Developing Cognitive Theory by Mining Large-scale Naturalistic Data
Michael N. Jones · Psychology Press eBooks · 2016
While laboratory research is still the backbone of tracking causation among behavioral variables, more and more cognitive research is now letting experimental control go in favor of mining large-scale and real-world datasets. We are seeing an exponential1 expansion of data available to us that is the product of human behavior: Social media, mobile device sensors, images, RFID tags, linguistic corpora, web search logs, and consumer product reviews, just to name a few streams. Since 2012, about 2.5 exabytes of digital data are created every day (McAfee, Brynjolfsson, Davenport, Patil, & Barton, 2012). Each little piece of data is a trace of human behavior and offers us a potential clue to understand basic cognitive principles; but we have to be able to put all those pieces together in a reasonable way. This approach necessitates both advances in our theoretical models and development of new methodological techniques adapted from the information sciences.