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.