Aim This study focuses on the influence of methodological choices on the predictive performance of macroecological models (MEMs), i.e. statistical models designed to predict patterns of biodiversity using environmental predictors. We emphasize the influence of three methodological choices: (1) the choice of the currency in which the abundance of each species is measured, i.e. numbers of individ...

Commentary Computational models in psychology are precise, fully explicit scientific hypotheses. Probabilistic models in particular formalize hypotheses about the beliefs of agents— their knowledge and assumptions about the world—using the structured collection of probabilities referred to as priors and likelihoods. The probability calculus then describes inferences that can be drawn by combini...

The present study uses probabilistic models of corpus data in a novel way, to measure and compare the syntactic predictive capacities of speakers of different varieties of the same language. The study finds that speakers’ knowledge of probabilistic grammatical choices can vary across different varieties of the same language and can be detected psycholinguistically in the individual. In three pa...

Standard economic models tend to be more speci…c about pecuniary payo¤s than non-pecuniary payo¤s to education. Based on Akerlof and Kranton (2000), we consider a model of career choice and identity where individuals derive nonpecuniary identity payo¤s. Using factor analysis on a range of attitude questions, we …nd two factors related to identity (career orientation and social orientation), whi...

Results from five studies of real-life decision making are compared. In these studies, participants consistently constrained the amount of information they considered to relatively few options and to a somewhat larger set of criteria. Over time, the number of options considered shrank, but the number of criteria used did not. People's intuitive "calibration" with the predictions of normative li...

The modal split model is one of the steps of the classical four-step travel demand planning. Predictive, descriptive, and prescriptive modal split models are essential to make a balance between travel demand and supply. To calibrate these models, it is necessary to detect and employ influential independent variables that are related to characteristics of travel modes, individual and family attr...