One sample t-tests, puppies, real data.

This teaching example:

1. Is psychology research.

2. Features the actual data from the generous and helpful Dr. Bray.

3. Features GIFs. EVERYTHING is better with GIFs.

4. Includes puppies.

5. Includes a good ol' Psych Statistics standard: The one-sample t-test.

Okay, get ready.

I first learned about Dr. Emily Bray's dog cognition research via Twitter. Never let it be said that good things don't happen on Twitter. Occasionally. 

1 Dogs are known for their ability to cooperate with humans and read our social cues. But are these skills biologically prepared? To find out, we tested 375 puppies at 8.5 weeks on 4 social cognition tasks (task descriptions: https://t.co/aETequNBce) #AnimBehav2021 #Cognition pic.twitter.com/7vN2lp82Dp

— Emily Bray (@DrEmilyBray) January 27, 2021

This is such a helpful way to share your research. This example works for your Cognitive or RM classes as well as your stats class, since this thread illustrates not just her findings but her methods.

The thread also featured one-sample t-tests. Which, let's be honest, you don't find out in the wild very often despite the fact that they are almost always taught in Psychological Statistics.

2 We found that social skills are present from an early age. Puppies followed communicative cues at levels far exceeding chance expectation, and readily gazed to a person’s face during our human interest and unsolvable tasks #AnimBehav2021 #Cognition pic.twitter.com/L1TkHukbq9

— Emily Bray (@DrEmilyBray) January 27, 2021

 I'm especially fond of this example because it compares the sample data not to some value believed to be true (like "Is the average human body temperature really 98.6?"). Instead, it compares the data (proportion of successful trials for each puppy on each task) to what you would expect if there was no relationship at all: The dogs, given two options, would perform correctly on 50% of tasks. While the GIF only features a few of the tasks performed by the dogs, this table shows ALL of the one-sample t-tests you can choose from, in addition to the one illustrated in the previous tweet.

I emailed Dr. Bray and asked for the data so I could share it with you all, so your students can practice one-sample t-tests with real data. She kindly obliged (access it here).