On 2017 Feb 08, Lydia Maniatis commented:

To make clear what Adamian and Cavanagh (2017) do, and what they don’t do, in this publication. What they don’t do is to test a hypothesis. What they do is present a casual, ad hoc explanation of the Frohlich effect based on the results of past experiments, which they replicate here. The proposal remains untested. Even the ad hoc, untested assumptions (“we assume that the critical delay in producing the Fröhlich effect is not just the delay of attention in arriving at the target but also the time a saccade would then need to land on the target, if one were executed;”) can’t explain the results of their experiments, requiring more ad hoc proposals about complex processes: “The results suggest that the simultaneous onsets may be held in iconic memory and the cued motion trajectory can be retrieved if the cue arrives soon enough;” “A late SOA implies a longer memory retention period, and that means that the reported shifts could arise from working memory limitations and might not be perceptual in nature.”

Is Adamian and Cavanagh’s assumption that “the critical delay is not just the delay of attention….but also the time a saccade would then need to land on the target…” testable?

How would one go about testing it, as well as the additional assumptions the authors feel obliged to make with respect to memory?

Why didn’t the authors attempt to test their proposal to begin with, rather than simply performing replications that, even if successful, could do no more than leave the issue unresolved? They have not even proposed possible tests.

Obviously, replication was the safer choice, but one, again, that is essentially uninformative vis a vis an ad hoc proposal. It should be clear that the subject of eye movements and their role in perception is extremely complex and that casual speculations are unlikely to be borne out, if properly tested.

I think Adamian and Cavanagh’s proposal is so vague, the confounds so many, and (least of all, at present) the technical demands so great, that it cannot be tested. If all of the main and subsidiary assumptions, and their implications, were clarified enough to allow them to be critically assessed for logical coherence and consistency with other known facts, it might well fail at this stage, obviating the need for experimental tests.

Of course, I could be wrong in the present case; the authors may intend, post-replication, to attempt to concretize and subject their proposal to a genuine test; that would be genuinely refreshing.

I would note, as an afterthought, the uninformative nature of the title of the article, which is typical of many vision science articles and reflects the essentially uninformative nature of the work itself. The title tells us what the article is about, but not what it concluded or implied.

On 2017 Feb 08, Lydia Maniatis commented:

To make clear what Adamian and Cavanagh (2017) do, and what they don’t do, in this publication. What they don’t do is to test a hypothesis. What they do is present a casual, ad hoc explanation of the Frohlich effect based on the results of past experiments, which they replicate here. The proposal remains untested. Even the ad hoc, untested assumptions (“we assume that the critical delay in producing the Fröhlich effect is not just the delay of attention in arriving at the target but also the time a saccade would then need to land on the target, if one were executed;”) can’t explain the results of their experiments, requiring more ad hoc proposals about complex processes: “The results suggest that the simultaneous onsets may be held in iconic memory and the cued motion trajectory can be retrieved if the cue arrives soon enough;” “A late SOA implies a longer memory retention period, and that means that the reported shifts could arise from working memory limitations and might not be perceptual in nature.”

Is Adamian and Cavanagh’s assumption that “the critical delay is not just the delay of attention….but also the time a saccade would then need to land on the target…” testable?

How would one go about testing it, as well as the additional assumptions the authors feel obliged to make with respect to memory?

Why didn’t the authors attempt to test their proposal to begin with, rather than simply performing replications that, even if successful, could do no more than leave the issue unresolved? They have not even proposed possible tests.

Obviously, replication was the safer choice, but one, again, that is essentially uninformative vis a vis an ad hoc proposal. It should be clear that the subject of eye movements and their role in perception is extremely complex and that casual speculations are unlikely to be borne out, if properly tested.

I think Adamian and Cavanagh’s proposal is so vague, the confounds so many, and (least of all, at present) the technical demands so great, that it cannot be tested. If all of the main and subsidiary assumptions, and their implications, were clarified enough to allow them to be critically assessed for logical coherence and consistency with other known facts, it might well fail at this stage, obviating the need for experimental tests.

Of course, I could be wrong in the present case; the authors may intend, post-replication, to attempt to concretize and subject their proposal to a genuine test; that would be genuinely refreshing.

I would note, as an afterthought, the uninformative nature of the title of the article, which is typical of many vision science articles and reflects the essentially uninformative nature of the work itself. The title tells us what the article is about, but not what it concluded or implied.