But when experts repeat these studies, they can't replicate the results.
Some of these issues aren't unique to neuroscience. They begin with what Ellis called the "original sin" of science: Academics are put under huge pressure to publish positive research findings.
The problems are big enough that they are "halting the growth and development of science and the curing of diseases," Ellis told Live Science.
It can be difficult for researchers to get access to MRI scanners for their studies, and the scans are expensive. This has historically meant that many brain-imaging studies included relatively few participants. (Image credit: Shutterstock)
For example, a landmark study in 2007 found that the brains of kids with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder took longer to mature. But a study published earlier this year found that this link vanished once the different rates of aging between boys and girls were taken into account. "That's what made the whole house of cards topple," Matthew Albaugh, co-author of the replication paper and a clinical neuroscientist at the University of Vermont, previously told Live Science.
A 2015 paper failed to replicate this finding, but the authors of the original paper argued that was because the follow-up study didn't follow the same protocol.
So, in 2019, Genon and her colleagues tried a different type of replication analysis.
Most neuroscience studies use MRI scans to study the brain and deduce findings from these images. (Image credit: Image Editor, Flickr)
If one of these micro-studies reported a significant association between a behavior and a brain structure, the team tried to reach the same findings using a different subset of the data. Very few of the repeat studies replicated the results of the first. "It was clear evidence that the replicability of those brain-behavior associations is relatively weak," Genon said.
Everybody always says that replication is great. But then when I suggest that their specific studies could be replicated, often they are a bit more skeptical
Additionally, the behavioral tests used to establish psychological variables can be inconsistent, Genon said. What's more, some of these studies may be operating on the outdated assumption that small brain regions control complex characteristics like intelligence, she added. In reality, however, "those types of abilities are usually relatively distributed across the brain," she said. When researchers analyze multiple small brain areas with that assumption in mind using separate statistical tests, it can raise the risk of producing mirage associations.
But a follow-up study found that the differences among the clusters weren't statistically significant, meaning they could have occurred by chance. Richard Dinga, a neuroscientist at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena in Germany who worked on the follow-up study, said the main problems lay in its design.
Conor Liston, a psychiatrist at Weill Cornell Medicine and co-author of the original paper, acknowledged the model's susceptibility to overfitting. "That was not at all our intention, but that was the result," Liston told Live Science
A brain scan from the re:vision project. (Image credit: Luca Kämmer and Martin Hebart)Solving the problem
The results of many studies that share the same issues as these papers will never be replicated and yet will be left to stand. For one thing, there's no money in replication efforts. "Grant agencies wouldn't be really excited" to fund a study whose goal was to confirm past work, Genon said. And even when these studies get done, they aren't as likely to get published when they undermine prior findings.
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Hebart and Kämmer said they have already received over a dozen applications for their project. Reception has been particularly positive among younger researchers in the field. But convincing senior scientists to retest their data might take more work because they have more to lose if their long-standing finding is ultimately not replicated, Kämmer said.
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