Recent Progress in Mathematical Psychology

Mathematical psychology is an interdisciplinary area of research in which methods of mathematics, operations research, and computer science in psychology are used. Now more than 30 years old, the field has continued to grow rapidly and has taken on a life of its own. This volume was prepared to summarize that recent progress in mathematical psychology as seen by some of the leading figures in the field as well as some of its leading young researchers. This volume received its impetus at the July 1992 meeting of the European Mathematical Psychology Group - a meeting at which many of the papers in the volume were originally presented. The excitement about the field and its new directions led the participants at that meeting to suggest that a volume be prepared. However, the resulting volume is not just a conference proceedings. After the meeting, the editors decided that a broader pool of contributions than could be taken from the meeting itself would enhance the volume, making it broader in scope and of interest to a wider audience than simply a proceedings volume. The papers presented in this volume naturally fall into a variety of areas that reflect many of the most important current directions of research in mathematical psychology. They cover topics in measurement, decision and choice, psychophysics and psychometrics, knowledge representation, neural nets and learning models, and cognitive modelling. Some of the major ideas included are important new applications of concepts of measurement theory to social phenomena, new directions in the theory of probabilistic choice, surprising results in nonlinear utility theory, applications of Boolean methods in the theory of knowledge spaces, applications of neural net ideas to concept learning, developments in the theory of parallel processing models of response time, new results in inhibition theory, and new concepts about paired associate learning.