The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing

Naomi Havron is currently a postdoc at the LSCP in Paris, France. She is investigating syntactic adaptation and syntactic category learning in children and infants.

I spent four years writing my thesis, four years of ups and downs, p values smaller than .05, but also some t values smaller than .05. At times, I felt confident and optimistic, at times less so – this was somewhat correlated with the p values, but not significantly so.

Then it came time to start gathering everything I did into an article thesis. In the Hebrew University, at least in my year, not all of these articles had to be published articles, and you could also include manuscripts you did not plan to submit for publication. I thought I would write up everything, even my null results, because whoever reads my dissertation (well, at least all those 1^st year PhD students and my grandfather) could probably learn just as much from my failed attempts than from my success stories.

How to run a meta-analysis? A video tutorial

Christina, Page and I like meta-analyses. We are convinced they are a great tool to leverage past research in order to move forward: To gain an overview of the state of a field, to get an idea of research practices, to plan new experiments, and even to get novel theoretical insights.

Find a significant effect in any study

Stephen Politzer-Ahles is Assistant Professor at the Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He is committed to finding solutions to current challenges in the cognitive sciences. For instance, he is developing efficient and transparent strategies to empty out his own file drawer.

p>.05. We’ve all been there. Who among us hasn’t had a student crying in our office over an experiment that failed to show a significant effect? Who among us hasn’t been that student?

Statistical nonsignificance is one of the most serious challenges facing science. When experiments aren’t p<.05, they can’t be published (because the results aren’t real), people can’t graduate, no one can get university funding to party it up at that conference in that scenic location, and in general the whole enterprise falls apart. The amount of taxpayer dollars that have been wasted on p>.05 experiments is frankly astounding.