The Mnemonic Lode – Memory. Measurement. Life in Academia.

In memoriam, Bill

May 14, 2020 Uncategorized No Comments

Everything is different than it was at the start of 2020 – what a brutal year it is. One of its blows was the untimely death of my friend and colleague Bill Macken back in February. I just want to post/archive some of my thoughts from around that time. At…

Wrangling messy data in R using the tidyverse

November 19, 2019 Measurement Openness No Comments

When I was learning R, I found the biggest obstacle to be figuring out how to organize and format the data – how to go from raw, messy data to something I could enter into an analysis. This process has become much easier with the introduction of the tidyverse suite…

Alessandra Souza, the 2019 WomWoM Research Fairy

November 15, 2019 Academia WomWoM 1 Comment

By Vanessa Loaiza, Clara Overkott, and Evie Vergauwe Women of Working Memory (WomWoM) is a network of women in the working memory field who embolden each other to do their best work amongst a supportive and inclusive community. You can read about the group’s origin story and their annual Research…

#WomWom: A wand award for the 2018 research-fairy

November 16, 2018 Academia WomWoM 2 Comments

by Alessandra Souza (@A_SSouza) and Vanessa Loaiza (@vmloaiza1) Fairies are magical creatures, believed to have the power of words and mystical objects. They make up the content of fairy-tales, which spark the imagination and lend people to entertain a different world of ideas and possibilities. Today we want to…

I’ve got a lab handbook now

November 6, 2018 Measurement Openness No Comments

So in 2019 I can have a different New Year’s resolution than I’ve set for the last several years, because in 2018 I actually wrote my lab handbook. There are lots of great reasons to have a lab handbook. How your’s works and what you focus on will depend on…

The (outsize) role of single-patient case evidence in guiding working memory theory

August 30, 2018 Research No Comments

Today at EWOMS-9 in Pavia I’m going to try to persuade my colleagues that the single-patient “short-term store” case evidence, which serves to bolster ideas about specialized verbal, visual and spatial short-term storage, is not unambiguous, and ought to be skeptically reconsidered. I’ve written about that in a new review…

Going for a Registered Report?

August 17, 2018 Measurement Openness Research 2 Comments

Candice C. Morey and Loukia Tzavella Registered Reports are a type of journal article in which the journal evaluates a proposal for a hypothetical research project. The Stage 1 manuscript includes an introductory literature review, details of the proposed method, and a plan for analyzing the data. Reviewers consider this…

Thoughts about whether eye movement patterns reflect specialized visual-spatial rehearsal

July 6, 2018 Research No Comments

I’m speaking at the joint meeting of the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour, and Cognition and the Experimental Psychology Society this afternoon. I’ll be reviewing data from my lab on eye movements during memory tasks for clues about whether we should believe that eye movements could serve as a basis…

My favorite papers: Processing speed in complex span edition

May 9, 2018 Measurement Research No Comments

Sometimes I find a paper that is so perfectly useful for whatever I’m doing, that tells me what I need to know when I didn’t know for sure the information I wanted even existed that I’m really grateful to the authors for writing it. In the moment, I want to…

The Peer Reviewers’ Openness Initiative, Year 1

January 7, 2018 Openness No Comments

The Peer Reviewer’s Openness (PRO) initiative is a grass-roots movement in which reviewers agitate for new standards of transparency at the journals who depend on them. I’m a signatory to this initiative and a co-author on the paper announcing it, and since 1 January 2017 I have been enforcing PRO…