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Text of the page (random words):
ing this r script here plos is the open access publisher of the biggest scientific journal plos one as well as a number of smaller more high impact journals the huge amount of data allows me to have a 90 chance of discovering even a small effect r 1 if it actually exists i should add that i limited my sample to those articles published after may 2012 which is when plos started tracking tweets and january 2015 in order to allow for at least two years to aggregate citations the 87 649 remaining articles published in any of the plos journals offer the following picture there is a small but non negligible association between impact on twitter tweets and impact in the scientific literature citations pearson r 12 p 001 spearman rho 18 p 001 this pattern held for nearly every plos journal individually as well all pearson r 10 except for plos computational biology all spearman rho 12 except for plos pathogens this result is in line with peoples et al s 2016 analysis of twitter activity and citations in the field of ecology so twitter might indeed help a bit to promote an article does this hold for social media in general a look at facebook reveals a different picture the relationship between facebook mentions of an article and its scientific impact is so small as to be practically negligible pearson r 03 p 001 spearman rho 06 p 001 this pattern of only a tiny association between facebook mentions and citations held for every single plos journal pearson r 09 spearman rho 08 in conclusion twitter can be used for promoting your scientific work in an age of increased competition for scientific reading time renear palmer 2009 facebook on the other hand can be used for procrastinating wanna explore the data set yourself i made a web app which you can use in rstudio or in your web browser have fun with it and tell me what you find peoples bk midway sr sackett d lynch a cooney pb 2016 twitter predicts citation rates of ecological research plos one 11 11 pmid 27835703 renear ah palmer cl 2009 strategic reading ontologies and the future of scientific publishing science new york n y 325 5942 828 32 pmid 19679805 posted in richard kunert science and tagged citation citation count facebook impact factor influence plos one research science social media twitter on february 22 2017 by richard kunert 2 comments why does music training increase intelligence we know that music training causes intelligence to increase but why in this post i 1 propose a new theory and 2 falsify it immediately given that this particular combination of activities is unpublishable in any academic journal i invite you to read the whole story here in under 500 words 1 proposing the isaml incredible but true music lessons improve the one thing that determines why people who are good on one task tend to be better on another task as well iq schellenberg 2004 kaviani et al 2013 see coverage in previous blog post curiously i have never seen an explanation for why music training would benefit intelligence i propose the improved sustained attention through music lessons hypothesis isaml the isaml hypothesis claims that all tasks related to intelligence are dependent to some degree on people attending to them continuously this ability is called sustained attention a lapse of attention caused by insufficient sustained attention leads to suboptimal answers on iq tests given that music is related to the structuring of attention boltz jones 1989 and removes attentional gaps olivers nieuwenhuis 2005 see coverage in previous blog post music training might help in attentional control and thus in increasing sustained attention this in turn might have a positive impact on intelligence see boxes and arrows in figure 1 figure 1 the improved sustained attention through music lessons hypothesis isaml in a nutshell arrows represent positive associations the isaml does not predict that intelligence is the same as sustained attention instead it predicts that a music training increases sustained attention b sustained attention is associated with intelligence c music training increases intelligence 2 evaluating the isaml prediction c is already supported see above does anyone know something about prediction b here i shall evaluate prediction a does music training increase sustained attention so far the evidence looks inconclusive carey et al 2015 therefore i will turn to a data set of my own which i gathered in a project together with suzanne r jongman kunert jongman in press we used a standard test of sustained attention the digit discrimination test jongman et al 2015 participants had the mind boggingly boring task of clicking a button every time they saw a zero while watching one single digit after another on the screen for ten minutes a low sustained attention ability is thought to be reflected by worse performance higher reaction time to the digit zero at the end of the testing session compared to the beginning or by overall high reaction times unfortunately for the isaml it turns out that there is absolutely no relation between musical training and sustained attention as you can see in figure 2a the reaction time logged decrement between the first and last half of reactions to zeroes is not related to musical training years pearson r 03 n 362 p 61 95 ci 076 129 jzs bf 01 with default prior 7 59 spearman rho 05 same for mean reaction time logged see figure 2b pearson r 02 n 362 p 74 95 ci 0 861 0 120 jzs bf 01 8 181 spearman rho 0 03 figure 2 the correlation between two different measures of sustained attention vertical axes and musical training horizontal axes in a sample of 362 participants high values on vertical axes represent low sustained attention i e the isaml predicts a negative correlation coefficient neither correlation is statistically significant light grey robust regression lines show an iterated least squares regression which reduces the influence of unusual data points 3 conclusion why on earth is musical training related to iq increases i have no idea the isaml is not a good account for the intelligence boost provided by music lessons carey d rosen s krishnan s pearce m shepherd a aydelott j dick f 2015 generality and specificity in the effects of musical expertise on perception and cognition cognition 137 81 105 doi 10 1016 j cognition 2014 12 005 jongman s meyer a roelofs a 2015 the role of sustained attention in the production of conjoined noun phrases an individual differences study plos one 10 9 doi 10 1371 journal pone 0137557 jones m boltz m 1989 dynamic attending and responses to time psychological review 96 3 459 491 doi 10 1037 0033 295x 96 3 459 kaviani h mirbaha h pournaseh m sagan o 2013 can music lessons increase the performance of preschool children in iq tests cognitive processing 15 1 77 84 doi 10 1007 s10339 013 0574 0 kunert r jongman sr 2017 entrainment to an auditory signal is attention involved journal of experimental psychology general 146 1 77 88 pmid 28054814 olivers c nieuwenhuis s 2005 the beneficial effect of concurrent task irrelevant mental activity on temporal attention psychological science 16 4 265 269 doi 10 1111 j 0956 7976 2005 01526 x glenn schellenberg e 2004 music lessons enhance iq psychological science 15 8 511 514 doi 10 1111 j 0956 7976 2004 00711 x posted in music richard kunert and tagged attention attentional blink brain training dynamic attending theory intelligence iq learning music training on february 17 2017 by richard kunert leave a comment the curious effect of a musical rhythm on us do you know the feeling of a musical piece moving you what is this feeling one common answer by psychological researchers is that what you feel is your attention moving in sync with the music in a new paper i show that this explanation is mistaken watch the start of the following video and observe carefully what is happening in the first minute or so you may stop it after that noticed something nearly everyone in the audience moved to the rhythm clapping moving the head etc and you did you move i guess not you probably looked carefully at what people were doing instead your reaction illustrates nicely how musical rhythms affect people according to psychological researchers one very influential theory claims that your attention moves up and down in sync with the rhythm it treats the rhythm like you treated it it simply ignores the fact that most people love moving to the rhythm the theory a rhythm moves your attention sometimes we have gaps of attention sometimes we manage to concentrate really well for a brief moment a very influential theory which has been supported in various experiments claims that these fluctuations in attention are synced to the rhythm when hearing music attention is up at rhythmically salient moments e g the first beat in each bar and attention is down during rhythmically unimportant moments e g off beat moments this makes intuitive sense important tones e g those determining the harmonic key of a music piece tend to occur at rhythmically salient moments looking at language rhythm reveals a similar picture stressed syllables are important for understanding language and signal moments of rhythmic salience it makes sense to attend well during moments which include important information the test faster decisions and better learning i together with suzanne jongman asked whether attention really is up at rhythmically salient moments if so people should make decisions faster when a background rhythm has a moment of rhythmic importance as if people briefly concentrated better at that moment this is indeed what we found people are faster at judging whether a few letters on the screen are a real word or not if the letters are shown near a salient moment of a background rhythm compared to another moment however we went further people should also learn new words better if they are shown near a rhythmically salient moment this turned out not to be the case whether people have to memorise a new word at a moment when their attention is allegedly up or down according to a background rhythm does not matter learning is just as good what is more even those people who react really strongly to the background rhythm in terms of speeding up a decision at a rhythmically salient moment red square in figure below even those people do not learn new words better at the same time as they speed up it s as if the speed up of decisions is unrelated to the learning of new words that s weird because both tasks are known to be affected by attention this makes us doubt that a rhythm affects attention what could it affect instead figure 1 every dot is one of 60 participants how much a background rhythm sped up responses is shown horizontally how much the same rhythm at the same time facilitated pseudoword memorisation is shown on the vertical axis the red square singles out the people who were most affected by the rhythm in terms of their decision speed notice that at the same time their learning is unaffected by the rhythm the conclusion a rhythm does not move your attention it moves your muscles to our own surprise a musical rhythm appears not to affect how your attention moves up and down when your attentional lapses happen or when you can concentrate well instead it simply appears to affect how fast you can press a button e g when indicating a decision whether a few letters form a word or not thinking back to the video at the start i guess this just means that people love moving to the rhythm because the urge to do so is a direct consequence of understanding a rhythm somewhere in the auditory and motor parts of the brain rhythm processing happens however this has nothing to do with attention this is why learning a new word shown on the screen a task without an auditory or motor component is not affected by a background rhythm the paper the high point of my career you may read all of this yourself in the paper here i will have to admit that in many ways this paper is how i like to see science done and so i will shamelessly tell you of its merits the paper is not too long 7 500 words but includes no less than 4 experiments with no less than 60 participants each each experiment tests the research question individually however the experiments build on each other in such a way that their combination makes the overall paper stronger than any experiment individually ever could in terms of analyses we put in everything we could think of all analyses are bayesian subjective bayes factor and frequentist p values we report hypothesis testing analyses bayes factor p values and parameter estimation analyses effect sizes confidence intervals credible intervals if you can think of yet another analysis go for it we publish the raw data and analysis code alongside the article the most important reason why this paper represents my favoured approach to science though is because it actually tests a theory a theory i and my co author truly believed in a theory with a more than 30 year history with a varied supporting literature with a computational model implementation with more than 800 citations for two key papers with in short everything you could wish to see in a good theory and we falsified it instead of thinking of the learning task as insensitive or as a failed experiment we dug deeper and couldn t help but concluding that the attention theory of rhythm perception is probably wrong we actually learned something from our data ps no one is perfect and neither is this paper i wish we had pre registered at least one of the experiments i also wish the paper was open access see a free copy here there is room for improvement as always kunert r jongman sr 2017 entrainment to an auditory signal is attention involved journal of experimental psychology general 146 1 77 88 pmid 28054814 posted in music richard kunert uncategorized and tagged attention dynamic attending theory learning lexical decision task music rhythm word reading on january 9 2017 by richard kunert 2 comments how to write a nature style review nature reviews neuroscience is one of the foremost journals in neuroscience what do its articles look like how have they developed this blog post provides answers which might guide you in writing your own reviews read more than you used to reviews in nature reviews neuroscience cover more and more ground ten years ago 93 references were the norm now reviews average 150 references this might be an example of scientific reports in general having to contain more and more information so as not to be labelled premature incomplete or insufficient vale 2015 reviews in nrn include more and more references concentrate on the most recent literature nature reviews neuroscience is not the outlet for your history of neuroscience review only 22 of cited articles are more than 10 years old a full 17 of cited articles were published a mere two years prior to the review being published i e something like one year before the first draft of the review reached nature reviews neur...