Lessons from a catalogue of 6674 brain recordings

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Science
• Psychology

Background:

• The sustained posterior negativity (SPN) is a measurable brain response to visual symmetry.
• Decades of research have generated substantial data on SPN, but it has remained fragmented.
• Publicly accessible, centralized data is crucial for advancing scientific understanding and reproducibility.

Purpose of the Study:

• To create a comprehensive, publicly available catalogue of sustained posterior negativity (SPN) data.
• To develop tools for data extraction and visualization from the SPN catalogue.
• To re-analyze SPN data to investigate the scientific process, including statistical power and publication bias.

Main Methods:

• Collected and catalogued 6674 individual SPN measurements from 2215 participants.
• Developed and provided data extraction and visualization tools.
• Performed re-analyses of the aggregated SPN data.

Main Results:

• Successfully created a public repository of 6674 SPN measurements.
• The catalogue and associated tools are available at https://osf.io/2sncj/.
• Re-analysis revealed insights into statistical power and publication bias within the SPN research field.

Conclusions:

• The public SPN catalogue represents a significant advancement for neuroscience research.
• This resource facilitates deeper investigation into the reliability and biases of scientific findings.
• The catalogue has the potential to uncover new scientific insights related to visual symmetry processing.