Ah I really enjoyed being Discussant for today’s symposium at #SPR2022@TheRealSPR
It’s a joy to bring these three projects together and talk about the challenges of research using high dimensional neuro data and some pathways to doing better! 1/
@VanjaKovic led us off with an intro to the three great projects being brought together for this syposium, highlighting their focus on building open communities to advance research
@angelasoskic shared the background behind the ARTEM-IS project — reminding us that even within one rather narrow study type (N400s) there can be as many analysis pipelines as there are papers!
but at the same time, not everybody writes down all of the steps involved in their research - so how can we know which pathway or pipeline to follow? This both makes replication and meta-science hard.
We have seen attempts at publishing ‘guidelines’ for reporting, but they don’t make much difference. the ARTEM-IS idea is that we might be able to build tools that help people do the job of reporting more easily! And we can do this job better together with others!
@angelasoskic also shared a walk through of some of the features of our ARTEM-IS Web App which is ready for you to play around with! In the next stage of Dev one of the goals is to seek user feedback about how we can make it even easier to use!
The the app was developed with a series of Design Guidelines in mind - to help make sure that the tool would be intuitive to use and fool-proof by design!
More about the design process here: doi.org/10.1016/j.neur…
… and the INCF Working Group is open for new members to join the team!
Next, @ugpavlov presented on the #EEGManyLabs project - another project tackling uncertainty in the published EEG literature - This time by bringing a community together for a series of replication studies -
In the next talk @nastalfischer introduced the background behind #EEGManyPipelines which came out of a Twitter poll 🙀
Will EEG studies analysed in 70 different ways be more or less variable than the chaos of some recent MRI reanalysis projects?
And @ufangyang talked us through how the #EEGManyPipelines project will make progress on the empirical question - they have made huge progress recruiting over 100 analysis teams.
Find out more: eegmanypipelines.org
So what’s a discussant to do when wrapping up such great presentations of such important projects?
Why look for similarities of course!
Have you noticed we all have red EEGs in our logos 😹
More importantly, all 3 are all motivated by the challenges of analytic flexibility.
In the multiverse analysis shown here just two to three options at eight different processing steps results in 864 different ways to analyse!
So many options we invented a new plot 😅
And although our multiverse analysis reveals that some overall events like this N400 remain significant in all pathways, let’s see what happens when we investigate pairwise comparisons between conditions…
Now we can see there are important differences between. Some comparisons are only significant in some conditions 🤨
Read more? psyarxiv.com/8rjah/
This has important implications not just for this study…
There are impacts on
👉 Replication. What future studies will replicate?
👉 Metascience. Which data is valid to pool across or compare?
👉 Credibility. Who will believe a single finding in our field?
👉Ethics. Responsibilities to our participants AND to our junior trainees!
So what can we do?
Historically we have seen Complaints (position/theory papers) and Advice (guidelines/handbooks). The field might look quite different if we mandated best practice — but at the moment, compliance is patchy.
These 3 projects focus on pathways to solutions
Each project tackles analytical flexibility from a different perspective, but all three are community-led projects aiming to make research easier through collective action
And these 3 projects – like some of the best in Open Science – build up diverse, global networks, using pipelines for distributed work and collective decision making
This is the future of neuroscience 🥰
I love all of these projects and they’re making great progress 💪🏻
Great tips for helping participants enjoy your studies - and a pathway to better data!
Another tip is to think about whether your task’s structure leads participants to expect certain kinds of questions or actions. @VanjaKovic and I call this “experimental pragmatics” 1/
@VanjaKovic Once, we ran a study where TWO THIRDS of our participants responded weirdly😱 Turns out that they read the instructions, but the task itself led them to expect something different - They thought we made a mistake in the instructions, so they ignored them! osf.io/gkz2w
@VanjaKovic The pattern was really clear - our participants were trying to help us by doing 'the right thing' even though it was not what we asked them to do
The Experimenter-as-Idiot Fallacy: They thought we were idiots, and tried to 'correct' our mistake🤦🏻♀️
Very excited to share this work led by @hannahlgoh with @LucaOnnis2
Can bilinguals’ of a language with one type of retroflex (in fricatives and affricates) learn to hear a different kind of retroflex (in stop consonants)? Can they transfer their perceptual skills?
What’s a retroflex? A speech sound that is pronounced with the tip of the tongue flipped over a bit, like in this diagram (the purple line). In some languages there are phoneme contrasts where changing the shape of your tongue like this makes a difference in what word you say!
Languages like Hindi and Tamil have contrasts between “d” sounds made with these two tongue shapes.
We can write them in the IPA like this:
/d/ alveolar
/ɖ/ retroflex
English only has /d/, and many English speakers find it hard to hear differences between /d/ and /ɖ/
Join us at #SIPS2022 tomorrow to help make rock solid tools for transparent neuroscience!
We believe the right kind of tools can make methods reporting smoother and less error-prone.
We’ll introduce the ARTEM-IS Web-App (beta) for you to try, and we can work on improving it! 🧵
Accurate methods reporting is super important because different processing pathways can lead to different results, as we’ve shown in one multiverse analysis of N400s 🤔
(see how the Related version Reversed comparison has different outcomes in different pathways)
If we want to improve #reproducibility and #replicability in our field, we need to make sure we can accurately report what has been done - which path was taken through the Garden of Forking Paths?
Lots of reporting guidelines currently exist but…
So pleased to see our first report of translanguaging in child-directed speech as a poster at #WILD2022!
Since our Corpus team couldn't travel to San Sebastian, our fab lab-mate Han will be standing by to answer questions during the poster session at 16:40 CEST) today👇and also..
..in a bit of an experiment, I'll also be standing by for any Q&A about methods, transcription protocols, how on earth we managed 92% retention rate for the 143 children in the sample (8m to 4y), over three picture-narration tasks spanning 4-6 months!
This poster is really exciting for me because it was a study we rolled out during lockdown. At the time we were planning an ambitious series of home visits, but suddenly we weren't able to visit any homes! So we redesigned our entire protocol for online participation.
In a few hot minutes I have the great pleasure to deliver a plenary lecture at ‘New Horizons in Education’ for the University of Belgrade. I’ll be talking about “De-Centering the Professor” with a focus on diversity and access 😃 1/
It’s exciting because I really take seriously the idea that teachers are quite different from the vast majority of the students in our classes, so I want to share some strategies for making the class better for people who aren’t US 2/
So here’s the experimental bit! I don’t speak Serbian, and although the conference languages are both English AND Serbian, I know that there will be some attendees who have stronger Serbian language skills than English…
3/
(pic description: a beach scene with large text: “BEACH-BRAIN BOOKS”)
Each of the books here has a couple of sentences about the content, and things I think are particularly great. I’ve included notes about specific classes the books might have some relevance for 😇