Peter Dixon

Psyco 356: Methods in Cognition. A survey of theories and research on the production and comprehension of spoken and written language. Topics include speech perception, printed word recognition, sentence production and comprehension, discourse processing, reading, language development, and language pathologies. The focus will be on the processing mechanisms implicated by findings in the area. Prerequisite: PSYCO 258. [Faculty of Arts]

Psyco 631: Scientific Inference. In psychology and a wide of other fields, null hypothesis significance testing is the standard technique for describing the evidence for scientific claims. In this course, we first consider the logic and history of this technique and discuss a range of common critiques. In particular, we consider the role significance testing has had in the so-called “replication crisis” that has undermined our confidence in published research results. As an alternative, we develop model comparison as a general framework for describing evidence, and, in that context, we discuss model building strategies and various model comparison criteria. This approach is applied to assessing evidence for a variety of types of hypotheses, including patterns of results in complex designs, null effects, post hoc models, replications, and model adequacy. The overarching goal of the course is to provide a deeper understanding of the inference tools that can be used for evaluating evidence. Prerequisite: PSYCO 531-2 or equivalent.