ABSTRACT
We used Big Data tools to address theoretical issues about how people develop
high-level skill in serial-ordering their actions. We asked how typists “analyze”
Big Data that comes in the form of years of experience of typing, and apply
knowledge of sequential structure in that data to their actions when they are typing.
Our typists’ learning and memory processes were crunching Big Data with their
fingertips. More generally, Big Data tools relevant for experimental psychology
are literally at the fingertips of researchers in an unprecedented fashion that is
transforming the research process. We needed to estimate the statistical structure
of trigrams in the English language, and accomplished this task in a couple of
days by downloading and analyzing freely available massive corpuses of natural
language, which were a click away. We needed hundreds of people to complete
typing tasks to test our theories, which we accomplished in a couple of days using
freely available programming languages and the remarkable mTurk service. We
haven’t figured out how to use Big Data to save time thinking about our results and
writing this paper. Nevertheless, the Big Data tools we used dramatically reduced
the time needed to collect the data needed to test the theories, and they also
enabled us to ask these questions in the first place. We are excited to see where
they take the field in the future.
