statistics

Brief Clarifications, Open Questions: Commentary on Liu et al. (2018)

Post

Critical examination of Liu et al. (2018) claims about methodological inconsistencies in ERP studies of conceptual modality switching, arguing that their conclusions overlook theoretical and methodological justifications for varying analytical approaches.

Preregistration: The interplay between linguistic and embodied systems in conceptual processing

Publication

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.

Mixed-effects models in R and a new tool for data simulation

Presentation

In this talk, I will look over the rationale for LMEMs, and demonstrate how to fit them in R (Brauer & Curtin, 2018; Luke, 2017). Challenges will also be covered. For instance, when using the widely-accepted 'maximal' approach, based on fitting all possible random effects for each fixed effect, models sometimes fail to find a solution, or 'convergence'. Advice for the problem of nonconvergence will be demonstrated, based on the progressive lightening of the random effects structure (Singman & Kellen, 2017; for an alternative approach, especially with small samples, see Matuschek et al., 2017). At the end, on a different note, I will present a web application that facilitates data simulation for research and teaching (Bernabeu & Lynott, 2020).

Reproducibilidad en torno a una aplicación web

Presentation

Las aplicaciones web nos ayudan a facilitar el uso de nuestro trabajo, ya que no requieren programación para utilizarlas. Crear estas aplicaciones en R, mediante paquetes como "shiny" o "flexdashboard", ofrece múltiples ventajas. Entre ellas destaca la reproducibilidad, tal como veremos en torno a una aplicación para la simulación de datos (https://github.com/pablobernabeu/Experimental-data-simulation).

Web application for the simulation of experimental data

Application / dashboard

Open-source R-based web application for creating varied experimental data sets with customizable structures including between-group and within-participant variables that can be categorical or continuous.

Data is present: Workshops and datathons

Post

This project offers free activities to learn and practise reproducible data presentation. Pablo Bernabeu organises these events in the context of a Software Sustainability Institute Fellowship. Programming languages such as R and Python offer free, powerful resources for data processing, visualisation and analysis. Experience in these programs is highly valued in data-intensive disciplines. Original data has become a public good in many research fields thanks to cultural and technological advances. On the internet, we can find innumerable data sets from sources such as scientific journals and repositories (e.g., OSF), local and national governments, non-governmental organisations (e.g., data.world), etc. Activities comprise free workshops and datathons.

Event-related potentials: Why and how I used them

Post

Overview of event-related potentials as a research method, covering electroencephalography fundamentals, ERP definitions and processing, and their application to studying the time course of cognitive processes like conceptual processing.

Dutch modality exclusivity norms

Application / dashboard

This app presents linguistic data over several tabs. The code combines the great front-end of Flexdashboard—based on R Markdown and yielding an unmatched user interface—, with the great back-end of Shiny—allowing users to download sections of data they select, in various formats. The hardest nuts to crack included modifying the rows/columns orientation without affecting the functionality of tables. A cool, recent finding was the reactable package. A nice feature, allowed by Flexdashboard, was the use of quite different formats in different tabs.

Dutch modality exclusivity norms for 336 properties and 411 concepts

Publication

Part of the toolkit of language researchers is formed of stimuli that have been rated on various dimensions. The current study presents modality exclusivity norms for 336 properties and 411 concepts in Dutch. Forty-two respondents rated the auditory, …

Naive principal component analysis in R

Post

Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is a technique used to find the core components that underlie different variables. It comes in very useful whenever doubts arise about the true origin of three or more variables. There are two main methods for performing a PCA: naive or less naive. In the naive method, you first check some conditions in your data which will determine the essentials of the analysis. In the less-naive method, you set those yourself based on whatever prior information or purposes you had. The 'naive' approach is characterized by a first stage that checks whether the PCA should actually be performed with your current variables, or if some should be removed. The variables that are accepted are taken to a second stage which identifies the number of principal components that seem to underlie your set of variables.