Research Interests
It needs to be recognized that many problems in psychology cannot be
answered without modeling the psychological process. Modeling means recasting
the psychological process in some formal language such as the language
of mathematics. Consider these questions: How does one decide what strategies
children use to solve a problem? How many strategies are available to
children? How do these strategies evolve with development? None of these
questions is easily answered simply by using empirical methods. One must
build a model. Hoben Thomas does mathematical psychology opportunistically:
I like to work on problems I find interesting and challenging. As in most
mathematical psychology, the formal language for me is the language of
probability theory. Recent work has focused largely on problems of child
development. Understanding how children solve Piaget's class inclusion
problem, or how an infant's sequence of touches to objects informs one
of the infant's cognitive classification scheme are two recent problems
of interest.
Recent Publications
Hettmansperger, T. P., & Thomas, H. (2000). Almost nonparametric inference for repeated measures in mixture models. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 62 (4), 811-825.
Thomas, H. & Dahlin, M. P. (2000). Inferring children’s categorizations from sequential touching behaviors: An analytical model. Psychological Review, 107, 182-194.
Thomas, H., Lohaus, A., & Kessler, T. (1999). Stability and change in longitudinal water-level task performance. Developmental Psychology, 35, 1024-1037.
Thomas, H. and Horton, J. J. (1997). Competency criteria and the class inclusion task: Modeling judgments and justifications. Developmental Psychology.
Thomas, H. (1996). Between sex differences are often averaging artifacts. Behavior and Brain Science, 19 (2), 265.
Thomas, H. (1995). Modeling class inclusion strategies. Developmental Psychology, 31, 170-179.
