Read the Issue

Beyond the Lab: Using Big Data to Discover Principles of Cognition

With more than 100 years of collective practice, experimental psychologists have become highly sophisticated in their application of well-controlled laboratory experiments to reveal principles of human cognition and behavior. This approach has yielded rigorous experimental designs with extensive controls. But the very expertise with which psychologists wield their tools for achieving laboratory control may now be limiting our field to the possibilities that now exist for using beyond the lab approaches to inform psychological theories.

For this special issue we seek contributions that fall into the broad topic of going beyond the lab to answer questions difficult or impossible to answer with conventional lab studies. Examples of ideal contributions include, but are not limited to:

Harvesting data from online databases
Network analysis
Linguistic corpora
Educational data analytics
Crowdsourcing experimentation, coding, and analysis
Gamification of data collection and analysis
Statistical methods for dealing with naturally occurring data sets
Deriving causal relations from data
Integrating experiments and naturally occurring data sets
Psychological investigations of patterns in specific databases for understanding: language, search, reasoning, problem solving, decision making, vision, performance, and group behavior
Creating online environments for collecting behavioral data
Environmental statistics and cognition

TIMELINE
November 30, 2017: Preliminary proposals due. Submit your proposal here. Requested information includes a tentative title, a 250-400 word description of your proposed paper, and information on your intended audience.

December 20, 2017: Decisions on preliminary proposals emailed to authors.

April 20, 2018: Invited full papers due. The papers will go through the conventional peer review process at Behavior Research Methods.

Please email any questions to the guest editors:

Gary Lupyan, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Rob Goldstone, Indiana University Bloomington

^{(Open access to articles older than 12 months)}