Stable | Sau-Chin Chen's Website

Justify Your Alpha

Sun, 09 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This project responds to the widely discussed proposal by Benjamin et al. (2018, Nature Human Behaviour) to redefine statistical significance by lowering the conventional alpha threshold to p ≤ .005. Rather than adopting a single fixed threshold, the collaborating authors argue that researchers should transparently report and justify the alpha level chosen for a given study, treating the significance threshold as a design decision that depends on context rather than a universal constant.

Sau-Chin Chen is a co-author of this large multi-author methodology project, which brought together statisticians and methodologists across many institutions to formulate a shared position on error control in study design.

The project’s significance lies in shifting the debate on statistical significance away from a search for a single “correct” threshold and toward a broader emphasis on transparency and justification in research design choices, a position that has since informed wider discussions of statistical practice.

Status: Stable — completed and archived on OSF.

Investigating Object Orientation Effects Across 14 Languages

Wed, 08 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This project, PSA 002 of the Psychological Science Accelerator, examined whether people mentally simulate the orientation of objects while reading sentences that describe them, extending decades of research on mental simulation in language comprehension. Earlier work using the sentence-picture verification task had found robust match advantages for shape, color, and size, but evidence for orientation was limited and confined mostly to Western samples. The study combined a large cross-linguistic replication with a mental rotation task to relate individual differences in mental imagery to the strength of the orientation effect.

Sau-Chin Chen proposed and led this project as a large-scale, multi-laboratory collaboration coordinated through the Psychological Science Accelerator network, bringing together dozens of contributing labs and languages. The resulting registered report, covering 18 languages and nearly 4,000 participants, was published as Investigating object orientation effects across 18 languages in Current Psychology (2025).

By testing the same paradigm across speakers of many different languages, the project offered one of the most direct tests to date of whether object-orientation simulation generalizes beyond the languages in which it was first documented, and it produced a well-powered dataset connecting the phenomenon to individual differences in mental imagery ability.

Status: Stable — completed and archived on OSF.

EXPPSY Opensci: An Open Textbook for Experimental Psychology Methods

Mon, 23 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

EXPPSY Opensci is an open-source textbook on experimental psychology methods, built on R Markdown and the booktem template. It is published as a browsable online book so students and instructors can read the material directly without building it locally.

The book targets students learning the logic and practice of experimental design in psychology, and it is structured so that the source repository can reproduce the published site end to end.

Status: Stable — content is complete and the repository is kept available with no active new-chapter development.

Teaching Experimental Psychology in Taiwan

Mon, 24 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This project collects the OSF-based experimental psychology course projects that Sau-Chin Chen has taught at Tzu-Chi University over several academic years, gathering student and course materials produced as part of hands-on training in open research practices.

As the instructor, Sau-Chin Chen created and maintains this parent OSF node as a running archive, adding course projects from successive years of teaching experimental psychology to undergraduate students.

The collection illustrates a sustained effort to integrate open science practices, including preregistration and data sharing through OSF, directly into undergraduate experimental psychology training rather than treating them as separate add-on skills.

Status: Stable — an ongoing teaching archive, updated as new course years are added.

Basic Statistics for Psychological Science (OSF Companion)

Fri, 07 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This project is the OSF companion to Sau-Chin Chen’s online statistics textbook for psychological science, hosting the demonstration materials and downloadable exercise modules that accompany the text.

Sau-Chin Chen created and maintains this project as an instructor, using it to distribute datasets and practice modules that let students apply the concepts covered in the textbook directly.

By keeping the practical materials on OSF, the project makes the exercises openly accessible and reusable alongside the textbook, supporting students learning basic statistics for psychological research.

Status: Stable — a companion resource maintained alongside the textbook.

Translation Project: Improving Your Statistical Inferences

Thu, 10 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This project coordinated a collaborative effort to translate Daniël Lakens' well-known Coursera course, “Improving Your Statistical Inferences,” into Chinese, aiming to bring its material on statistical inference and research methodology to a wider Chinese-speaking audience.

Sau-Chin Chen organized this project as a community translation effort, working with other contributors on OSF to push the course’s content out to a broader audience beyond its original English-language delivery.

The project reflects a community-driven contribution to open statistics education, extending the reach of well-regarded methodology training materials across a language barrier.

Status: Stable — completed and archived on OSF.