space ...

Contour-based object identification and segmentation: Stimuli, norms and data, and software tools

Nov 01, 2004; De Winter, Joeri; Wagemans, Johan ... We summarize five studies of our large-scale research program, in which we examined aspects of contour-based object identification and segmentation, and we report on the stimuli we used, the norms and data we collected, and the software tools we developed. The stimuli were outlines derived from ...

Perception of biological motion: A stimulus set of human point-light actions

Nov 01, 2004; Vanrie, Jan; Verfaillie, Karl ... We present a set of stimuli representing human actions under point-light conditions, as seen from different viewpoints. The set contains 22 fairly short, well-delineated, and visually "loopable" actions. For each action, we provide movie files from five different viewpoints as well as a text ...

A lifespan database of adult facial stimuli

Nov 01, 2004; Minear, Meredith; Park, Denise C ... Faces constitute a unique and widely used category of stimuli. In spite of their importance, there are few collections of faces for use in research, none of which adequately represent the different ages of faces across the lifespan. This lack of a range of ages has limited the majority of ...

Photographs of facial expression: Accuracy, response times, and ratings of intensity

Nov 01, 2004; Palermo, Romina; Coltheart, Max ... Equal numbers of male and female participants judged which of seven facial expressions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, neutrality, sadness, and surprise) were displayed by a set of 336 faces, and we measured both accuracy and response times. In addition, the participants rated how well the ...

A cross-culturally standardized set of pictures for younger and older adults: American and Chinese norms for name agreement, concept agreement, and familiarity

Nov 01, 2004; Yoon, Carolyn; Feinberg, Fred; Luo, Ting; Hedden, Trey; Et al ... The present study presents normative measures for 260 line drawings of everyday objects, found in Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980), viewed by individuals in China and the United States. Within each cultural group, name agreement, concept agreement, and familiarity measures were obtained ...

Story stimuli for creating false beliefs about the world

Nov 01, 2004; Marsh, Elizabeth J ... Fiction is not always accurate, and this has consequences for readers. In laboratory studies, the reading of short stories led participants to produce story errors as facts on a later test of general knowledge (Marsh, Meade, & Roediger, 2003). The present article describes these story ...

Data archiving in animal experimentation: Merits, challenges, and a case study

Nov 01, 2004; Crystal, Jonathon D ... Electronic data archives may supplement the traditional peer-reviewed journal article. The merits of data archiving include public service, a more complete research project, overcoming barriers to limited-access research resources, and increasing the impact of a scientific project. A case study ...

Measures of temporal discrimination in fixed-interval performance: A case study in archiving data

Nov 01, 2004; Guilhardi, Paulo; Church, Russell M ... The primary data of many experimental studies of animal learning and performance consist of the times at which stimuli and reinforcers were delivered, and the times at which responses occurred. The articles based on most of these studies report selected data, either from some sessions or some ...

Proposal for the creation of a Web-based heterogeneous distributed archive for psychological data

Nov 01, 2004; Boker, Steven M; Crowell, Charles R ... This report presents a proposal to create archives of data from psychological research and associated metadata Web pages and link them into a heterogeneous distributed archive on the World-Wide Web. Several specific recommendations are made concerning some of the issues faced by the data ...

Computing aspects of power for multiple regression

Nov 01, 2004; Dunlap, William P; Xin, Xue; Myers, Leann ... Rules of thumb for power in multiple regression research abound. Most such rules dictate the necessary sample size, but they are based only upon the number of predictor variables, usually ignoring other critical factors necessary to compute power accurately. Other guides to power in multiple ...

Fitting Wald and ex-Wald distributions to response time data: An example using functions for the S-PLUS package

Nov 01, 2004; Heathcote, Andrew ... Schwarz (2001, 2002) proposed the ex-Wald distribution, obtained from the convolution of Wald and exponential random variables, as a model of simple and go/no-go response time. This article provides functions for the S-PLUS package that produce maximum likelihood estimates of the parameters for ...

Fitting distributions using maximum likelihood: Methods and packages

Nov 01, 2004; Cousineau, Denis; Brown, Scott; Heathcote, Andrew ... The most powerful tests of response time (RT) models often involve the whole shape of the RT distribution, thus avoiding mimicking that can occur at the level of RT means and variances. Nonparametric distribution estimation is, in principle, the most appropriate approach, but such estimators are ...

SPSS and SAS procedures for estimating indirect effects in simple mediation models

Nov 01, 2004; Preacher, Kristopher J; Hayes, Andrew F ... Researchers often conduct mediation analysis in order to indirectly assess the effect of a proposed cause on some outcome through a proposed mediator. The utility of mediation analysis stems from its ability to go beyond the merely descriptive to a more functional understanding of the ...

VoiceRelay: Voice key operation using Visual Basic

Nov 01, 2004; Abrams, Lise; Jennings, David T ... Using a voice key is a popular method for recording vocal response times in a variety of language production tasks. This article describes a class module called VoiceRelay that can be easily utilized in Visual Basic programs for voice key operation. This software-based voice key offers the ...