Academic articles handle dense and complex subject matter, which means that a great degree of care goes into writing that tells this complicated story in a simple and compelling way. I like writing, and I thought I’d share my approach to structuring my own written work. It relies on three rules. I treat the first … [Read more…]
Last year, after a particularly discouraging interaction regarding my department’s willingness to support me in applying for grants, I made the half-crazed move of googling ‘mental health research jobs near me’. I found a company that looked good, clicked on their contact page, uploaded my CV and told them I’m looking for a job. My … [Read more…]
An important problem in psychological research is how to use findings from basic cognitive neuroscience to form an idea about what goes on in an individual. This step from cognitive experimental research to individual differences has been described as uncharted territory decades ago [1], and not enough intervening methodological work has been dedicated to working … [Read more…]
When people become chronically distressed, their first port of call is usually their GP. A lot of the time, maybe even most of the time, people will initially come with vague physical complaints [1]. Headaches, dizziness, a digestive tract that doesn’t work as smoothly as it could. After some searching, if physical causes are eventually … [Read more…]
Editors of international academic journals are currently discussing banning contributions from academics affiliated with Russian institutions. I don’t normally talk about my war experiences, but my ex-Yugoslav perspective might be valuable here because I presume it is close to what many Russian colleagues in academia are going through right now. I will assume that the … [Read more…]
eLife is trying out a new model of reviewing, that includes obligatory preprints, obligatory open data and code, as well as open reviews. You can read more about it here: I was lucky enough to review an article under this new model. The openness of reviews is not yet obligatory, but I opted for it. … [Read more…]
More precisely, a sampling technique for situations where one of two correlated variables is easy to measure, while the other is not. Say you wanted to correlate a personality questionnaire with a neural measure. Or a result from a behavioural experiment with a neural measure. This is not easy, because (a) when such correlations exist, … [Read more…]
Spoiler alert: I didn’t. But I thought about it long and hard. My reasons include a mix of the usual and unusual. I struggled to stay afloat moving from country to country and from job to job during some exceptionally difficult childbearing years. The stress took so much out of me that I no longer … [Read more…]
The Oxford Reproducibility Lectures were largely concerned with trustworthiness of scientific findings, as well as carving out more robust research practices. We discussed adequately powering one’s studies, statistical methods that are better aligned to typical research questions, how to pre-register experiments, how to deal with the garden of forking paths, as well as setting standards … [Read more…]
At the beginning of my postdoc, I told my supervisor I’d like to learn some fMRI on top of my usual electrophysiology. “Wonderful”, she said, “I have just the dataset for you!” It was a straightforward research question with a fairly simple manipulation and it also happened to be along the lines of my interests. … [Read more…]