Adam Sanborn
Wednesday 17th February 2016
Time: 4.00pm
Ground Floor Seminar Room
25 Howland Street, London, W1T 4JG
Making Numerical Estimates from Uncertain Information
Many everyday estimation tasks require people to make numerical estimates, whether the task is guessing the number of people in a room or estimating the chance that an event will happen. While people often make good estimates, it is not entirely clear how previous experience is represented, how estimates are produced, or what strategies are used. I will present results from two sets of tasks that investigate these questions. A pair of perceptual tasks are used to characterize how people learn what numbers are likely to occur and how participants convert uncertain beliefs into a single estimate. A second kind of task, asking participants to estimate the probabilities of conjunctions and disjunctions of events, is deployed to investigate strategy use when making estimates.
Adam Sanborn is a cognitive psychologist interested in how people's behaviour can be explained by statistical models and approximations to statistical models. He received his PhD in Cognitive Science and Psychological and Brain Sciences from Indiana University in 2007. Afterwards he took up a fellowship from the Royal Society to work at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit. He has been at Warwick since 2010 and is now an Associate Professor in Psychology.
+44 (0)20 7679 1176