REPUBLISHED WITH PERMISSION,
PSYCHOL SCI, DOI:10.1177/0956797620916786, 2020
When Maxwell Elliott’s latest research paper began making the rounds on Twitter last June, he wasn’t sure how he felt.
Elliott, a graduate student in clinical psychology in Ahmad Hariri’s lab at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, studies functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and how it can be used to better understand neurological conditions such as dementia and autism.
He was excited that this “nitty-gritty” aspect of the field, as he describes it, was garnering a bit more attention, but the reason for the buzz disappointed him: A news outlet had picked up the story and run it with an overstated headline: “Duke University researchers say every brain activity study you’ve ever read is wrong.”