Hi all,

Just writing to follow-up on yesterday's discussion of the replication crises.  I know that a few of you expressed interest in this topic but were unable to attend, so I thought it might be worth mentioning a few interesting points/resources.

First of all, thanks to all who attended- it was really great to hear your thoughts on this! We all agreed that the Spellman paper (circulated on Tuesday) was a highly readable and reasonably comprehensive summary of the issues and potential solutions (so, well worth a read). Liz Renner brought our attention to some reproducibility issues within the field of oxytocin research. Interestingly, these problems were identified when a research group decided to critical​ly examine their own published work and open their file drawer. Some links here:  

Becky Sharman discussed her own efforts to replicate a curious perceptual effect and she has successfully published these findings in the Royal Society's new OA journal (link here: http://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/2/12/150418.abstract). Becky has kindly provided a lay summary of this work for those interested (see postscript). 

So, thanks again to all for such an interesting discussion! Next week we have Dr. Vicky Fishlock talking to us about her work at Amboseli National Park. It is going to be great! 

All the best,
Eoin

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PS: Lay- summary of Mather & Sharman (2015)

The implied motion after effect occurs when adapting to still images of motion e.g. someone running causes the same kind of after-effect as looking at actual moving stimuli. We showed that this effect is only present when participants are asked to make a directional judgement (i.e. are the dots moving left or right), but isn’t present when they are asked to make a non-directional judgement (i.e. is the top or bottom half of the stimulus moving). The stimuli were exactly the same, only the instructions and the subsequent results were different.