ABSTRACT

While laboratory research is still the backbone of tracking causation among

behavioral variables, more and more cognitive research is now letting experimental

control go in favor of mining large-scale and real-world datasets. We are seeing

an exponential1 expansion of data available to us that is the product of human

behavior: Social media, mobile device sensors, images, RFID tags, linguistic

corpora, web search logs, and consumer product reviews, just to name a few

streams. Since 2012, about 2.5 exabytes of digital data are created every day

(McAfee, Brynjolfsson, Davenport, Patil, & Barton, 2012). Each little piece of

data is a trace of human behavior and offers us a potential clue to understand basic

cognitive principles; but we have to be able to put all those pieces together in a

reasonable way. This approach necessitates both advances in our theoretical models

and development of new methodological techniques adapted from the information

sciences.