My name is Michael Chow —^. I’m a first year graduate student at Princeton University. When I’m not writing blurbs about myself or sleeping, you can generally count on finding me in Andy Conway’s Human Working Memory Lab.
There are many computational models which explain how people are able to recall memories serially, and many computational models which explain memory regardless of order. I’m interested in using commonalities to bridge these two groups.
Another area of interest is how the many different conceptions of what is meant by “working memory” can be related across cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience. For example, working memory is often considered a short-term memory, but several classic tasks of working memory heavily engage long-term processes.
Finally, having been abducted into psychology from statistics, I have an interest in experimental design and classic nonparametrics.
Ubuntu is a very user-friendly flavor of Linux.
Scripting language of choice. In addition to having very clean syntax, Python carries great community support and is completely open source. Learning Python after C++ felt like this. I often use the psychoPy library for writing experiments.
Unless serious matrix algebra is involved, R is a solid language for statistical analysis. Statisticians seem attracted to R, so it seems good at keeping up with contemporary techniques. In terms of graphics, it has some useful libraries (RGL, ggplot2), but it doesn’t seem to compare with plotting in, say, Matlab
Used to manage code for experimental tasks and analysis scripts. This has been really helpful, as I often work on different machines. It seems like the most popular form of version control in my department is DropBox, which scares me a little. But, git + dropbox?!
Text processing on steroids.
Zotero is a free, opensource organizer for research sources. It’s an addon for FireFox (a stand-alone version is in the works). I’ve been pretty happy with it.
