Turmoil has engulfed psychological science. Causes and consequences of the reproducibility crisis are in dispute. With the hope of addressing some of its aspects, Bayesian methods are gaining increasing attention in psychological science. Some of their advantages, as opposed to the frequentist framework, are the ability to describe parameters in probabilistic terms and explicitly incorporate prior knowledge about them into the model. These issues are crucial in particular regarding the current debate about statistical significance. Bayesian methods are not necessarily the only remedy against incorrect interpretations or wrong conclusions, but there is an increasing agreement that they are one of the keys to avoid such fallacies. Nevertheless, its flexible nature is its power and weakness, for there is no agreement about what indices of “significance” should be computed or reported. This lack of a consensual index or guidelines, such as the frequentist p-value, further contributes to the unnecessary opacity that many non-familiar readers perceive in Bayesian statistics. Thus, this study describes and compares several Bayesian indices, provide intuitive visual representation of their “behavior” in relationship with common sources of variance such as sample size, magnitude of effects and also frequentist significance. The results contribute to the development of an intuitive understanding of the values that researchers report, allowing to draw sensible recommendations for Bayesian statistics description, critical for the standardization of scientific reporting.

The use of heart rate variability (HRV) in research has been greatly popularized over the past decades due to the ease and affordability of HRV collection, coupled with its clinical relevance and significant relationships with psychophysiological constructs and psychopathological disorders. Despite the wide use of electrocardiograms (ECG) in research and advancements in sensor technology, the analytical approach and steps applied to obtain HRV measures can be seen as complex. Thus, this poses a challenge to users who may not have the adequate background knowledge to obtain the HRV indices reliably. To maximize the impact of HRV-related research and its reproducibility, parallel advances in users’ understanding of the indices and the standardization of analysis pipelines in its utility will be crucial. This paper addresses this gap and aims to provide an overview of the most up-to-date and commonly used HRV indices, as well as common research areas in which these indices have proven to be very useful, particularly in psychology. In addition, we also provide a step-by-step guide on how to perform HRV analysis using an integrative neurophysiological toolkit, NeuroKit2.

A growing interest in cerebellar function and its involvement in higher cognition have prompted much research in recent years. Cerebellar presence in a wide range of cognitive functions examined within an increasing body of neuroimaging literature has been observed. We applied a meta‐analytic approach, which employed the activation likelihood estimate method, to consolidate results of cerebellar involvement accumulated in different cognitive tasks of interest and systematically identified similarities among the studies. The current analysis included 88 neuroimaging studies demonstrating cerebellar activations in higher cognitive domains involving emotion, executive function, language, music, timing and working memory. While largely consistent with a prior meta‐analysis by Stoodley and Schmahmann (: Neuroimage 44:489‐501), our results extended their findings to include music and timing domains to provide further insights into cerebellar involvement and elucidate its role in higher cognition. In addition, we conducted inter‐ and intradomain comparisons for the cognitive domains of emotion, language, and working memory. We also considered task differences within the domain of verbal working memory by conducting a comparison of the Sternberg with the n‐back task, as well as an analysis of the differential components within the Sternberg task. Results showed a consistent cerebellar presence in the timing domain, providing evidence for a role in time keeping. Unique clusters identified within the domain further refine the topographic organization of the cerebellum. Hum Brain Mapp 35:593–615, 2014.