What the “Kanye West vs. Taylor Swift” of neuroscience tells us about open science

A clash between two major figures in cognitive neuroscience came to a head yesterday, and it got a bit ugly. The dispute centers around a publicly posted peer review of a publicly posted manuscript. Although seemingly aligned with Open Science ideals, the public review prompted worries about ulterior motives and power dynamics in some researchers. In addition to being juicy drama, the events reveal that Open Science requires trust, tact, and integrity. This post summarises the things I’ve learned.

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Testing children with iPad games

RED logo draft.

Testing children is less easy than testing adults, primarily because they lack the social inhibition to tell psychological researchers to go away with their super boring tests. This presents a problem in developmental research: How do you reach these kids?! We developed a bunch of iPad games to test the cognition of an entire classroom in one go. And it works!

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Computer vision: Taylor Swift saliency mapping

swift_shake_saliency_01

In cognitive neuroscience, we’re interested in what guides human attention. We distinguish between influences from high-level cognition (e.g. current goals), and low-level visual features. There are highly sophisticated models of how visual features such as intensity, colour, and movement guide human attention. Computerised implementations of these models allow computers to mimic human eye movements. Turns out Taylor Swift’s amazing videos are an excellent example!

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Dalmaijer DPhil DONE!

Edwin's thesis hand-in

Traditional English DPhil programmes end in a viva. This is an examination by one internal and one external examiner, who critically assess the candidate and their thesis over the course of several hours. Mine was today, and I am delighted to announce that I passed! Many thanks to my wonderful …

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PyGaze supports Tobii Pro SDK

Tobii Pro Logo

Tobii is a major player in the eye-tracking world, selling devices to customers in business and science. Today, Tobii has made a major step towards supporting open science by adding support for its new SDK in PyGaze (and by extension in OpenSesame). You can review the code on GitHub, download the PyGaze package as a zip, or download a full WinPython version. Details below, and more info on downloading here.

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