[R-sig-ME] psychometric function fitting with lmer?

[Mike Lawrence]

On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 3:29 PM, Doran, Harold <HDoran at air.org> wrote:
>   First, I don't know how one uses OLS
>  to fit a probit model.

I've seen it done. Folks usually collapse responses to
means-per-value-on-the-x-axis  then either use a computationally
intensive search algorithm to minimize the squared error on the
proportion scale, or fit a simple linear function on the probit scale
(when they encounter means of 1 or 0, they "tweak" these values by
either dropping that data entirely or adding/subtracting some
arbitrary value).

Regardless, I suspect we both agree that these are inadvisable ways of
dealing with this data, but I'm not sure we are on the same page with
respect to the underlying paradigm motivating the data analysis.
Whereas the paper you provided appears to be discussing data derived
from questionnaires with different items, etc, I was thinking (and I
apologize for failing to be more clear on this earlier) of data
derived from studies of temporal order judgement and other
psychophysical discrimination studies. Here's an example that I
happened to find while searching google for an article not behind a
pay-wall:

http://www.psych.ut.ee/~jyri/en/Murd-Kreegipuu-Allik_Perception2009.pdf

In such studies, individuals are provided two stimuli and asked "which
one is more X", where the stimuli are manipulated to explore a variety
of values for the difference of X between them. For example, in
temporal order judgements, we ask which of two successive stimuli came
first, right or left, then plot proportion of "right first" responses,
accumulated over many trials, as a function of the amount of time by
which the right stimulus led the right stimulus (SOA, or stimulus
onset asynchrony, where negative values mean the right stimulus
followed the left stimulus). This typically yields a sigmoidal
function where people are unlikely to say "right-first" when the left
stimulus leads by a lot (large negative SOA values) and very likely to
say "right-first" when the right stimulus leads by a lot (large
positive SOA values. The place where this function crosses 50% is
termed the point of subjective simultaneity (PSS) and the slope of the
function indexes the participants' sensitivity (shallow slopes
indicate poor sensitivity, sharp slopes indicate good sensitivity).
Researchers are often then interested in how various experimental
manipulations affect these two characteristics of performance.


> Second,
>  why are you treating the observed data as a parameter estimate? Why don't you
>  actually estimate the model parameters (i.e., the item parameters), which are
>  asymptotically unbiased under certain estimation conditions. You can do this in a number of
>  ways in R, lme4 can do this using lmer as described here:
>
>  http://www.jstatsoft.org/v20/i02
>
>  Or you can use JML methods for Rasch in the MiscPsycho package or you can use
>  MML methods in the LTM package. What you seem to be doing is treating the eICC
>  as some kind of parameter for the item; but this is not reasonable I don't
>  think.
>
>> This
>> > fitting is typically done within each individual and condition of
>> > interest separately, then the resulting parameters are submitted to 2
>> > ANOVAs: one for bias, one for variability. I wonder if this analysis
>> > might be achieved more efficiently using a single mixed effects model,
>> > but I'm having trouble figuring out how to approach coding this.
>>
>
>
>  I'm not sure I can help you here as I am unclear on what you are doing
>  exactly. Maybe if we elaborate a bit on what you are trying to do above, we
>  can do this part next.
>
>>
>> Below
>> > is an example of data similar to that collected in this sort of
>> > research, where individuals fall into two groups (variable "group"),
>> > and are tested under two conditions (variable "cue") across a set of
>> > values from a continuous variable (variable "soa"), with each cue*soa
>> > combination tested repeatedly within each individual. A model like
>> >
>> > fit = lmer(
>> >     formula = response ~ (1|id) + group*cue*soa
>> >     , family = binomial( link='probit' )
>> >     , data = a
>> > )
>> >
>> > employs the probit link, but of course yields estimates for the slope
>> > and intercept of a linear model on the probit scale, and I'm not sure
>> > how (if it's even possible) to convert the conclusions drawn on this
>> > scale to conclusions about the bias and variability parameters of
>> > interest.
>> >
>> > Thoughts?
>> >
>
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>
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