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> The salmon thing was a statistical problem, not a technical one. How is that relevant to the question of whether or not most fMRI research is wrong?
by Alex3917 10y ago
> The salmon thing was a statistical problem, not a technical one.
How is that relevant to the question of whether or not most fMRI research is wrong?
- mattkrause 10y ago1. It's trivially checkable for any existing individual paper. You skim the methods or search for "multiple comparisons" or "false discovery rate" or something like that. 2. For papers where this wasn't done, the already-collected data can be reanalyzed. In fact, you can often get correct it without access to the raw data (at least approximately). 3. It means that future papers (where future is somewhere after 2008-9 here) can be done correctly from the get-go; it's not a limitation of the technique or the signal itself.
- Alex3917 10y agoIf you believe that the majority of papers in the field are not incorrect, what are the assumptions behind your estimation of the numbers?
- omginternets 10y agoThe significance of the dead salmon paper is waaaay overblown. That paper was a warning to researchers that family-wise error corrections are, indeed, important. A small (but non-negligible) portion of researchers were not doing these corrections simply because "the results looked nicer". The dead fish guys wanted to demonstrate the extent to which this could produce false positives. The (rightly) make no comment on the soundness of fMRI as a tool for cognitive science.