Novel Methods for Maximizing and Evaluating Adaptive Measurement Efficiency

Contributions within Discipline: The findings have improved the efficiency of adaptive measurement in psychophysics, in experimental paradigms where individual trials are often information-poor and experiments are consequently long. The Bayesian adaptive methodology improves the information throughput in such experiments and improves on heuristic methods. The multivariate estimation also extends the utility of Bayesian adaptive estimation into realms where it is even more important because of the \u27curse of dimensionality\u27 (where the size of parameter space is exponential in the number of parameters). In addition, the work on nonparametric adaptive methods has helped reveal the source of bias in simpler adaptive methodology that has often incorrectly been taken to be safe because of its apparent lack of statistical assumptions. By revealint the source of such bias, it offers solutions for minimizing the bias