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I confess that I am an experiment chauvinist – I look down on studies that are purely observational, studies that don’t manipulate anything. Where does my prejudice come from? One factor is that as a perceptual and cognitive psychologist, when I do science, I’m usually interested in the causes, or underlying mechanisms, of a phenomenon.

originally published by The Chronicle of Higher Education as “How to Stop Academic Fraudsters” (I didn’t choose that title) “Hi Alex, this is not credible.” I’ll never forget that email. It was 2016, and I had been helping psychology researchers design studies that, I hoped, would replicate important and previously published findings.

Today the Gates Foundation announced that they will “cease support for individual article publishing fees, known as APCs, and mandate the use of preprints while advocating for their review”. I am excited by this news because over the last couple decades, it’s been disheartening to see large funders continue to pour money down the throats of high-profit multinational publishers . In their announcement, the Gates Foundation has recommendations

To evaluate and build on previous findings, a researcher sometimes needs to know exactly what was done before. Computational reproducibility is the ability to take the raw data from a study and re-analyze it to reproduce the final results, including the statistics.

Many of the practices associated with modern science emerged in the early days of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, which was founded in 1660. Today, it is usually referred to as simply “the Royal Society”.  When the Royal Society chose a coat of arms, they included the words Nullius in verba :

In a clever bit of rhetoric, Professor Dorothy Bishop came up with “the four horsemen of irreproducibility“: publication bias, low statistical power, p-hacking, and HARKing. In an attempt at more complete coverage of the causes of the replication crisis, here I’m expanding on Dorothy’s four horsemen by adding two more causes, and using different wording. This gives me six P’s of the replication crisis!

Blogged about this web app we created to help researchers document who did what in their journal articles, posted over at Medium for a change.

A brief intro for research students. Good science is cumulative Scientists seek to create new knowledge, often by conducting an experiment or other research study. But science is much more than doing studies and analyzing the data. Critical to the scientific enterprise is communication of what was done, and what was found.

Topics this year: Visual letter processing; role of attention shifts versus buffering (mostly @cludowici, @bradpwyble); reproducibility (@sharoz); visual working memory (mostly @will_ngiam) Symposium contribution, 12pm Friday 17 May: