Lecturer: Stefan Scherbaum and Martin Schoemann
Fields: Psychology, Neuroscience, Cognitive Modeling
Content
For a long time, psychology and neuroscience has used outcome measures (usually key-presses) to study what people do, e.g., which options people choose under which circumstances. The cognitive processes behind these outcomes were either inferred by theoretical connections or by fitting simple models to data. This approach matched with static or stage-like cognitive and decision models. However, our view on cognitive processes has become more and more dynamic and hence, the experimental focus has shifted in recent years to measure the dynamics of cognitive processes more directly, e.g., via eye-tracking, modern EEG-based approaches, and motion tracking. The latter approach is based on the assumption that the dynamics of cognitive processes can leak into continuously traced behavior. A simple and cheap version of this approach that is available to practically everyone is to track participants’ mouse cursor movement while they are making decisions between options (e.g., moral options, monetary options, stimulus categories) on a computer screen.
This course provides a theoretical introduction to mouse cursor tracking and offers hands-on experience in building mouse tracking experiments and analyzing the resulting data. In the theoretical parts, we will look at insights from typical mouse tracking studies, what needs to be considered when building such a study, how the resulting continuous data can be analyzed and constrain models of cognitive processes. In the practical parts, you will design and implement mouse tracking experiments in small groups, measure each other and analyze the resulting data. The course will provide a basic framework in Matlab for the experiments and analysis of data (other programming languages can be used when you are proficient, e.g., R, Python, JavaScript, C#, etc.). Basic programming skills will be required, but work in groups will allow you to combine your skills and get insights what your movement dynamics tell you about your cognition.
Literature
- Schoemann, M., O’Hora, D., Dale, R., & Scherbaum, S. (2021). Using mouse cursor tracking to investigate online cognition: Preserving methodological ingenuity while moving toward reproducible science. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 28(3), 766–787. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-020-01851-3
- Scherbaum, S., & Dshemuchadse, M. (2020). Psychometrics of the continuous mind: Measuring cognitive sub-processes via mouse tracking. Memory & Cognition, 48(3), 436–454. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-019-00981-x
- Freeman, J. B. (2018). Doing Psychological Science by Hand. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 27, 315–323. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721417746793
- Wulff, D. U., Kieslich, P. J., Henninger, F., Haslbeck, J. M. B., & Schulte-Mecklenbeck, M. (2021, December 23). Movement tracking of cognitive processes: A tutorial using mousetrap. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/v685r
Lecturer
Stefan Scherbaum works as a Professor of psychological research methods and cognitive modelling at TU Dresden. Much of his work focuses on measuring and modelling the dynamics of cognitive and social interaction processes. Martin Schoemann is a predoctoral researcher in Stefan’s lab at TU Dresden. He works at the intersection of research methods, cognitive modelling, and decision sciences where he focuses on measuring and modelling the dynamics of decision-making processes.
Affiliation: Technische Universität Dresden
Homepage: https://tu-dresden.de/mn/psychologie/ifap/methpsy/die-professur/index