usyd School of Psychology
Faculty of Science
 

Dr Damian Birney PhD (University of Queensland)

 

Positions:
 
Honorary Senior Lecturer
School of Psychology
Brennan MacCallum Building (A18)
The University of Sydney
NSW 2006
Australia

Senior Lecturer
Accelerated Learning Laboratory
Australian School of Business
University of New South Wales,
Sydney, NSW, 2052


    Research Interests:

My research focuses on the investigation of human reasoning, learning, and problem solving, broadly defined. Three areas of particular interest are individual differences in cognitive abilities, relational reasoning abilities and working memory, and the philosophy of measurement.

Individual difference in cognitive abilities: The general focus of individual differences research is to map relationships between different psychological abilities and traits using correlational methods. It has been suggested that while correlational methods are effective for describing relations between different abilities, they provide little insight into the underlying processes1. For instance, researchers have argued that (1) our understanding of cognitive (and personality) constructs has been limited by a “dutiful” adherence to a limited set of methodologies2,3, and (2) that a much broader conceptualisation of abilities is necessary – that traditional psychometric tests capture only a small part of human capabilities4,5. These, I believe, are legitimate concerns for individual differences research that might be addressed, at least in part, by broadening both theoretical and methodological paradigms.
            Working Memory and Relational reasoning abilities: My interest in relational reasoning abilities stems from my work with Graeme Halford6 and the work of other information-processing theorists7. These theories tend to conceptualise cognition from an experimental perspective which focuses more on mean differences in performance than on individual differences. Halford et al’s research investigates the nature and development of working memory as defined as the capacity to represent and process complex relations in parallel. My research has contributed to attempts to identify characteristics of tasks that influence relational complexity, and the person characteristics that mediate the capacity to deal with complexity8. While cognitive process analyses of tasks may provide useful accounts of the processes involved, experimental theories have been criticised for failing to sufficiently account for individual differences9. These, I believe, are legitimate concerns.
            Measurement: The theoretical interests I have briefly described are driven to a large extent by interests in psychological measurement. Understanding covert cognitive processes is necessarily limited by the inappropriateness, unreliability, and imprecision of our assessment methods – quantification is not simply deciding what to count. My philosophical interests in measurement stem from the work of diverse researchers such as Joel Michell10 and Ben Wright11 who argue, albeit from different methodological paradigms, that researchers often only assume that the measures used to develop and validate psychological theories have appropriate measurement properties. Unfortunately, it has been argued that the nature of psychological research, particularly applied research, means that situations in which the quantitative properties of measurement can be directly assessed are rare12. However, while there is a clear tension between the ideals of measurement and the practical constraints of psychological and educational research, this does not mean that we cannot aspire to the more perfect ideal.

Integration and current research: Individual differences and experimental approaches are often seen to be distinct investigative paradigms. However, I believe there are important advances to be made in psychology if we integrate these approaches. My primary research interests have increasingly focused on combining process (experimental) and individual differences theories of human reasoning and more recently in the development of flexible expertise.

Selected references that have influenced my thinking:        
1      Deary, I.J. (2001) Human intelligence differences: Towards a combined experimental-differential approach. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 5 (4), 164-170.
2      Cronbach, L.J. (1957) The two disciplines of scientific psychology. American Psychologist 12, 671-684.
3      Lohman, D.F. and Ippel, M.J. (1993) Cognitive diagnosis: From statistically based assessment toward theory-based assessment. In Test theory for a new     generation of tests (Frederiksen, N. et al., eds.), pp. 41-70, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
4      Sternberg, R.J. (1997) Successful intelligence, Plume.
5      Birney, D.P. and Sternberg, R.J. (in press) Intelligence and cognitive abilities as competencies in development. In Lifespan Cognition: Mechanisms of Change (Bialystok, E. and Craik, G., eds.).
6      Halford, G.S. et al. (1998) Processing capacity defined by relational complexity: Implications for comparative, developmental, and cognitive psychology. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 21, 803-831.
7      Johnson-Laird, P. (2001) Mental models and deduction. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 5 (10), 434-442.
8      Birney, D.P. and Halford, G.S. (2002) Cognitive complexity of suppositional reasoning: An application of the relational complexity metric to the knight-knave task. Thinking and Reasoning 8 (2), 109-134.
9      Roberts, M.J. (1993) Human reasoning: Deduction rules or mental models, or both? Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 46A (4), 569-589.
10    Michell, J. (1997) Quantitative science and the definition of measurement in psychology. British Journal of Psychology 88 (3), 355-384.
11     Wright, B.D. (1999) Fundamental measurement for psychology. In The New Rules of Measurement: What Every Psychologist and Educator Should Know. (Embretson, S.E. and Hershberger, S.L., eds.), Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
12    Birney, D.P. (2001) Solution of Incomplete Latin Squares: An Application of the Rasch Measurement Model. In Psychonomic Seminar Series, Univeristy of Queensland.
13    Stankov, L. (2000) Complexity, metacognition and fluid intelligence. Intelligence 28 (2), 121-143
14    Embretson, S.E. (1993) Psychometric models for learning and cognitive processes. In Test Theory for a New Generation of Tests (Frederiksen, N. et al., eds.), pp. 125-150, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates

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Last update 26th, August, 2009 webmaster@psych.usyd.edu.au