Differences of resource allocation to active and passive states in visual working memory

Causal evidence for the role of the sensory visual cortex in visual short-term memory maintenance

“…Along these lines, future work should study this possibility, by combining the monocularly presented VSTM task, with double retrospective cueing (e.g. [ 106 ]), which will enable the manipulation of attention between behaviourally relevant (sustained-activity) and irrelevant (activity-silent) memory items.…”

P-Values or Bayes Factors? Whichever, but not Both

“…Traditionally, statistical training for psychologists is based on the frequentist framework (see The "Orthodox" Frequentist Statistics section), with little to no focus on Bayesian approaches. Likely because of this lack of training in Bayesian statistics, some psychology researchers seem to still rely on frequentist approaches to test their hypotheses (for similar arguments see Dienes & Mclatchie, 2018;Scheel, 2022;Scheel et al, 2021), but concurrently report a BF along with traditional NHST and p-values (for recent examples see Chen et al, 2022;Guo et al, 2021). This practice is problematic.…”

“…Implementing multiple statistical tests enables researchers to identify and report any results that can be statistically supported (Friese & Frankenbach, 2019;Simmons et al, 2016;Wilson et al, 2022), a problem referred to as analytical flexibility (Dienes, 2023). Put simply, in studies using both approaches (Chen et al, 2022;Guo et al, 2021), the same statistical test is conducted twice, but with a different statistical approach, and provides an independent result for the frequentist test (i.e., p-value) and another independent result for the Bayesian test (i.e., BF). As such, the issue of analytical flexibility arises, which translates to increased researcher degrees of freedom, and consequently, bias.…”

“…As I discuss below, the answers to these questions do not lie in the superiority of one approach over the other, but instead, in the choice of appropriate scientific practices and, in general, the rigorousness of a given study. Still, part of the confusion could be attributed to the fact that, currently, BFs are wrongly used as a complementary statistic to the more common p-value, to quantify evidence (e.g., Chen et al, 2022;Guo et al, 2021). This misuse is also encouraged by attempts to compare the two approaches and investigate relationships between the two statistics (e.g., Huisman, 2022).…”

“…It should, however, be noted that both frequentist and Bayesian approaches for statistical inference should not be simultaneously used and presented because of the issues (amongst others) described above (see also Bayarri & Berger, 2004;Dienes, 2019;Dienes & Mclatchie, 2018;Wagenmakers et al, 2008). So far, the concurrent reporting of both a p-value and a BF was (wrongly) done so that further to NHST statistical significance (p < α), authors (e.g., Chen et al, 2022;Guo et al, 2021) could report on the strength of evidence based on the BF, which is information that the p-value cannot provide (Johansson, 2011). But, as explained above, the BF cannot complement the pvalue, simply because of the fundamental differences in the theories underlying each statistic.…”