Hot answers tagged methodology
6
I'd like to address important issues that Jeromy Anglim raised in the "Personal thoughts" section of his answer, namely that correlation parameters (i.e., true, population, or infinite-sample correlations) often vary and covary among studies, and this between-studies\interstudy heterogeneity implies heterogeneity in studies' parameters for a structural ...
6
Using Parameters Estimated from an Individual in a Group Analysis
In a way this is exactly what usually happens when we calculate the mean reaction time across all conditions for a group of participants. When we normally calculate mean reaction times we assume that some process (P) takes t milliseconds to complete plus some Gaussian distributed noise. We ...
6
The basic approach that you are describing sounds like inverse efficiency scores (e.g., see Townsend and Ashby, 1978,1983), which are measured as
$$\frac{r}{1-e} = \frac{r}{c}$$
where $r$ is reaction time, $e$ is proportion error, and $c$ is proportion correct. John Christie provides a critique of inverse efficiency scores here or see the discussion in ...
6
The Open Science Framework will do some of what you ask for. Additionally, it will allow you to preregister your hypotheses to properly distinguish confirmatory and exploratory research.
Features (quoted from the homepage).
Document and archive studies
Share and find materials, scripts, data
Detail individual contributions
Increase transparency
...
6
There are many granulations of the objective-subjective distinction. The most objective would be the behaviorism which says it is meaningless to reason about anything except how environmental stimulus leads directly to observed behavior. This camp was popular in psychology during the time of B.F. Skinner, but now is seldom followed by people outside of ...
5
To the general question of how to test the claims , there's a couple things you want to show:
1) that the body absorbs the supplement (measure the absorption rate)
2) that the supplement crosses the blood brain barrier
3) that the
supplement actually plays the role of agonist, antagonist, or
allosteric modulator (or possibly even has a toxic effect). ...
5
I like your question. But I have to point out one thing - if you were to use documenting tools for all those tasks that you mentioned, you wouldn't have that much time left for your research. Sharing is great, but it takes time to do it properly, even with great tools.
I tried quite a few tools for documenting research, with an idea to boost my ...
5
Resonance methods can be used to measure neurotransmitter levels. Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy can measure the levels of a large number of neurotransmitters. However, this has always been viewed as a fairly static measure of neurotransmitter levels, and so has not been widely used as a measure of neural activity. However, Paul Mullins at Bangor University ...
5
Your question potentially raises philosophical questions, but for it to have meaning, there are several definitional issues.
What is a psychological question?
Presumably a psychological question is any question that concerns the domain of psychology.
There are many criteria that could be used to evaluate whether it is a scientifically interesting ...
5
Answer based on your original depression example
Note that this answer was originally written based on your initial example, where you asked:
Assume, I have developed a new intervention for people with light
depression. I want to compare the effectiveness of this intervention
(E) with an existing intervention (C). For this, I recruit test
subjects ...
4
I don't know if you can completely remove the selection bias from such a sample.
You seem to be referring (in some sense, at least) to regression towards the mean. This is one of the biggest (if not the biggest) problem with much research on clinical samples.
What I would do (assuming resources) would be to take the same size (or larger) sample from the ...
4
It's a bit of an art, currently. Following is one technique I witnessed in a lab that takes electrophysiological recordings of tadpole and rat neurvous sytems.
The lab that I worked with entrains the neuron, recording it's electrical activity (in a series of drug tests) and injects a marker that goes into the neuron (a GFP-like protein that binds to ...
4
I found an example of a system that researchers are aiming to use in the future for determining the level of neurotransmitter activity in the brain using MRI. You were on the right track with the utility of hemoglobin. The molecule used is somewhat similar. To understand how the probes were generated requires a bit of a biological detour.
There are ...
4
OpenSesame is a recent entry that is cross-platform and seems to promote GUI-based design while allowing customization via Python scripting.
It can be found at their website (link above). A recent article has references and summarizes 16 other tools as well (including some reported in the other stackexchange responses). I found great video tutorials and ...
4
I don't know of any well-validated general short scales. Here are a few thoughts:
A major distinction is between self-report versus ability based measures. Self-report measures will ask the participant to rate their knowledge, skills, and experience. Ability based measures will require demonstration of competence. If you are limited to "self-measures", ...
4
Ronnlund and Nilsson (2006) studied performance on the WAIS block design test in a large sample of adults both longitudinally and cross-sectionally. The time difference was about 5 years. They wanted to tease out age related changes from practice effects. I believe they estimated the 5-year practice related improvement to be about 0.6 of a T score (i.e., ...
4
Figshare is one option for archiving assorted research artefacts. To quote the "about page":
figshare allows researchers to publish all of their research outputs
in seconds in an easily citable, sharable and discoverable manner. All
file formats can be published, including videos and datasets that are
often demoted to the supplemental materials ...
4
If you're trying to work out a standardized effect size in order to calculate power for your study then it doesn't matter whether any studies like yours have been done. It's important to find studies using the same dependent measure so that you have an estimate of variability but evidence of the size of prior effects is less important. If you have the ...
3
Let's start with signal detection methods. The big one in memory literature is D-Prime analysis (hits versus false alarms). If the subject chooses X more times than Y, you can compare the number of times choice X is made correctly versus chosen incorrectly (as a false alarm). If that was your paradigm, then choice Y would be the correct rejection (if ...
3
Have you read this:
Fishbein, M., Middlestadt, S. (1995) Noncognitive Effects on Attitude Formation and Change: Fact or Artifact? Journal of Consumer Psychology, 4(2),181-202. [DOI]
Direct quote from page 187:
Note that the psychology of the double negative is an essential part of an expectancy-value formulation (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1980; Fishbein, ...
3
There are a few people who have been very extensively experimented on because they have unusual brain lesions (which is kind of like the opposite of a skill). The most famous is Henry Molaison (HM), who developed a rare case of episodic anterograde amnesia following surgery for severe epilepsy. He spent the entire latter part of his life in a care institute ...
3
You should consider SuperLab. It runs on Mac and Windows.
It uses a point-and-click user interface that makes it really easy to setup experiments. Even "programming" contingencies are done via point-and-click.
Disclaimer: I wrote the original version of SuperLab and I work at Cedrus, its developer.
3
The purpose of reviewing the literature for effect sizes is to form an estimate of what effect size you might expect in your present study.
Existing meta-analysis: The principles and techniques of meta-analysis provide a good starting point for generating a predicted effect size.
If a meta-analysis has already been conducted, then the estimated population ...
2
I'm not an expert in neuroimaging, so I had to search a little bit to learn about how carry-over designs apply to fMRI (I found Aguirre, 2007). Thus, feel free to correct me if there is something specific about this problem domain that influences the correct answer to this question.
However, based on general principles of experimental design of repeated ...
2
You seem to be concerned with reliability, and more specifically internal reliability. Internal reliability is the degree to which different questions are measuring the same construct. This concept is used often in psychology and is usually measured using Cronbach's alpha. However, it is typically used to measure the reliability of a test, and not the ...
2
Preventing random responding: An important first step is to think about ways to prevent random responding from occurring in the first place. A few ideas include: administer the survey face to face; have an experimental invigilator present; communicate the importance of the research to participants and the importance of participants taking the research ...
2
One option is to use Inquisit Web Edition.
Here is an example script with a lexical decision task.
Unfortunately, it is not free and it requires installation of a plug-in.
Version 4 of Inquisit runs on OSX and Windows. Thus, it wont work in Linux or on phones, tablets, etc.
2
So I've had a chance to try out the RPi for this purpose. Short answer: it works great (with some limitations).
The RPi does not support OpenGL. I approached this system with the idea of using a python environment to create and present experiments. There are two good options for this that I know of, opensesame and psychopy. Psychopy requires an OpenGL ...
2
This is really more of a statistical question (except perhaps the bit about APA style). As such it probably belongs on stats.stackexchange.com .
A binary variable does not have a "normal distribution". A normal distribution is bell shaped and is relevant to continuous data.
Your null hypothesis is that the population proportions for left and right handers ...
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