Doing Psychological Research
Christian D. Schunn
John R. Anderson
Abstract
We present a study designed to test what kinds of skills psychologists
actually use in designing and interpreting experiments, and contrast
expertise within a particular research area with general expertise at
designing and interpreting experiments. In the task, called the
Simulated Psychology Lab, subjects design and run a series of
experiments to test between two theories for a phenomenon. The results
suggest that psychologists use many domain-general skills in their
experimentation and that bright and motivated Carnegie Mellon
undergraduates are missing many of these skills. We present an ACT-R
model of Domain-Expert performance in the task and show how the
differences between the different subject groups can be captured by
removing certain chunks and productions from this model. The model
provides futher insights into the nature of expertise and demonstrates
that smaller grain-sized ACT-R 4.0 is capable of modeling preformance in
a very complex task.
Models
SPL task