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John Bargh, a Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Yale University has written a blog post that’s currently receiving a thorough dressing down by the academic community. The title of the blog post, “Nothing in Their Heads” is a scathing ad-hom attack on a research group that failed to replicate his research. The opening gambit is an attack on, well the entire academic community.
“Scientific integrity in the era of pay-as-you-go publications and superficial online science journalism.”
It’s like a lesson in how to alientate your audience. “Superficial online science journalism” apparently refers to Ed Yong’s critique of his research. Yong isn’t exactly a light weight, as well as his Discover magazine blog he writes for New Scientist and Nature and has a stack of awards for his quality of writing and integrity. Before writing his article Yong even requested Bargh’s opinion but Bargh refused to give it. Thereby explaining why Yong’s critique may be ever so slightly superficial in this instance (Update 11/03/08: Yong has now published a full reply to Bargh’s blog containing a reply from a member of the team that created the replication).
Bargh’s argument is tainted from the offset with a rambling attack on the most revered, open access, not for profit academic journal (PLoS), claiming because the replication was published there that it is “essentially self-published”. PLoS have replied in the comments clearly proving this attack to be completely factually deficit. It’s worth noting that the open access PLoS is by no means alone in charging it’s authors. A great proportion of leading journals are “pay as you go publications” (as Bargh puts it) so this argument is invalid, not to mention weirdly juvenile coming from someone in Bargh’s position. The only difference is that other publishers that actually are profit making are just less up-front about charges, describing them as “colour” charges when there is often sod all printing going on. The Journal of Neuroscience for example charges $1000 per image (assuming you like your hard work portrayed in colour rather than appearing as something from the dark ages of Xerox). That’s on top of a $980 publication fee. By any standards PLoS is cheap relative to it’s competition, it even offers to waive the fee for any reason, no questions asked.
After you’ve waded through the school yard bullshit, if you’re still reading that is, the actual argument at hand is academic in the extreme (so I won’t paraphrase it here). If you take the time to read it, Bargh’s case is monumentally ironic. Besides the discussion on priming at hand, Bargh’s paper focuses on “rudeness” and “elderly stereotype”. It’s almost like Bargh is trying to parody himself as a rude old professor clinging on to a sinking ship, a casualty of post-publication review, open science and all the good things to come of it. You couldn’t make it up. If you do a search on Psych File Drawer you’ll discover this isn’t even the first failed replication attempt of Bargh’s experiment.
Free database of psych studies and their replication status
To me this debate highlights an issue at the very heart of science that is often neglected in Psychology. Science gets interesting when science gets replicated.
References:
Doyen S, Klein O, Pichon CL, & Cleeremans A (2012). Behavioral priming: it’s all in the mind, but whose mind? PloS one, 7 (1) PMID: 22279526
Bargh, J. Chen, M. Burrows, L. (1996). Automaticity of Social Behaviour: Direct Effects of Trait Construct and Stereotype Activation on Action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology : http://www.yale.edu/acmelab/articles/bargh_chen_burrows_1996.pdf
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This week two new brain computer interface (BCI) based products have hit the headlines, one is a hoax. I’ve placed the adverts for both below, see if you can figure out which one is a real project.
Project Black Mirror
The developers of “project black mirror” claim to have developed a BCI that can control an iphone using Siri.
Neurowear
The developers of “Neurowear” claim to have developed a pair of wearable rabbit ears containing a BCI that moves based on your mood.
But, can you tell which one is an elaborate hoax?
(Watch the videos, check out their websites but don’t scroll down until you’ve made your guess.)
An elaborate hoax
Believe it or not, it turns out that the project that is a hoax is actually the mobile phone device “project black mirror“. This is clear for a number of reasons:
1. EEG can not yet be deciphered anywhere near the extent necessary to achieve a wide range of commands based simply on imagined words. At the moment it is only possible to assign commands based on cues such as our emotions or imagined movements of different parts of the body. Even then, there is a very long way to go before we can achieve significantly more commands than can be counted on one hand.
2. On the “project black mirror” page the group make the blunder of describing the device as an ECG instead of an EEG. An ECG is an electrocardiogram which measures activity from the heart while an EEG is an Electroencephalograph which measures activity from the brain, by definition, a necessary component in any BCI (the brain, that is).
3. On the “project black mirror” page the group describe the device as measuring signals in the range of 0-5v. EEG signals are approximately one millionth of that range! (“microvolts” not “volts”.)
4. The chip board in the “project black mirror” video isn’t properly attached.
5. In the “project black mirror” video, on the laptop screen there is an animation of the matrix code, presumably instead of an EEG output.
As @Interaxon has pointed out, this is a rather sad trick to play because it devalues the work being done by genuine BCI researchers and raises expectations to an unrealistic level. That said, progress is being made. Only this week a breakthrough study was published in the Lancet that demonstrated using EEG that 19% of patients diagnosed with being in a vegative state could respond using BCI.
“Three (19%) of 16 patients could repeatedly and reliably generate appropriate EEG responses to two distinct commands, despite being behaviourally entirely unresponsive (classifi cation accuracy 61–78%)”
(Cruse et, al, 2011) [Open access PDF via The Lancet]
This is a major step forward, demonstrating clinically that there really is potential for us to communicate using the many different BCI packages in development around the world with those that currently have no way of communicating whatsoever. This really is a noble goal and one that we are, right now, witnessing being achieved for the first time. Conversely, the “Project Black Mirror” video appears to be attempting to capitalise on this by applying to crowd-fund their “project” using Kickstarter. This is at best a poor thought out hoax and at worst a blundering attempt to commit a major fraud.
Now, there is one question left to answer and that is…
“What about the BCI rabbit ears?”
Well, it seems that this project may well indeed be genuine. The concept itself is certainly scientifically grounded and empirically demonstrated (Coan, et al. 2004) [Open access PDF]. As for the product, well if there is someone bonkers enough to create it then there would be no reason why it would not be technically possible. And that, it would appear, there is.
NB: This is not an endorsement of the “neurowear” product. I have seen no published data and the apparent use of one electrode suggests the device would be vulnerable to confounding facial movements (See my critical post on the Emotiv’). That said, they certainly aren’t the first group to come up with an attempted wacky implementation of BCI and they certainly won’t be the last.
References:
Damian Cruse, Srivas Chennu, Camille Chatelle, Tristan A Bekinschtein, Davinia Fernández-Espejo, John D Pickard, Steven Laureys, Adrian M Owen (2011). Bedside detection of awareness in the vegetative state: a cohort study The Lancet : 10.1016/S0140-6736(11)61224-5
Coan, J., & Allen, J. (2004). Frontal EEG asymmetry as a moderator and mediator of emotion Biological Psychology, 67 (1-2), 7-50 DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsycho.2004.03.002 Continue reading »
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