Jeffrey R. Spies

Scientific Utopia: II - Restructuring Incentives and Practices to Promote Truth Over Publishability

An academic scientist’s professional success depends on publishing. Publishing norms emphasize novel, positive results. As such, disciplinary incentives encourage design, analysis, and reporting decisions that elicit positive results and ignore negative results. Prior reports demonstrate how these incentives inflate the rate of false effects in published science. When incentives favor novelty over replication, false results persist in the literature unchallenged, reducing efficiency in knowledge accumulation. Previous suggestions to address this problem are unlikely to be effective. For example, a journal of negative results publishes otherwise unpublishable reports. This enshrines the low status of the journal and its content. The persistence of false findings can be meliorated with strategies that make the fundamental but abstract accuracy motive—getting it right—competitive with the more tangible and concrete incentive—getting it published. This article develops strategies for improving scientific practices and knowledge accumulation that account for ordinary human motivations and biases.

How open science helps researchers succeed

Open access, open data, open source and other open scholarship practices are growing in popularity and necessity. However, widespread adoption of these practices has not yet been achieved. One reason is that researchers are uncertain about how sharing their work will affect their careers. We review literature demonstrating that open research is associated with increases in citations, media attention, potential collaborators, job opportunities and funding opportunities. These findings are evidence that open research practices bring significant benefits to researchers relative to more traditional closed practices. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.16800.001

Response to Comment on "Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science"

Gilbert et al. conclude that evidence from the Open Science Collaboration’s Reproducibility Project: Psychology indicates high reproducibility, given the study methodology. Their very optimistic assessment is limited by statistical misconceptions and by causal inferences from selectively interpreted, correlational data. Using the Reproducibility Project: Psychology data, both optimistic and pessimistic conclusions about reproducibility are possible, and neither are yet warranted.

Mapping and Manipulating Facial Expression

Nonverbal visual cues accompany speech to supplement the meaning of spoken words, signify emotional state, indicate position in discourse, and provide back-channel feedback. This visual information includes head movements, facial expressions and body gestures. In this article we describe techniques for manipulating both verbal and nonverbal facial gestures in video sequences of people engaged in conversation. We are developing a system for use in psychological experiments, where the effects of manipulating individual components of nonverbal visual behavior during live face-to-face conversation can be studied. In particular, the techniques we describe operate in real-time at video frame-rate and the manipulation can be applied so both participants in a conversation are kept blind to the experimental conditions.

Modeling Accuracy and Variability of Motor Timing in Treated and Untreated Parkinson’s Disease and Healthy Controls

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is characterized by difficulty with the timing of movements. Data collected using the synchronization–continuation paradigm, an established motor timing paradigm, have produced varying results but with most studies finding impairment. Some of this inconsistency comes from variation in the medication state tested, in the inter-stimulus intervals (ISI) selected, and in changeable focus on either the synchronization (tapping in time with a tone) or continuation (maintaining the rhythm in the absence of the tone) phase. We sought to re-visit the paradigm by testing across four groups of participants: healthy controls, medication naïve de novo PD patients, and treated PD patients both “on” and “off” dopaminergic medication. Four finger tapping intervals (ISI) were used: 250, 500, 1000, and 2000 ms. Categorical predictors (group, ISI, and phase) were used to predict accuracy and variability using a linear mixed model. Accuracy was defined as the relative error of a tap, and variability as the deviation of the participant’s tap from group predicted relative error. Our primary finding is that the treated PD group (PD patients “on” and “off” dopaminergic therapy) showed a significantly different pattern of accuracy compared to the de novo group and the healthy controls at the 250-ms interval. At this interval, the treated PD patients performed “ahead” of the beat whilst the other groups performed “behind” the beat. We speculate that this “hastening” relates to the clinical phenomenon of motor festination. Across all groups, variability was smallest for both phases at the 500-ms interval, suggesting an innate preference for finger tapping within this range. Tapping variability for the two phases became increasingly divergent at the longer intervals, with worse performance in the continuation phase. The data suggest that patients with PD can be best discriminated from healthy controls on measures of motor timing accuracy, rather than variability.

Something in the Way We Move: Motion Dynamics, Not Perceived Sex, Influence Head Movements in Conversation

During conversation, women tend to nod their heads more frequently and more vigorously than men. An individual speaking with a woman tends to nod his or her head more than when speaking with a man. Is this due to social expectation or due to coupled motion dynamics between the speakers? We present a novel methodology that allows us to randomly assign apparent identity during free conversation in a video-conference, thereby dissociating apparent sex from motion dynamics. The method uses motion-tracked synthesized avatars that are accepted by naive participants as being live video. We find that 1) motion dynamics affect head movements but that apparent sex does not; 2) judgments of sex are driven almost entirely by appearance; and 3) ratings of masculinity and femininity rely on a combination of both appearance and dynamics. Together, these findings are consistent with the hypothesis of separate perceptual streams for appearance and biological motion. In addition, our results are consistent with a view that head movements in conversation form a low level perception and action system that can operate independently from top-down social expectations.

Justify your alpha

In response to recommendations to redefine statistical significance to P ≤ 0.005, we propose that researchers should transparently report and justify all choices they make when designing a study, including the alpha level.

High-presence, low-bandwidth, apparent 3D video-conferencing with a single camera

Small digital video cameras have become increasingly common, appearing on portable consumer devices such as cellular phones. The widespread use of video-conferencing, however, is limited in part by the lack of bandwidth available on such devices. Also, video-conferencing can produce feelings of discomfort in conversants due to a lack of co-presence. Current techniques to increase co-presence are not practical in the consumer market due to the costly and elaborate equipment required (such as stereoscopic displays and multicamera arrays).