I, for one, welcome our statcheck overlords

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

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…

Eye movements as retrieval cues?

I’ll be speaking on Friday in the International Colloquia Series at the School of Psychology at Cardiff University on my newest line of research: figuring out whether eye movements cue memory retrieval. Eye movements have been proposed as a possible analog to speech-based verbal rehearsal, potentially useful for retrieving ordered…

Pre-emptive open science is fairer open science

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.…

A visit from the Ghost of Research Past

A request for an old data set recently afforded me the opportunity, much like Ebenezer Scrooge, of revisiting my Past-Self when I was a brand-new post-graduate student, and allowing Past-Self and Future-Self to help me critique how my lab curates our data and materials in the present day. Both Past-Self…

Bayesian methods and experimental design

At our symposium on Bayesian Methods in Cognitive Science at the meeting of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology, we talked about the advantages using Bayes factors for inference. I talked about a logical hypothesis test about the role of attention in binding that has frequently resulted in non-significant interactions…