(Telecom-Paris) (Photo by Carlos Pelta)
The "Meeting of the European Mathematical Psychology Group", which was held at the Telecom ParisTech, August 29-31, 2011, was a great success. Major credits go to Professor Olivier Hudry, the Meeting chair, who opened the Meeting with a few welcoming remarks. Next, Professor Marchant, the first plenary speaker, shared the latest developments about "Measurement theory with unary relations". H. Colonius and S. Rach have developed an approach based on the theory of Fechnerian Scaling for the measure of visual-auditory integration efficiency. Fechnerian Scaling deals with the computation of subjective distances from their pairwise discrimination probabilities. In the afternoon, L. Stefanutti spoke about knowledge structures extending the probabilistic framework to represent local independence among items in a probabilistic knowledge structure. Professors Alcalá-Quintana and García-Pérez introduced a model of indecision in perceptual detection tasks revealing strong order effects that vary in sign and magnitude in a systematic manner across observers. Besides, they used a probabilistic model of temporal-order perception to provide a common framework for synchrony judgments. Professor Shanteau described his experiments on memory-retrieval versus decision-making in repetition priming. Finally, Professors Albert and Hockemeyer analysed the very relevant contributions by Jean-Claude Falmage, the founder of the "European Mathematical Psychology Group", to Mathematical Psychology.
On Tuesday, Professor Raijmakers started the morning sessions with the oral presentation entitled "The application of latent Markov models in category learning". Latent Markov models allows for analysing multiple latent categorization strategies separately in a robust way. Next, Professor Pelta introduced a computational simulation in Social Psychology, adding to the spatial prisoner´s dilemma the three laws of imitation formulated by Jean-Gabriel Tarde in his book "The laws of imitation" (1890). Professor Thiel exposed how automata network models can simulate the halo effect in human attitudes, using a connectionist model on the Beckwith and Lehman multiattributes theory. In the afternoon, Jean-Claude Falmagne presented the idea of "Learning Spaces" and his colaborator Eric Cosyn introduced a very interesting practical application. Cosyn has extracted 350 items forming a learning space whose domain is the field of middle-school algebra. Professor Induráin tried to establish a common theory that relates the different mathematical properties that the concept of "mean" can have.
On Wednesday 31 August, Professor Choirat reviewed her work on separable representations in Mathematical Psychology and decision making. Finally, I would like to stress the oral presentation by Professor Doignon about representations of interval orders.
A post-conference edition of Meeting presentations should be available on the journal "Electronic Notes in Discrete Mathematics" perhaps during the first quarter of 2012.
We are very grateful, in first place, to the city of Paris, and, in a second place, to Professors Hudry, Lobstein, Charon and Choirat and Telecom ParisTech, for the organization of the Meeting.
