“This chair is too big!” she exclaimed. So she sat in the second chair. “This chair is too big, too!” she whined. So she tried the last and smallest chair. “Ahhh, this chair is just right,” she sighed. But just as she settled down into the chair to rest, it broke into pieces! – Southey […]
Scientific Practice
“The impious warbler delved into the paltry aperitif and anointed the pumice with ineffable rigmarole.” That’s a sentence with a lot of big words (and I hope it’s never been uttered before), but if you understood that I was referring to a nasty little bird that wiped some booze on a rock, then you may […]
There are many lessons in life that we have all had to learn the hard way: don’t cram the dishwasher full of plates, arrive at the airport well before your flight time, and maybe take two trips instead of carrying a huge armload of laundry up the stairs in one go. When we make mistakes […]
Researchers have argued for centuries over two leading statistical approaches: Bayesian analysis and the Frequentist approach. Both holding their own complex (and convincing) reasoning, well-meaning researchers can all agree on the goal of their analyses: reaching conclusions with the least amount of bias and error. The war between Bayesians and Frequentists is likely far from […]
Let’s set the stage with a series of images. Each of these pictorial examples represents a different aspect of decision-making, which requires the ability to compare incoming stimuli quickly to behave appropriately. In the case of the flying stimuli in the first set of images, a human might be asked to categorize […]
Older adults are more motivated than younger adults to do well in lab studies. What does this mean for our understanding of cognitive aging? If you’re a psychologist who studies cognitive aging, chances are you recruit younger adults (18-22 years) from the college or university and older adults (65+ years) from the community and have […]
Should you have to be a data archeologist with open data? Have you ever come back to a dataset a few years after collecting it, and scratched your head over what Past You was thinking and what the variables and labels mean? Now, imagine it’s not Past You, but another researcher, and you are trying […]
At the Psychonomic Society Digital Event, Research in Time of Crisis, in May 2020, members contributed ideas on how to do “science without the drag.” That is, how do we produce, evaluate, and disseminate high-quality research to match the rapid pace of decision-making needed in the face of COVID-19? Below are the links to the […]
When confronted with the Black Death in the middle ages, leading authorities resorted to analysis of the position of the planets —Jupiter’s hostility against Mars features prominently— to explain the plague. Today, authorities rely mainly on science to explain and manage the COVID-19 pandemic. The success of this is borne out in countries such as […]
Academic peer review of scientific manuscripts often falls short. It invariably slows and sometimes prevents the publication of good research. And it sometimes leads to the distribution and amplification of flawed research. Prestigious journals sometimes publish research grounded on shaking theory that used weak measures and inappropriate analyses to reach dubious conclusions. Failings of peer […]