| Wow. fMRI science is full of intrigue. Last year Edward Vul, et. al opened up a bag of worms when they published a paper called "Puzzlingly High Correlations in fMRI Studies of Emotion, Personality, and Social Cognition." It was originally titled "Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience," which is more in keeping with the tone of the paper. They had noticed that a whole rash of fMRI studies on emotion, personality, and social cognition — all hot topics that tend to get lots of attention in the popular press — had both astoundingly high numbers and slight methodology sections. So they undertook to try and figure out how those numbers were being arrived at. Their claim is that many of the studies used a kind of circular inference that was skewing the data. Ed Vul's website is great. He's posted the original paper, plus a whole pile of critical response and follow-up research here. |
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- sally mckay 11-05-2010 2:23 pm