AUTHOR=Tran N.-Han , van Maanen Leendert , Heathcote Andrew , Matzke Dora TITLE=Systematic Parameter Reviews in Cognitive Modeling: Towards a Robust and Cumulative Characterization of Psychological Processes in the Diffusion Decision Model JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology VOLUME=11 YEAR=2021 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.608287 DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2020.608287 ISSN=1664-1078 ABSTRACT=
Parametric cognitive models are increasingly popular tools for analyzing data obtained from psychological experiments. One of the main goals of such models is to formalize psychological theories using parameters that represent distinct psychological processes. We argue that systematic quantitative reviews of parameter estimates can make an important contribution to robust and cumulative cognitive modeling. Parameter reviews can benefit model development and model assessment by providing valuable information about the expected parameter space, and can facilitate the more efficient design of experiments. Importantly, parameter reviews provide crucial—if not indispensable—information for the specification of informative prior distributions in Bayesian cognitive modeling. From the Bayesian perspective, prior distributions are an integral part of a model, reflecting cumulative theoretical knowledge about plausible values of the model's parameters (Lee,