Pueblo Serna

Which methodological reforms will be most useful for increasing reproducibility and replicability? I've gone back and forth on this blog about a number of possible reforms to our methodological practices, and I've been particularly ambivalent in the past about preregistration , the process of registering methodological and analytic decisions prior to data collection. In a post from about three years ago, I worried that preregistration was too time-consuming  for small-scale studies, even if it was appropriate for large-scale studies. And last year, I worried whether  preregistration validates the practice of running (and publishing) one-offs , rather than running cumulative study sets. I think these worries were overblown, and resulted from my lack of understanding of the process. Instead, I want to argue here that we should be preregistering every experiment do. The cost is extremely low and the benefits � both to the research process and to the credibility of our results � a...

(After blogging a little less in the last few months, I'm trying out a new idea: I'm going to write a series of short posts about theoretical ideas I've been thinking about.) Is human knowledge built using a set of of perceptual primitives combined by the statistical structure of the environment, or does it instead rest on a foundation of pre-existing, universal concepts? The question of innateness is likely the oldest and most controversial in developmental psychology (think Plato vs. Aristotle, Locke vs. Descartes). In modern developmental work, this question so bifurcates the research literature that it can often feel like scientists are playing for different "teams," with incommensurable assumptions, goals, and even methods. But these divisions have a profoundly negative effect on our science. Throughout my research career, I've bounced back and forth between research groups and even institutions that are often seen as playing on different teams from one a...