Csibra, Gergely and Hernik, M. and Mascaro, O. and Tatone, D. and Lengyel, M. (2016) Statistical treatment of looking-time data. Developmental Psychology 52 (4), pp. 521-536. ISSN 0012-1649.
This is the latest version of this item.
|
Text
csibra_etal_2016.pdf - Published Version of Record Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (668kB) | Preview |
Abstract
Looking times (LTs) are frequently measured in empirical research on infant cognition. We analyzed the statistical distribution of LTs across participants in order to develop recommendations for their treatment in infancy research. Our analyses focused on a common within-subject experimental design, in which longer looking to novel or unexpected stimuli is predicted. We analyzed data from two sources: an in-house set of LTs that included data from individual participants (47 experiments, 1584 observations), and a representative set of published papers reporting group-level LT statistics (149 experiments from 33 papers). We established that LTs are log-normally distributed across participants, and therefore should always be log-transformed before parametric statistical analyses. We estimated the typical size of significant effects in LT studies, which allowed us to make recommendations about setting sample sizes. We show how our estimate of the distribution of effect sizes of LT studies can be used to design experiments to be analyzed by Bayesian statistics, where the experimenter is required to determine in advance the predicted effect size rather than the sample size. We demonstrate the robustness of this method in both sets of LT experiments.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
---|---|
Keyword(s) / Subject(s): | looking times, Bayesian statistics, infancy, log-normal distribution |
School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Science > School of Psychological Sciences |
Research Centres and Institutes: | Brain and Cognitive Development, Centre for (CBCD) |
Depositing User: | Gergo Csibra |
Date Deposited: | 04 Oct 2016 13:09 |
Last Modified: | 02 Aug 2023 17:26 |
URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/15962 |
Available Versions of this Item
-
Statistical treatment of looking-time data. (deposited 15 Feb 2016 16:33)
- Statistical treatment of looking-time data. (deposited 04 Oct 2016 13:09) [Currently Displayed]
Statistics
Additional statistics are available via IRStats2.