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In 1950 a couple of ground breaking white papers on learning theory have appeared in “Psychological Review” magazine. The paper by Bush and Mosteller that had introduced the linear operator approach to learning and the Estes’s paper dedicated to the stimulus sampling helped to establish...

The WWII gave a tremendous boost to developments in engineering, mathematical logic, computability theory, computer science, mathematics, information theory and the military applications of encryption and code breaking. All of this created the need to understand human performance and its...

While the efforts of Wundt's laboratory were directed towards conscious human experiences (in line with the work of Fechner and Weber on the intensity of stimuli), the United Kingdom research group led by Francis Galton – a cousin of famous Charles Darwin - had focused its efforts on...

The first experimental psychology laboratory (a predecessor of modern cognitive psychology) was established in Germany by Wilhelm Wundt, who applied Donders' ideas by building variety of clever machines capable of measuring different type of human responses and their reactions to various stimuli.

Continuing this ground breaking work Dutch physiologist F. C. Donders and his student J. J. de Jaager have recognized the importance of reaction dynamics for objectively normalizing the amount of time different mental operations usually required. It was Donders who first identified the “mental...

With the rapid development of measuring tools in mechanics, astronomy, navigation and artillery 19th century researchers were faced with the necessity to map distances, denote the exact time of passing star or calculate the trajectory of a cannon ball by measuring the wind velocity. They did...

It has all started in the 19th century with Ernst Weber and Gustav Fechner - the first psychologists who have successfully applied mathematical technique of functional equations to psychological processes. By doing so, they have established the fields of experimental psychology in general, and...

As I said earlier, mathematical psychology is, unfortunately, not a well-known area of psychological research. To some people it sounds almost like an oxymoron implying that mathematics and psychology could not be mixed. Well, let me assure you - it is a real science. It represents an unusual...

First I would like to give you a very short (and hopefully not very boring) overview of these areas of psychology. You, of course, are more than welcome to skip this portion of the thread if you have no interest in history of these scientific fields and, like many of my research subjects, have...

In this thread we are going to use ideas, methods and tools that belong to mathematical and cognitive psychology. For the most people those areas of scientific research are, unfortunately, not very well-known. It is, however, understandable. With so many exciting things popping up everywhere...

As a psychologist and a computer scientist I have been studying perceptional patterns observed in organized financial markets over the past 18 years. Like a starry night sky presents endless wealth of data to an astronomer, markets are the ultimate source of behavioral patterns, psychological...

Again, this thread is not about proving something. It is not about putting the “steak in the ground” either; it does not include rigorous formal logical proofs and does not use much of the math. It will not have any “proven track records” nor will it have any pounding on the chest. The...

The purpose of this thread is to discuss some of methods and devices that could be described as Intuition Amplifiers. I will try to present some results of my experiments that had involved many different people who kindly helped me to better understand such elusive subjects as subconscious...

In 1984 while working on my Ph.D. thesis I became determined to understand what makes your average neighborhood barber so much more efficient compared to the most sophisticated computers. What are the brain mechanisms that enable us to process vast amounts of visual, tactile and other sensory...

An average person has around 120,000 strands of hair on their head. Imagine that the length of each individual strand is measured and then presented as a list of numbers separated by commas. If were to show this list to an average human and ask her to determine the length of the longest hair on...

There are, of course other examples of explicit and vivid differences between humans and computers. An average human would experience tremendous difficulties when trying to multiply 2,345,321,098,213,469 by 323,425,580,982 just using his/her mental calculating abilities and of course modern...

It is good to “delegate” and free up our minds of routine mental chores such as number crunching, data storage, search and sorting of information etc. It is also good to have auto-pilots, self-parking cars and buy/sell algorithms to trade markets providing that we are still in a position to...

We absolutely must have an ability to override our “automatic pilots” and switch to the “manual control” when we need to “land our malfunctioned planes” safely. We must develop an alternative set of tools that are independent of our computer algorithms and are efficient enough to...

Second to military organizations financial industry is the headhunting top for math and physics Ph.Ds. Launching what some have called a “technological arms race” the financial industry has become the driving force for the most advanced computers, artificial intelligence based programs and...

It takes a human about 250 milliseconds to blink. It takes approximately 50 microseconds for an electronic exchange computer to fully complete a financial transaction. There are hundreds of electronic exchanges world-wide that simultaneously run thousands upon thousands of “transaction...