PNAS
Article
PNAS is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between January 26, 2022 and December 19, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “this article was accepted to PNAS under a special deal”; “We’ll be replicating randomly selected studies from PNAS, JPSP, and PSci shortly after they are released”; “studies from PNAS”. It most often appears alongside Vox, ACX Survey, alpha waves.
Metadata
- Category: Publications
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: January 26, 2022
- Last seen: December 19, 2022
Appears In
Related Pages
-
- Vox (2 shared issues)
-
- ACX Survey (1 shared issues)
-
- alpha waves (1 shared issues)
-
- Andrew Gelman (1 shared issues)
-
- Astralcodexten (1 shared issues)
-
- Baby’s First Years (1 shared issues)
-
- beta waves (1 shared issues)
-
- Blue Group (1 shared issues)
-
- Clearer Thinking (1 shared issues)
-
- CT (1 shared issues)
-
- Dr. Troller (1 shared issues)
-
- EEG (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
A recent paper claims to have found an Impact Of A Poverty Reduction Intervention On Infant Brain Activity. It’s doing the rounds of the usual media sites, like Vox and the New York Times:
Inline links: Impact Of A Poverty Reduction Intervention On Infant Brain Activity, Vox, New York Times
And finally, people want to discover a link between poverty and cognitive function so bad. Every few months, another study demonstrates that poverty decreases cognitive function, it's front page news everywhere, and then it turns out to be flawed. This recent analysis tried to replicate twenty poverty/cognition priming studies. 18/20 replications had lower effect sizes than in the original, and 16/20 had effect sizes statistically indistinguishable from zero. Most of these studies were vastly worse than the current paper - they were trying to do dumb things with priming as opposed to this much smarter thing with actual RCTs of childhood environment. Still, this whole field makes me nervous.
Inline links: This recent analysis
Getting to the paper itself: it’s called The Impact Of A Poverty Reduction Intervention On Infant Brain Activity. It’s part of a much larger study called Baby’s First Years which randomizes some low-income mothers to receive $300/month in extra support. Most of these families were making about $20,000, so this was an increase of about 10-20%.
We launched a new project (which received an ACX Grant) to help improve the replication crisis in psychology: Transparent Replications by Clearer Thinking! We're aiming to vastly increase the probability of studies in top journals being replicated in order to change researcher incentives. As soon as new psychology and behavior papers come out in Nature and Science (the two most prestigious general science journals), our plan is to replicate a study from nearly every one of them. Additionally, we'll be replicating randomly selected studies from PNAS, JPSP, and PSci shortly after they are released. You can check out our first three replications now!