lood analysis. Other diagnostic applications are being made to aptitude testing, materials testing, weather forecasting, and polygraph lie detection (Swets 1996, Chap. 4).
A recent development is to use SDT to improve, as well as to evaluate, diagnostic accuracy. Observers’ ratings of the relevant dimensions of a diagnostic task—e.g., perceptual features in an X-ray—are merged in a manner speciﬁed by the theory to yield an optimal estimate of the probability that a ‘signal’ is present (Swets 1996, Chap. 8). The latest work both in psychology and diagnostics has been described didactically (Swets 1998).
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