Following from last year’s research review, I’ve decided to repeat the process. You can’t be a proper academic if you don’t have a degree of imposter syndrome, and I’m always frustrated that I don’t achieve my ridiculously ambitious set of goals. So the list below has to be seen in the context of various local institutional challenges and on a time allowance of 1.5 days per week (30%) for research, and a reasonably heavy teaching load. That’s either an explanation or an excuse, take your pick.
- Technically this came out in 2016, but Keith May and I published a statistical commentary, ‘Fewer Statistical Tests … or Better Ones?‘ (May & Vincent, 2016) which became available in 2017.
- Ran a bunch of delay discounting experiments, with my wonderful undergrad research assistants, that should see the light of day next year I hope.
- Reviewed for the Royal Society Open Science journal for the first time, alongside some other reviews. On this note, I sorted myself out with a Publons profile. This is an interesting idea to get some form of alt-credit for your otherwise invisible reviewing activity via 3rd party verification. You send them your ‘thanks for reviewing’ emails you get from journals.
- I hosted Tom Stafford who gave a great talk about using big data to study human learning. Incidentally, he has a high Kardashian Index.
- Acted as External examiner in a PhD viva at Birkbeck University of London.
- Talk 1: University of St Andrews, at the invite of @CatharineCross, titled ‘Food and sex: some now, or more later?’ This covered in-progress work on delay discounting by me and my collaborators.
- Released an interactive app (made in R/Shiny) which allows you to explore discount functions. I cover exponential discounting [web app; youtube video] and hyperbolic discounting [web app; youtube video] and code is available on my GitHub account.
- Submitted an outline grant application to Leverhulme Foundation, with William Tipples (Leeds Beckett) as PI. Failed.
- Talk 2: at University of Hull, again entitled ‘Food and sex: some now, or more later?’ but with updated data and analysis.
- Took part in, and semi co-organised the Carnegie Mellon University workshop with Britt Anderson, Wayne Wu, and Rich Krauzlis, called What is Attention?
- Talk 3… my contribution to the What is Attention workshop
- Talk 4… Bayesian accounts of covert attention, to the Behrmann + Plaut + Tarr labs.
- Talk 5… talked about my hierarchical Bayesian analysis of temporal discounting data to the Dynamic Decision Making Lab, lead by Coty Gonzalez.
- Talk 6… Bayesian accounts of covert attention, to the Department of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh.
- Talk 7 on Temporal discounting at Newcastle University, Institute of Neuroscience.
- One of my former undergraduate dissertation students, Jordan Skrynka, was international winner of the Psychology section of The Undergraduate Awards. This is pretty cool and gave rise to the pre-print below.
- First pre-print on PsyArXiv… Skrynka & Vincent (in prep) Subjective hunger, not blood glucose, influences domain general time preference. Data is also available on OSF.
- Second pre-print… Vincent & Rainforth (in prep) The DARC Toolbox: automated, flexible, and efficient delayed and risky choice experiments using Bayesian Adaptive Design. Matlab code to run adaptive discounting experiments is in a Github repo.
- Submitted an abstract for the Psychonomics conference, Amsterdam 2018. This will be my first chance to present my discounting work at a conference since my research pivot into higher level cognition and decision making.
Inter-temporal choice methods
I still have some work underway on perceptual decision making and attention, but I’ve been focusing upon temporal discounting (aka inter-temporal choice). My strategy here was to produce rigorous methodology that I’ll need to collect and analyse discounting data. So we can efficiently collect data using the DARC Toolbox (Vincent & Rainforth, preprint), and then analyse that data with hierarchical Bayesian methods (Vincent, 2016). This took a bit longer than expected, but these things take time. Soon we’ll hopefully see the fruits of this work in terms of some empirical contributions. And of course, if others find these tools useful then that is a bonus.
Non-research stuff
- I took on the role of co-lead for Academic Integrity for our School. I’m hoping that, as a Psychologist, I can help distribute recent developments in open and reproducible science to other disciplines in the School.
- Had a lot of fun brining in a lot of new content on open and reproducible science into my MSc module
2018
I’ve got a bunch of talks and workshops set up for next year, so looking forward to that… a bit of Canada, a bit of Amsterdam, and bit of UK. We’ll get these pre-prints submitted and out. I’m looking forward to submitting a theory/modelling idea on time discounting that I’ve been working on. And looking forward to pushing forward various collaborations in the works. I’ll be paying particular attention to lab efficiency – something I’ve not excelled at in the past.