Oral communication for scientific research

I would like to share the series of seminar videos from one of the courses at my University called “Oral communication for scientific research“. How can we better explain what we do as scientists? How we can transmit the core message of what we are doing in our labs? What is the best way to…

Enjoying neuroscience’s research from home

c0 lDo you wanna watch talks and seminars about neuroscience from home? Is that a yes? That’s great! Because World Wide Neuro is collecting in a unique place many of the talks and seminars that are happening around the world. Here’s their own description about what’s WWN and how it works: This is a new…

The meaningfulness of effect sizes in the social and behavioural sciences

Today I jointd the seminar on “The meaningfulness of effect sizes in the social and behavioural sciences in light of the reproducibility crisis” given by Thomas Schäfer, a Professor for Quantitative Research Methods at MSB Medical School Berlin. Here’s the abstract of the seminar: ABSTRACT: Effect sizes are the currency of the social and behavioral sciences….

The preregistration revolution

This week at the MRG seminar a colleague gave a talk about why, what, and how to do pre-registration in science. Before the session, he suggested us to read the following paper: PNAS March 13, 2018 115 (11) 2600-2606; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1708274114 The preregistration revolution Brian A. Nosek,  Charles R. Ebersole,  Alexander C. DeHaven, and  David…

New tools for online behavioural experiments

Today’s research group meeting we’ve discussed whether we would consider changing the way we’ve been performing experiments so far and doing online experiments as a group (due to the current COVID-19 situation with no prospects to come back to the lab any soon). In general terms, some of us agreed to invest their time in…

The mega-study of timing: lab-based vs online experiments

Given the current situation with COVID-19, several people from my investigation center at the university have started to change the way they’ve been programming their experiments so far and switched from lab-based to online studies. This has brought new considerations to bear in mind, such as whether the timing of online experiments is as reliable…

Quantitative methods in psychology

Today I would like to share a paper that I found about quantitative methods in psychology: Front Psychol. 2010 Jul 30;1:29. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2010.00029. eCollection 2010. Quantitative methods in psychology: inevitable and useless. Toomela A Abstract Science begins with the question, what do I want to know? Science becomes science, however, only when this question is…

The fallacy of placing confidence in confidence intervals

Today we’ve discussed the following paper about the reliability of confidence intervals: The fallacy of placing confidence in confidence intervals Richard D. Morey, Rink Hoekstra, Jeffrey N. Rouder, Michael D. Lee & Eric-Jan Wagenmakers Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. Volume 23, pages 103–123 (2016). Theoretical Review. Open Access. Published: 08 October 2015 Morey and colleagues define interval estimates and confidence intervals as follows:…

Is it possible to modulate the behaviour of online discussion threads?

In the digital era that we live in, online discussion has become more and more present in our daily lives and especially on the social media platforms that we frequently use. Whenever we post an image on Instagram or write a twit on Twitter, we start a potential discussion thread. How come is that? When…

Left-hand vs. Right-hand finger tapping experiment

The aim of Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) is to improve the autonomy of people with severe motor disabilities by new communication and control options. It is commonly known that either if you perform a movement, or you think about actually doing this movement, the same area in the brain is activated. Therefore, the point with these…