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Low experimental power makes a crisis in visual attention inevitable, but easy to address

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 November 2025

Gregory Francis  and
Evelina Thunell Open the ORCID record for Evelina Thunell [Opens in a new window]
Gregory Francis*
Affiliation:
Purdue University, Psychological Sciences, West Lafayette, IN, USA gfrancis@purdue.edu
Evelina Thunell
Affiliation:
Karolinska Institutet, Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Stockholm, Sweden evelina.thunell@ki.se
*
*Corresponding author.
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Abstract

We suggest that the crisis in visual attention is caused by problems prevalent in many other areas of psychology: low-power experiments and questionable research practices. We demonstrate that many attention experiments use sample sizes that are several orders of magnitude too small and argue that it is unreasonable to expect theoretical clarity based on such unreliable empirical data.

Information

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 48 , 2025 , e140
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press

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