ArticlePsychological methods2021
Power contours: Optimising sample size and precision in experimental psychology and human neuroscience.
Article in Psychological methods, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 111 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
111 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
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- EEG microstate reconfiguration across cognitive states in preschool children with developmental language disorder.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2026Article
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- The individual-level precision of implicit measures.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
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- Attention Modulates Stimulus Representations in Neural Feature Dimension Maps.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2025Article
- Temporal momentum: an online replication and beyond.Psychological research · 2025Article
51 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
When designing experimental studies with human participants, experimenters must decide how many trials each participant will complete, as well as how many participants to test. Most discussion of statistical power (the ability of a study design to detect an effect) has focused on sample size, and assumed sufficient trials. Here we explore the influence of both factors on statistical power, represented as a 2-dimensional plot on which iso-power contours can be visualized. We demonstrate the conditions under which the number of trials is particularly important, that is, when the within-participant variance is large relative to the between-participants variance. We then derive power contour plots using existing data sets for 8 experimental paradigms and methodologies (including reaction times, sensory thresholds, fMRI, MEG, and EEG), and provide example code to calculate estimates of the within- and between-participants variance for each method. In all cases, the within-participant variance was larger than the between-participants variance, meaning that the number of trials has a meaningful influence on statistical power in commonly used paradigms. An online tool is provided (https://shiny.york.ac.uk/powercontours/) for generating power contours, from which the optimal combination of trials and participants can be calculated when designing future studies. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).
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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.