Wednesday, August 2, 2017

measuring away an attentional confound??!

so this is out (a critique on a PNAS paper from the Graziano lab @ Princeton last year).

i remember we thought long and hard about whether to write up something like this.

as a young postdoc i was known for being rude and scathingly critical. yeah, i was awkward. but man, i'm not young anymore. do we still need to pick fights like this?

i hope this doesn't get seen as picking fight. the thing is, this relates to my last post. to earn our peers' respect, we can't just handwave some glib theoretical ideas and say whatever we want in some popular magazines. in our field more than others in cog neuro, we need to do some serious work in trying to look good and experimentally solid.

i met Taylor Webb the first author of the target paper and he seemed really smart and reasonable. not sure how the experimental design went wrong. ah well, or perhaps they still don't think there's anything so wrong after all.

let's hope it stimulates some useful discussion.

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