prefrontal
Joined 11 years ago
Karma
212
Submissions
34
Member since
Apr 2
Craig Bennett
Software Developer, Project Manager, Neuroscientist
http://prefrontal.org
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Comment · 10 months ago
Many thanks - appreciate the kind words. Thanks also for always working to work with care in your science. It makes all the difference.
Among other challenges, when we first submitted the poster to the Human Brain Mapping conference we got kicked out of consideration because the committee thought we were trolling. One person on the review committee said we actually had a good point and brought our poster back in for consideration. The salmon poster ended up being on a highlight slide at the closing session of the conference!
Comment · 10 months ago
Yeah, it did prove to be a rather one-sided conversation... ;)
Comment · 10 months ago
Many thanks! It was a ton of fun. Hard to beleive that we are coming up on 20 years since the data for the salmon was first collected...
Comment · 10 months ago
While I would agree that the prevalence of the problem has been minimized in fMRI during the last 15 years, I disagree that our critique does not hold up. The root of our concern was that proper statistical correction(s) need to be completed in order for research results to be interpretable. I am totally biased, but I think that remains worthwhile.
Comment · 10 months ago
When we published the salmon paper, approximately 25-35% of published fMRI results used uncorrected statistics. For myself and my co-authors, this was evidence of shaky science. The reader of a research paper could not say with certainty which results were legitimate and which might be false positives.
Comment · 10 months ago
That was our paper! We showed that you can get false positives (significant brain activity in this case) if fMRI if you don't use the proper statistical corrections. We did win an Ig Nobel for that work in 2012 - it was a ton of fun.
Comment · 10 months ago
As the first author of the salmon paper, yes, this was exactly our point. fMRI can be an amazing tool, but if you are going to trust the results you need to have proper statistical corrections along the way.
Comment · 10 months ago
As the first author on the salmon paper, yes, that was exactly our point. Researchers were capitalizing on chance in many cases as they failed to do effective corrections to the multiple comparisons problem. We argued with the dead fish that they should.
Comment · 2 years ago
Pretty much what TeMPOraL said. You can scan pretty much anything with fMRI and find results if you don't use proper statistical corrections. I have found "significant" voxels in a pumpkin before while doing testing. Our argument was/is that scientists need to have appropriate rigor in their analyses, otherwise you can reach ridiculous conclusions - like a dead fish looking alive...
Comment · 2 years ago
> we have a print of the poster on our lab's wall
That's amazing - you made my day with that statement.
I left neuroscience for the software world back in 2012, so I don't have a lot of data points since then. I know between 2009 and 2012 the field went from ~50% of papers doing the right statistical corrections to about ~90%, which is a huge step in the right direction. I hope those numbers are even better today.
The expense of MRI time means that studies include far fewer subjects than they might want/need. My opinion is that there are still significant challenges that go beyond correction for multiple comparisons, like data peeking and low-power experimental designs. I think that we should move to a mindset where we need replication and convergent evidence for major claims. Not a single study with 18 college freshman participants.
Comment · 2 years ago
I'm the first author of the salmon fMRI paper, if you have any questions. Generally, how the investigators do their statistics can lead to implausible conclusions. Extraordinary claims should require extraordinary evidence.
Comment · 4 years ago
I've scanned about 300 people as part of my research career. The director of the imaging center reviewed every anatomical scan. From that group of 300 we informed about three people that they had an anomaly which should be examined by a doctor.
Comment · 4 years ago
Marc Abrahams, organizer of the Ig Nobels, asked us for a salmon recipe to include in a cookbook they were publishing. We sent in a single page recipe for how to cook a salmon in an MRI scanner by overriding the safety protocols. That was fun to write.
Comment · 4 years ago
Thanks for the kind words. I am the first author of the "Neural correlates of interspecies perspective taking in the post-mortem Atlantic Salmon: An argument for multiple comparisons correction" paper. Happy to take any questions here. A link to the original poster: http://prefrontal.org/files/posters/Bennett-Salmon-2009.pdf
Comment · 5 years ago
My wife and I are so irritated about this. She bought a Cricut Maker last year to make masks for friends and family. Custom images were cut for every person she made a mask for. Now, nine months after we bought the machine, we will have to start paying $10/mo for the same privileges we enjoyed when we first got it.