Association Between Executive Functions, Working Memory, and Manual Dexterity

paper
Published

February 29, 2016

New paper (open data!): Association Between Executive Functions, Working Memory, and Manual Dexterity

I am thrilled to see that our fully-Bayesian, open-data paper "Association Between Executive Functions, Working Memory, and Manual Dexterity in Young and Healthy Older Adults" has been published in Perceptual & Motor Skills. This paper takes on the rarely asked question about the relationship between cognitive functions and manual dexterity. The history of my involvement with this manuscript is maybe unusual in that one of the reviewers actually requested the use of Bayesian statistics (because he felt that the analyses reported in an initial version of the MS in which I was not involved were not appropriate). I was, of course, all too happy to help and our efforts have resulted in a fully-Bayesian paper.

I have recently started to think about openness of data and materials to the scientific community. Ever since it's initiation, I have been a fan of Richard Morey's Peer Reviewers' Openness Initiative and I have recently signed the initiative (you should do so, too!). At the time of this writing, there are already 278 people who have committed to require that data and experimental materials are made openly available before reviewing a paper. Obviously, making such a commitment requires that I also follow these rules in my own research! So far, I have not done so (shame on me!), mostly for practical reasons (publishing large fMRI data is difficult; anonymization not trivial; documentation of the datasets time-consuming etc, etc) even though I was always committed to give out data/materials when requested (we signed a declaration in my old lab). However, I do see the difference between agreeing to handing out data and putting it up on the web for anyone to look at. How often did I not wish to have easy access to the data published in scientific articles (for research, teaching and sometimes just for fun)! I have therefore decided to implement an open-data policy and upload all data per-default upon publication.

Given that usually many co-authors are involved in most research projects, it is not always easy to convince everyone to go along with these requirements. I am happy that my co-authors on our new paper Claudia Rodriguez-Aranda and Olena Vasylenko from the Research group "Behavioral neuroscience and human development" readily agreed to share their hard-won data with anyone who can use a computer to download files. The data and all analysis scripts (R + Stan) are available from github.

References

  • Rodriguez-Aranda, C., Mittner, M. & Vasylenko, O. (2016). Association between Executive Functions, Working Memory, and Manual Dexterity in Young and Healthy Older Adults: An exploratory study. Perceptual & Motor Skills, 122 (1), 165-192.