Scott Brown

B.Math (Real Analysis Major), B.Sc. (Hons., Psychology Major)

Ph.D. University of Newcastle, Australia, 2002

My current research has two strands: one statistical and one experimental. Statistically, I am interested in the problem of efficiently estimating the parameters of theoretically assumed distributions from real psychological data, which is typically both noisy and contaminated. The methods I develop and examine have many applications in experimental psychology, such as in estimating parameters of complicated models of behaviour, or in testing theoretical predictions using distributional analyses. The experimental strand of my research is concerned with modelling choice response time in simple perceptual and memorial tasks. In particular, the most successful choice RT models are currently the sequential sampling models - my research is focussed on developing simpler versions of these models.

Representative Publications.

Brown, S.D. & Heathcote (2002) On the use of nonparametric regression for testing parametric regression models. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 46(5)

Heathcote, A.J., Brown, S.D. & Mewhort, D.J.K. (2000) The power law repealed: The case for an exponential law of practice. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 7(2), p.185-207.

Heathcote, A, Brown, S, & Mewhort, D.J.K. (2002) Quantile maximum likelihood estimation of response time distributions. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 9(2) p.394-401