Personal analytics and the future of psychological research

There has never been a better time to be a psychological scientist In the history of psychology there have been three really major methodological developments. The first was to realise that psychology could be thought of as a science (as opposed to a philosophical endeavour). The scientific method was relevant to the study of human […]

ARE AUSTRALIANS WILLING TO ACCEPT TECHNOLOGIES TO TRACK THE CONTACTS OF PEOPLE WHO HAVE TESTED POSITIVE TO COVID19?

Simon Dennis, Josh White, Paul Garrett, Daniel Little, Amy Perfors, Yoshi Kashima, Nic Geard, Lewis Mitchell#, Stephan Lewandowsky* University of MelbourneUniversity of Adelaide#University of Bristol* 79% of Australians think it is acceptable for the government to work with telecommunication companies to track who has been in contact with people who have tested positive to COVID-19. […]

Understanding the impact of pre-experimental experience on recognition memory using people’s emails

by Michael Diamond, Courtney O’Brien, Hyungwook Yim and Simon Dennis Experience sampling methodologies are set to revolutionise psychological science, as these techniques overcome some of the major limitations of laboratory experiments. This blog post explains how we utilised experience sampling techniques in a memory experiment investigating the Word Frequency Effect in recognition memory. The Word […]

Understanding eyewitness memory

In 1984, Ronald Cotton was convicted for rape and burglary. He was sentenced to life + 50 years. In 1995, he was released having served over 10 years in prison, when DNA evidence demonstrated that Booby Poole was guilty of the crime (Ronald Cotton, n.d.). The Innocence Project estimates that between 2% and 5% of […]

Understanding the Impact of Emotion on Memory

Emotions are the motive forces of much of human behaviour and are therefore important to understand. But studying emotion is hard. In the laboratory, researchers show participants pictures of angry faces or fluffy bunnies to try to induce emotions, but one always has a lurking doubt that the emotions evoked this way are really the […]

Plotting in Private

Below are a set of examples of plotting in Private. I will update this post later with more explanation, but in the meantime these should provide some insight into how to construct plots. Note the Private plotting functions are based on the seaborn plotting library. Acknowledgement: The plotting functionality and examples have been developed by […]

Manifold Privacy: A Practical Approach to Computational Privacy for Analysis Languages

Much of the research conducted in my lab relies on using sensors and other data streams generated by smartphones, online services and IoT devices to understand human memory. Naturally, people are protective of this data. We have developed a ecosystem that strives to collect data in ways that maximise the control people have over their […]

Bayesian Inference with Private Data

In the last tutorial, we discussed how to estimate quantities using experience sampling data that may be sensitive and therefore private. This time we are going to talk about how to do Bayesian inference, that is, how to test hypotheses. We’ll start by considering inference in general and then explore an example using experience sampling […]

An Introduction to the Private Language

In this post, I am going to provide a tutorial style introduction to the Private programming language. Private is a privacy preserving probabilistic scripting language. This will be the first of a series of three tutorials that cover different aspects of the language. I’ll link these in here when they are complete. The tutorial assumes […]

Bayesian Estimation with Private Data

In the last tutorial, we covered simple examples that aimed to build the conceptual understanding of probabilistic programming and introduce the Private programming language. In this tutorial, we are going use the Private language to extract information about potentially private experience sampling data. You can access a Private shell at https://private.mall-lab.com/ but note it will […]