ArticlePsychonomic bulletin & review2018
Small is beautiful: In defense of the small-N design.
Article in Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. It is linked to 6 registered trials, which are not on this map. Cited by 163 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Probing the Role of Feature Dimension Maps in Visual Cognition: Expt 1.1
Probing the Role of Feature Dimension Maps in Visual Cognition: Expt 2.1
Probing the Role of Feature Dimension Maps in Visual Cognition: Expt 2.3
Probing the Role of Feature Dimension Maps in Visual Cognition: Expt 3.1 (Pilot)
Probing the Role of Feature Dimension Maps in Visual Cognition: Expt 1.1 (Behavioral)
Probing the Role of Feature Dimension Maps in Visual Cognition: Expt 2.2
Who cites it
163 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Pooled it
- Trial
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- Learned foveal representations, not gaze-mediated information access, underlie perceptual advantages for canonical face configurations.Journal of vision · 2026Article
- Designing research interfaces for non-human minds: a biocentric design approach for animal cognition research.Animal cognition · 2026Review
- Evidence against independence of peripheral latencies and central threshold in temporal-order perception.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Article
- Unconscious cognition without post hoc selection artifacts: From selective analysis to functional dissociations.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Second-order facial features are processed analytically in composite faces.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2025Article
- Spatiotemporal Evidence Accumulation Through Saccadic Sampling for Object Recognition.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Urgency overpowers cognitive control by amplifying cognitive processing asymmetries.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2025Article
- How strong is the rhythm of perception? A registered replication of HickokRoyal Society open science · 2025Article
- Sample size matters when estimating test-retest reliability of behaviour.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
- Spatiotemporal survival analysis for movement trajectory tracking in virtual reality.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Attention Rhythmically Shapes Sensory Tuning.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- A solution to the pervasive problem of response bias in self-reports.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Review
- Limitation of switching sensory information flow in flexible perceptual decision making.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Article
- The Effects of Visual Behavior and Ego-Movement on Foveated Rendering Performance in Virtual Reality.SN computer science · 2025Article
103 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The dominant paradigm for inference in psychology is a null-hypothesis significance testing one. Recently, the foundations of this paradigm have been shaken by several notable replication failures. One recommendation to remedy the replication crisis is to collect larger samples of participants. We argue that this recommendation misses a critical point, which is that increasing sample size will not remedy psychology's lack of strong measurement, lack of strong theories and models, and lack of effective experimental control over error variance. In contrast, there is a long history of research in psychology employing small-N designs that treats the individual participant as the replication unit, which addresses each of these failings, and which produces results that are robust and readily replicated. We illustrate the properties of small-N and large-N designs using a simulated paradigm investigating the stage structure of response times. Our simulations highlight the high power and inferential validity of the small-N design, in contrast to the lower power and inferential indeterminacy of the large-N design. We argue that, if psychology is to be a mature quantitative science, then its primary theoretical aim should be to investigate systematic, functional relationships as they are manifested at the individual participant level and that, wherever possible, it should use methods that are optimized to identify relationships of this kind.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.