flynn002

Over a hotel breakfast at an unfeasibly early hour (I'm a clock mutant) I saw two things on Twitter that appeared totally unrelated but which captured my interest for similar reasons. The two topics were the phonics wars and the reproducibility crisis. For those of you who don't work on children's reading, the idea of phonics wars may seem weid. But sadly, there we have it: those in charge of the education of young minds locked in battle over how to teach children to read. Andrew Old (@oldandrewuk), an exasperated teacher, sounded off this week about 'phonics denialists', who are vehemently opposed to phonics instrution, despite a mountain of evidence indicating this is an important aspect of teaching children to read. He analysed three particular arguments used to defend an anti-phonics stance. I won't summarise the whole piece, as you can read what Andrew says in his blogpost . Rather, I just want to note one of the points that struck a chord with me. It'...

Intuitive explanations of statistical concepts for novices #2 In my last post , I gave a brief explainer of what the term 'Analysis of variance' actually means – essentially you are comparing how much variation in a measure is associated with a group effect and how much with within-group variation. The use of t-tests and ANOVA by psychologists is something of a historical artefact. These methods have been taught to generations of researchers in their basic statistics training, and they do the business for many basic experimental designs. Many statisticians, however, prefer variants of regression analysis. The point of this post is to explain that, if you are just comparing two groups, all three methods – ANOVA, t-test and linear regression – are equivalent. None of this is new but it is often confusing to beginners. Anyone learning basic statistics probably started out with the t-test. This is a simple way of comparing the means of two groups, and, just like ANOVA, it looks at...

Intuitive explanations of statistical concepts for novices #1 Lots of people use Analysis of Variance (Anova) without really understanding how it works, so I thought I'd have a go at explaining the basics in an intuitive fashion. Consider three experiments, A, B and C, each of which compares the impact of an intervention on an outcome measure. The three experiments each have 20 people in a control group and 20 in an intervention group. Figure 1 shows the individual scores on an outcome measure for the two groups as blobs, and the mean score for each group as a dotted black line. Figure 1: Simulated data from 3 intervention studies In terms of average scores of control and intervention groups, the three groups look very similar, with the intervention group about .4 to .5 points higher than the control group. But we can't interpret this difference without having an idea of how variable scores are in the two groups. For experiment A, there is considerable variation within each gro...

There's been some interesting discussion on Twitter about the high rate of developmental language disorder (DLD) in the prison population. Some studies give an estimate as high as 50 percent (Anderson et al, 2016), and this has prompted calls for speech-language therapy services to be involved in the working with offenders. Work by Pam Snow and others has documented the difficulties of navigating the justice system if your understanding and ability to express yourself are limited. This is important work, but I have worried from time to time about the potential for misunderstanding. In particular, if you are a parent of a child with DLD, should you be alarmed at the prospect that your offspring will be incarcerated? So I wanted to give a brief explainer that offers some reassurance. The simplest way to explain it is to think about gender. I've been delving into the latest national statistics for this post, and found that the UK prison population this year contained 82,314 men,...

Corticogenesis: younger neurons migrate past older ones using radial glia as a scaffolding. Figure from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_development#/media/File:Corticogenesis_in_a_wild-type_mouse.png " Billy was a likable twelve-year old boy whose major areas of difficulty were described by his parents as follows: 1) marked difficulty in reading and retaining what he read; 2) some trouble with arithmetic; 3) extreme slowness in completing homework with writing and spelling of poor quality; 4) slowness in learning to tell time (learned only during the past year); 5) lapses of attention with staring into space; 6) "dizzy spells" with "blackouts"; 7) recurring left frontal headaches always centering around and behind the left eye; 8) occasional enuresis until recently; 9) disinterest in work; 10) sudden inappropriate temper outbursts which were often violent; 11) enjoyment of irritating people; and 12) tendency to cry readily. " Drake (1968), p . 488 Poo...

This morning I did a very mean thing. I saw an author announce to the world on Twitter that they had just published this paper , and I tweeted a critical comment. This does not make me happy, as I know just how proud and pleased one feels when a research project at last makes it into print, and to immediately pounce on it seems unkind. Furthermore, the flaws in the paper are not all that unusual: they characterise a large swathe of literature. And the amount of work that has gone into the paper is clearly humongous, with detailed analysis of white matter structural integrity that probably represents many months of effort. But that, in a sense, is the problem. We just keep on and on doing marvellously complex neuroimaging in contexts where the published studies are likely to contain unreliable results. Why am I so sure that this is unreliable? Well, yesterday saw the publication of a review that I had led on, which was highly relevant to the topic of the paper – genetic variants affecti...

Guest blogpost by  Ryan McKay, Department of Psychology,  Royal Holloway University of London and Max Coltheart, Department of Cognitive Science, Macquarie University These days it is common for academics to receive invitations from unfamiliar sources to attend conferences, submit papers, or join editorial boards. We began an attack against this practice by not ignoring such invitations – by, instead, replying to them with messages selected from the output of the wonderful Random Surrealism Generator . It generates syntactically correct but surreal sentences such as “Is that a tarantula in your bicycle clip, or are you just gold-trimmed?” (a hint of Mae West there?). This sometimes had the desired effect of generating a bemused response from the inviter; but we decided more was needed. So we used the surrealism generator to craft an absurdist critique of “impaired” publication practices (the title of the piece says as much, albeit obliquely). The first few sentences seem relev...