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…]
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…]
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…]
A couple of years ago, Brian Nosek and colleagues re-ran 100 psychological studies published in top journals during 2008 (source). The question was: will the results replicate? It turns out that’s a nontrivial question. Sure, you might consider that any study where the p-value fell above 0.05 is a study where the effect was not … [Read more…]
How many times have you read a research paper only to say, I don’t really believe this finding. It’s a regular occurrence, isn’t it? There is just something about the evidence that isn’t strong enough despite statistical significance, something about your theoretical knowledge that makes this finding fit rather badly. You perform a calculation in … [Read more…]
The rules of science are changing, to the exhilaration of some and apprehension of others. The problem is by now well defined: when we run an analysis on an unstable effect using a small sample, we can get a variety of different statistical outcomes. If only some of those outcomes are acceptable by journal standards, the literature will produce a skewed … [Read more…]
These thoughts about plotting were largely inspired by Guillaume Rousselet’s blog. Let’s start with this combined scatter ERP/ERF plot: These are real data from an early paper of mine, picked for convenience. The blue and red lines are the signal recorded by a set of temporal MEG sensors, to a tone click played twice (under two different conditions, called Blue … [Read more…]
I remember a sense of defeat when I started learning about research methodology. I enrolled in psychology brimming with questions, but instead of getting answers, there was this statistics course that seemed to be just caveat after caveat after caveat about what we’re allowed to conclude from data. You should have a representative sample, but … [Read more…]
I previously discussed why our search for intelligence in the brain bypasses some critical features of how IQ is measured, thus leading to data which add up to a theoretically confusing picture. It is possible that a clear-cut neural correlate of intelligence will be found some day. It is also possible that intelligence is a … [Read more…]
Being intelligent is about being good at many things. Intelligence researchers assign a single number to a diverse constellation of aptitudes, and this single number is the best across-the-board predictor of performance that differential psychology has ever yielded. Intuitively, there should be an ability behind this constellation: the more of this ability people have, the … [Read more…]