UIUC Quant Brownbag

“Don’t say ‘statistically significant’” – so says Wasserstein et al. (2019) in a special issue of The American Statistician sponsored by the American Statistical Association. Wasserstein et al. ask us to “move to a world beyond p < .05”. However, categorization of stimuli has lasting psychological effects – for some physical stimuli such as color and sound, they can induce what is known as a categorical perception effect. In this talk I present a series of studies we have conducted finding evidence that graduate students with statistical training are unable to self-regulate out of a categorical bias in their initial processing of numeric stimuli as p-values. I will share our ongoing work to examine whether this bias extends into longer cognitive processes such as encoding and retrieval, and discuss future directions related to both educational psychology and numerical cognition more broadly.