Himanshu Yadav ended his 3+ year stay at my lab today and will start a tenure-track assistant professorship at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in India, Department of Cognitive Science. He's the eighth professor from my lab.   ..read more

Today Himanshu defended his dissertation. His dissertation consists of three published papers. 1. Himanshu Yadav, Garrett Smith, Sebastian Reich, and Shravan Vasishth. Number feature distortion modulates cue-based retrieval in reading. Journal of Memory and Language, 129, 2023. 2. Himanshu Yadav, Dario Paape, Garrett Smith, Brian W. Dillon, and Shravan Vasishth. Individual differences in cue weighting in sentence comprehension: An evaluation using Approximate Bayesian Computation. Open Mind, 2022 3. Himanshu Yadav, Garrett Smith, Daniela Mertzen, Ralf Engbert, and Shravan Vasishth&n ..read more

Michael Betancourt, a giant in the field of Bayesian statistical modeling, once indirectly pointed out to me (in a podcast interview) that one should not try to model latent cognitive processes in reading by computing summary statistics like the mean difference between conditions and then fitting the model on those summary statistics. But that is exactly what we do in psycholinguistics. Most models (including those from my lab) evaluate model performance on summary statistics from the data (usually, a mean difference), abstracting away quite dramatically from the complex processes that re ..read more

I am looking for a postdoc working in sentence processing (psycholinguistics); the position is at the TV-L 13 salary level. This is a teaching + research position in my lab (vasishth.github.io) in the University of Potsdam, Germany. The planned start date is 1st October 2023, and the initial appointment (following a six-month probationary period) is three years; this can be extended following a positive evaluation. Principal tasks: - Teaching two 90 minute classes to undergraduates and graduate students every semester. We teach courses on frequentist and Bayesian statistics, the foundations of ..read more

These recordings are part of a set of videos that are available from the free four-week online course Introduction to Bayesian Data Analysis, taught over the openhpi.de portal ..read more

I was asked to advertise this summer school (I will be teaching a 2.5 day course on linear mixed modeling, and will give a keynote lecture on the use of Bayesian methods in linguistics/psychology). The text below is from the organizers. Summer School “Methods in Language Sciences” 2022: Registrations are open Top quality research requires outstanding methodological skills. That is why the Department of Linguistics and the Department of Translation, Interpreting and Communication of Ghent University will jointly organize the (second edition of the) Summer School “Methods in Language Sciences ..read more

This paper is part of a larger project that has been running for 4-5 years, on the predictions of cue-based retrieval theories.  This paper revisits Van Dyke 2007's design, using eye-tracking (the data are from comparable designs in English and German). The reading time patterns are consistent with syntactic interference at the moment of retrieval in both English. Semantic interference shows interesting differences between English and German---in English, semantic interference seems to happen simultaneously with syntactic interference, but in German, semantic interference is delayed (it a ..read more

I keep seeing this misleading comment on the internet over and over again: Non-normality is relatively unimportant; at worst you just may lose a bit of power. I strongly recommend @StatModeling & Hill (2007, pp. 45-47)'s summary of key regression model assumptions. Normality of errors literally gets LOWEST priority. My experience supports this. 3/3 pic.twitter.com/R0BfQCoxdK — Roger Levy (@roger_p_levy) December 8, 2018 Gelman is cited above, but Gelman himself has spoken out on this point and directly contradicts the above tweet: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/08/21/you-shou ..read more

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SAFAL 2: The Second South Asian Forum on the Acquisition and Processing of Language (30-31 August, 2021 Details: https://sites.google.com/view/safal2021/home The first South Asian Forum on the Acquisition and Processing of Language (SAFAL) highlighted the need to provide a platform for showcasing and discussing acquisition and processing research in the context of South Asian languages. The second edition aims to build on this endeavour. Following the first edition, the Second South Asian Forum on the Acquisition and Processing of Language (SAFAL) aims to provide a platform to exchange r ..read more