Tuesday, January 15, 2013

New features for 2013

Happy new year from everyone on the Cognitive Atlas team!  The new year brings an upgrade to the site, with some new features that we are particularly excited about. The biggest new feature is what we call collections, which encompass groups of concepts from the Atlas.  There are currently two types of collections:

Task Batteries are collections of tasks, and are meant to be used to define test batteries such as the NIH Toolbox or the CANTAB.  For example, here is the collections page for the NIH Toolbox Cognition Battery:



The page lists all of the constituent tasks that make up the Cognition Battery, and links to the separate task pages for each of those tasks.  It also allows specification of "derived indicators," which are composite measures that are derived from performance across multiple tasks.  Using this feature, we plan to represent all of the neuropsychological test batteries commonly used today.

Theories are defined as sets of assertions about concepts in the atlas.  For example, here is a (sketchy) representation of Baddeley's theory of working memory:


This is clearly just a start at defining this theory, but we believe that this feature can nonetheless provide a very useful formal summary of many of the theories in the domain of psychology.  Registered users should go ahead and add their favorite theory today!

Task implementations.  We have added a new feature to the task pages which support links to openly available implementations of tasks.  For example, here is the stop signal task page with a couple of implementations:



As always, your thoughts and suggestions are welcome and greatly appreciated!