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…]
There are many things to take care of in empirical research. The research design, programming the experiment, piloting, gathering a decent pool of participants, giving them clear instructions, handling complex technical equipment, analysing the data, communicating the findings… Every step of the way, a researcher can make this process run more or less smoothly. But … [Read more…]
It was when Kate Button started her PhD, that she began to appreciate the disconnect between the methods teaching she had prior to the PhD, and the knowledge she needed for actual research. Her early statistics lessons were more about determining which line to read in the SPSS output than about the inferential process. Little … [Read more…]
Say that you are new to research. You’ve read all the textbooks, passed all your exams, and are now beginning to perform empirical investigations. Everyone who has stepped into the lab like this is familiar with the explosion of new elements to master, things that seemed straightforward until you sat down to do them yourself. … [Read more…]
They ride in at dawn while the world quietly slumbers, cocooned in innocence, unsuspecting of the storm that is already under way. Immensely powerful, they gallop in bringing chaos. They are the four horsemen of the reproducibility apocalypse: HARKing, low power, p-hacking and publication bias. Who will resist and who will succumb? Who will be … [Read more…]
Here is an opportunity to view a series of timely talks on reproducibility, online. This September we held the Oxford Reproducibility School, a meeting aimed at discussing current problems in empirical science as well as best research practices. Spurred into action by Kia Nobre, organized by Dorothy Bishop, side-kicked by Caroline Nettekoven, Verena Heise and … [Read more…]
The New York Times recently published Susan Dominus’ piece, When the Revolution Came for Amy Cuddy. The article describes the replication crisis from the vantage point of its refraction through Amy Cuddy’s professional and personal life. The writing is incredible. Dominus talks about the changing rules of science, about a professional life that surged and … [Read more…]
Things I’ve learned today: make an empty room recording before piloting on people. Check if my experimental effects come out in the absence of a brain in the helmet. Then pilot. I usually use brief, pure tones in my experiments, and I usually do MEG. There is a stimulus computer outside the MEG room, that … [Read more…]
This is going to be one of those annoying posts where I tell you to first go and read something else before coming back. Sometimes, when research results are too good to be true, people start thinking there might be something fishy going on. Jens Foerster, for instance, was called out on the excessive linearity of his … [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…]