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Interaction effect: are you doing the right thing?
- Sara Garofalo
- Matteo Orsoni
- Francesca Starita
- Sara Giovagnoli
- Mariagrazia Benassi
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Description: How to correctly interpret interaction effects has been largely discussed in scientific literature. Nevertheless, misinterpretations are still frequently observed and neuroscience is not exempt from this trend. We revised 645 papers published from 2019 to 2020 in two of the most prestigious neuroscientific journals, namely Neuron (N = 398) and Nature Neuroscience (N = 247) pertaining to behavioral, cognitive, cellular, and molecular neuroscience, and found that, in the 93.2% of studies reporting a statistically significant interaction effect (N = 221), post-hoc pairwise comparisons were the designated method adopted to interpret its results. Given the widespread use of this approach, we aim to: (1) remark its limitations and how it can lead to misinterpretations of the interaction effect; (2) provide more effective and powerful ways to correctly interpret interaction effects, including both explorative and model selection procedures. The paper (pubblished at https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0271668) provides practical examples and freely accessible online materials to reproduce all analyses reported in R, Jamovi, and Jasp software (https://osf.io/ya9mp/).
Check-out the accompanying peer-reviewed paper:
Garofalo, S., Giovagnoli, S., Orsoni, M., Starita, F., & Benassi, M. (2022). Interaction effect: Are you doing the right thing? PLOS ONE, 17(7), e0271668. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0271668