A Collaborative Approach to Infant Research: Promoting Reproducibility, Best Practices, and Theory‐Building

Abstract

The ideal of scientific progress is that we accumulate measurements and integrate these into theory, but recent discussion of replicability issues has cast doubt on whether psychological research conforms to this model. Developmental research—especially with infant participants—also has discipline‐specific replicability challenges, including small samples and limited measurement methods. Inspired by collaborative replication efforts in cognitive and social psychology, we describe a proposal for assessing and promoting replicability in infancy research: large‐scale, multi‐laboratory replication efforts aiming for a more precise understanding of key developmental phenomena. The ManyBabies project, our instantiation of this proposal, will not only help us estimate how robust and replicable these phenomena are, but also gain new theoretical insights into how they vary across ages, linguistic communities, and measurement methods. This project has the potential for a variety of positive outcomes, including less‐biased estimates of theoretically important effects, estimates of variability that can be used for later study planning, and a series of best‐practices blueprints for future infancy research.

Face Preferences for Infant‐ and Adult‐Directed Speakers in Infants of Depressed and Nondepressed Mothers: Association with Infant Cognitive Development

“…It is possible that one or more of these differences contributed to the slightly lower ID face preferences among infants of non-depressed mothers in the present study relative to their study. However, that we essentially replicated Schachner and Hannon’s key finding in infants of non-depressed mothers demonstrates its robustness to small procedural variations across laboratories (see Frank et al, 2017). …”

Open Science is Liberating and Can Foster Creativity

“…They selectively present analyses that maximize the impression that results are 'significant' and suppress evidence that seems 'mixed' (Bakker, van Dijk, & Wicherts, 2012;Button et al, 2013;Chambers, 2017;Ioannidis, 2005;Nosek et al, 2015;Nosek, Spies, & Motyl, 2012;Simmons, Nelson, & Simonsohn, 2011;Vul, Harris, Winkielman, & Pashler, 2009). Given these quite understandable tendencies, it should be no surprise that when studies in the behavioral and life sciences are replicated, we don't consistently see the patterns reported in the original studies (Begley & Ioannidis, 2015;Camerer et al, 2016;Frank et al, 2017;Klein et al, 2014;Open Science Collaboration, 2015). Thus, we have a paradox.…”

Individual Differences in Infant Speech Segmentation: Achieving the Lexical Shift

“…Secondly, we do not know the extent to which ERP measures of segmentation are reliable (for a related discussion of behavioral measures see Cristia, Seidl, Singh, & Houston, ). Given the recent importance placed on replicability in infancy research and beyond (Frank et al., ; Open Science Collaboration, ), an important next step is to determine whether these results replicate in a larger sample of infants than has been previously tested.…”