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Quantitative Modeling, Measurement, Decision and Choice |
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| Faculty: William Batchelder Michael D'Zmura Barbara Dosher Jean-Claude Falmagne Donald Hoffman Geoffrey Iverson Michael D. Lee ** R. Duncan Luce Louis Narens ** George Sperling Ramesh Srinivasan Mark Steyvers Charles E. (Ted) Wright John. I. Yellott, Jr. Affiliated Faculty: A. Kimball Romney ** Member: National Academy of Sciences |
UCI is an internationally
recognized center for research on mathematical models in the behavioral
and social sciences. Through the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral
Sciences (IMBS), a Ph.D. program in Mathematical Behavioral Sciences is
offered for students who
are particularly strong in mathematics, and an M.A. program is offered
for
those who wish to minor in this area to complement another program
concentration. A substantial fraction of the Cognitive Sciences faculty
are involved in this program and mathematical behavioral science is an
emphasis within the doctoral program in Psychology. Quantitative Modeling This area involves primarily the development of new probabilistic models of data structures. Current faculty research programs investigate: multinomial models, designed as an alternative to ANOVA for analyzing data from many classes of cognitive experiments; knowledge spaces, designed to obtain a better understanding of the degree to which students have mastered a branch of knowledge such as algebra or geometry; mathematical models in perception, including research on the geometric nature of color space and computational models of visual motion perception and attention; multinomial processing tree models including discrete state information processing models for experimental paradigms in cognitive psychology, especially in the area of human memory. Measurement  Measurement refers, in practice, to two
related activities. One is the development of methods, including those
noted under Quantitative Modeling, for organizing data according to
some numerical or geometric model. The other
topic concerns qualitative conditions on data that allow them to be
represented
in some numerical or geometric structure. The methods of
representational measurement are, primarily, those of abstract algebra.
Current faculty research programs investigate: cultural consensus
theory, an information pooling model for aggregating responses from
informants. Decision and Choice The area of individual decision making is studied by several disciplines including psychology, management science, and economics. The primary mathematical methods are special cases of the quantitative and measurement methods, and these are tested empirically in both laboratory experiments and observational studies. Exemplary topics include the stochastic evolution of preferences. |
Cognitive Sciences
Psychology & Social Behavior
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