Colloquium: Prof. Andrea Hildebrandt (March 15th, 4.30 PM, 1.134 GEMI) - Toward open and reproducible neuroimaging

We would like to invite you to the next ANaP lab colloquium by Prof. Andrea Hildebrandt (University of Oldenburg) on Wednesday (March 15th) at 4:30 PM. Please find the title, abstract, and information about the venue below. We are looking forward to seeing you at our colloquium.

Abstract:

The main aim in cognitive neuroscience is to discover brain-cognition associations which are replicable across laboratories. However, to date we do not know well enough how much hitherto unsuccessful replications are due to the oppressive number of methodological decisions researchers have to make á priori to testing a brain-cognition association. To describe the multitude of researchers’ methodological choices, Gelman and Loken (2013) coined the term “garden of forking paths”. In every step of the study planning, data processing and analysis workflow, multiple defensible decisions and potential operations are available as choices. The established approach in science to date is to select one specific workflow from which results are reported and conclusions of the phenomenon studied are made. However, a multiple comparison problem is implicit to this approach, even if only one constructed dataset is used for statistical inferences. The reason is that theoretically a large variety of workflows are defensible, yet researchers do not correct their hypothesis tests to account for all theoretically possible comparisons that they did not explicitly carry out. More recently, multiverse analyses have been proposed to address this problem (e.g., Steegen et al., 2016), a term that aims to highlight the high dimensionality of the garden of forking paths. I argue that multi-lab research and methodological solutions that aim to bring transparency to the black box created by researchers' degrees of freedom are in high demand, and that multiverse analysis is the future of data analysis in cognitive and personality neuroscience and beyond. In this talk I will present two ongoing projects which aim to improve reproducibility in personality and cognitive neuroscience by applying a multiverse approach: The CoScience EEG personality and the METEOR network neuroscience project.