Measurement – The Mnemonic Lode

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…

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…

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…

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…

Use Mac OS to generate speech files from text

May 4, 2017 Measurement 3 Comments

Here’s a free (if you’ve got access to a Mac), quick method for creating spoken experimental stimuli, which I’ve implemented in this project and now use regularly in my lab. Hat tip to Richard Morey for suggesting this and writing a few lines of code that saves many hours of tedious voice…

Individual differences in experiencing visual imagery

December 22, 2016 Measurement Research No Comments

One frustration with studying visual memory is that we have no way to directly experience what someone else sees in their mind. When trying to understand individuals’ memories about uncontrolled events, we rely mainly on verbal descriptions of visual memories and individuals’ feelings of confidence in the clarity and vividness…

Measurement of visual memory is not always confounded by verbalization

October 1, 2016 Measurement Research No Comments

If you study visual memory, you can bet that you will encounter skepticism about whether your participants really remembered visual images. Maybe they only remembered verbal labels corresponding to your stimuli. Certainly, there are many published studies of “visual” memory that merit skepticism on this point. Unlike studying verbal memory,…

I, for one, welcome our statcheck overlords

September 11, 2016 Measurement Research 4 Comments

My spell-checker is stupid. It recently wondered whether the URL for my website, http://candicemorey.org, shouldn’t be “scaremongering”. It thinks proper names are mis-spelled words. This is one reason why we don’t let computers write our papers. It would also be pretty stupid of me not to let software help me…

Interpreting nulls, even surprising ones, is not trivial

March 19, 2016 Measurement Research No Comments

Sometimes I design an experiment really wondering what will happen, but that wasn’t the case when I first decided to compare proactive interference effects for verbal and visual memoranda. Proactive interference occurs when some information you have previously memorized disrupts your ability to learn new information. For example, having studied…

Pre-emptive open science is fairer open science

December 4, 2015 Academia Measurement 1 Comment

The Peer Reviewers Openness Initiative is a grass-roots campaign to empower reviewers to demand greater transparency in scientific research. Simply put, peer reviewers promptly request that authors “complete” their manuscript by making the data and research materials publicly accessible, or provide a justification for why they have not done so.…