Moving towards a more cumulative science in developmental psychology by Dr Michael C. Frank

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About the speaker

Michael C. Frank is David and Lucile Packard Professor of Human Biology at Stanford University and Director of the Symbolic Systems Program. He received his PhD from MIT in Brain and Cognitive Sciences in 2010. He studies language use and language learning, focusing especially on early word learning. He is the founder of the ManyBabies Consortium, a collaborative replication network for infancy research, and has led open-data projects including Wordbank and MetaLab. He was a Jacobs Foundation Fellow and has received the Troland Award from the National Academy of Sciences, the FABBS Early Career Impact Award, and the Marr Prize and Glushko Dissertation Prize from the Cognitive Science Society. He served as Chair of the Governing Board of the Cognitive Science Society and has edited for journals including Cognition and Child Development. You can find Michael on Twitter, his website, and his blog.

About the talk

In recent years, many psychologists have become increasingly concerned about issues of reproducibility and replicability. From small sample sizes to post-hoc analytic flexibility (“p-hacking”), many factors conspire to decrease the robustness and trustworthiness of results in published research. These problems are important in developmental psychology as well, though the scope of the problem is unknown. The speaker will present some scientific and meta-scientific work he has done on these issues (including progress on the ManyBabies project, a large collaborative replication project in the infancy field) and describe some practical steps to take for increasing the robustness of your own work.

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