Effect size and statistical power in the rodent fear conditioning literature - A systematic review.

ABSTRACT: Proposals to increase research reproducibility frequently call for focusing on effect sizes instead of p values, as well as for increasing the statistical power of experiments. However, it is unclear to what extent these two concepts are indeed taken into account in basic biomedical science. To study this in a real-case scenario, we performed a systematic review of effect sizes and statistical power in studies on learning of rodent fear conditioning, a widely used behavioral task to evaluate memory. Our search criteria yielded 410 experiments comparing control and treated groups in 122 articles. Interventions had a mean effect size of 29.5%, and amnesia caused by memory-impairing interventions was nearly always partial. Mean statistical power to detect the average effect size observed in w

SUBMITTER: Carneiro CFD 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5919667 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature