preregistration

A theory written only in prose cannot be checked mechanically. This post represents a theory of modality switching as structured data, derives the conditional independencies it implies, and tests them against data simulated from the theory and from a rival account.

Versioned, machine-checkable scientific theories in R and Python.

How transparency, preregistration and open data are becoming the standard for credible research, and what the shift offers researchers, funders and the wider scientific community.

The best argument to motivate a preregistration may be that it doesn’t take any extra time. It just requires frontloading an important portion of the work. As a reward, the paper will receive greater trust from the reviewers and the readers at large. Preregistration is not perfect, but is a lesser evil that reduces the misuse of statistical analysis in science.

This preregistration outlines a study that will investigate the dynamic nature of conceptual processing by examining the interplay between linguistic distributional systems—comprising word co-occurrence and word association—and embodied systems—comprising sensorimotor and emotional information. A set of confirmatory research questions are addressed using data from the Calgary Semantic Decision project, along with additional measures for the stimuli corresponding to distributional language statistics, embodied information, and individual differences in vocabulary size.