Mistaking data consistent with your hypothesis for data establishing your hypothesis is a surprisingly common mistake, even for highly trained, experienced scientists.  The subjective experience is common: you develop and carry around a theory on some topic and over the course of your day, you run into evidence (anecdotes, or other scientific findings) that would […]

I ran across this link referenced by its title: A neuroscientist explains a concept at five different levels http://kottke.org/17/03/a-neuroscientist-explains-a-concept-at-five-different-levels I was initially worried it would annoy me, but eventually decided to take a look at it anyway, figuring it would be interesting at the level of thinking about your audience when describing a complex scientific […]

One potential application for our basic studies of skill learning is understanding the development of skill in performing surgery.  So I was intrigued when happening to stumble across the following report of factors predicting successful surgical outcomes: Surgeon specialization and operative mortality in United States: retrospective analysis BMJ 2016; 354 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.i3571 (Published 21 July […]

The occasion is tragic, but I am happy to see some more public discussion of ‘unconscious bias’ in the context of recent events related to the police shootings of minority ‘suspects.’  I particularly like the title of this piece: “A former officer explains why racist police violence occurs even when cops ‘aren’t racist’” A former […]

I ran into a few references/mentions recently of The Dan Plan, a guy who is dedicating a few years of his life to “testing the 10,000 hours hypothesis”.  Specifically, he quit his job and is playing golf full-time trying to reach a professional level of play from a starting point of never having played before […]

I’ve written/stated in a few places that the main problem with replicability in psychology and social science is simply that we don’t replicate enough.  Participants are a precious resource that are time-consuming (and therefore expensive) to recruit and test.  Any decision to replicate a study reflects a huge opportunity cost — you spend resources on […]

More cleverness from John Holbo at Crooked Timber, especially the title.  There’s a lot to like in this piece and a few things that could be quibbled with.  Probably unsurprisingly, I’m not fond of the accusation that psychologists in general are ‘omnicausal’ as in we are all too vulnerable to crazy ideas about causal structure […]

I think I’m not even going to explain why this is interesting to me beyond the obvious title and the fact that the senior author, Liz Brannon is a childhood friend and now distinguished researcher and Professor at Duke. Abstract Implicit learning involves picking up information from the environment without explicit instruction or conscious awareness […]

I ran across this link to Paul Krugman being insightful and thoughtful about the general question of ‘What is a Model” and “What do we use them for in Science?” It’s about economics and specifically models of development economics, but the general questions of methodology apply to social sciences more broadly. It is in a […]

I was asked to answer some questions from a middle school student doing a research project on video games.  Since I am interested in the topic generally, I should probably figure out how to answer these kinds of questions at an age-appropriate level.  My attempt: Jose asks: 1. Do video games affect the human brain? […]