52% Yes, a signiicant crisis 3% No, there is no crisis 7% Don't know 38% Yes, a slight crisis 38% Yes, a slight crisis 1,576 RESEARCHERS SURVEYED M ore than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments. Those are some of the telling figures that emerged from Nature's survey of 1,576 researchers who took a brief online questionnaire on reproducibility in research. The data reveal sometimes-contradictory attitudes towards reproduc-ibility. Although 52% of those surveyed agree that there is a significant 'crisis' of reproducibility, less than 31% think that failure to reproduce published results means that the result is probably wrong, and most say that they still trust the published literature. Data on how much of the scientific literature is reproducible are rare and generally bleak. The best-known analyses, from psychology 1 and cancer biology 2 , found rates of around 40% and 10%, respectively. Our survey respondents were more optimistic: 73% said that they think that at least half of the papers in their field can be trusted, with physicists and chemists generally showing the most confidence. The results capture a confusing snapshot of attitudes around these issues, says Arturo Casadevall, a microbiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland. "At the current time there is no consensus on what reproducibility is or should be. " But just recognizing that is a step forward, he says. "The next step may be identifying what is the problem and to get a consensus. "
Mouse-tracking - the analysis of mouse movements in computerized experiments - is becoming increasingly popular in the cognitive sciences. Mouse movements are taken as an indicator of commitment to or conflict between choice options during the decision process. Using mouse-tracking, researchers have gained insight into the temporal development of cognitive processes across a growing number of psychological domains. In the current article, we present software that offers easy and convenient means of recording and analyzing mouse movements in computerized laboratory experiments. In particular, we introduce and demonstrate the mousetrap plugin that adds mouse-tracking to OpenSesame, a popular general-purpose graphical experiment builder. By integrating with this existing experimental software, mousetrap allows for the creation of mouse-tracking studies through a graphical interface, without requiring programming skills. Thus, researchers can benefit from the core features of a validated software package and the many extensions available for it (e.g., the integration with auxiliary hardware such as eye-tracking, or the support of interactive experiments). In addition, the recorded data can be imported directly into the statistical programming language R using the mousetrap package, which greatly facilitates analysis. Mousetrap is cross-platform, open-source and available free of charge from https://github.com/pascalkieslich/mousetrap-os .
Previous literature has suggested that risky choice patterns in general--and probability weighting in particular--are strikingly different in experience-based as compared with description-based formats. In 2 reanalyses and 3 new experiments, we investigate differences between experience-based and description-based decisions using a parametric approach based on cumulative prospect theory (CPT). Once controlling for sampling biases, we consistently find a reversal of the typical description-experience gap, that is, a reduced sensitivity to probabilities and increased overweighting of small probabilities in decisions from experience as compared with decisions from descriptions. This finding supports the hypothesis that regression to the mean effects in probability estimation are a crucial source of differences between both presentation formats. Further analyses identified task specific information asymmetry prevalent in gambles involving certainty as a third source of differences. We present a novel conceptualization of multiple independent sources of bias that contribute to the description-experience gap, namely sampling biases and task specific information asymmetry on the one hand, and regression to the mean effects in probability estimation on the other hand.
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