The COVID-19 vaccine communication handbook. A practical guide for improving vaccine communication and fighting misinformation

This handbook is for journalists, doctors, nurses, policy makers, researchers, teachers, students, parents – in short, it’s for everyone who wants to know more: About the COVID-19 vaccines; How to talk to others about them; How to challenge misinformation about the vaccines.Published versio

Evidence accumulation models with R: A practical guide to hierarchical Bayesian methods

Evidence accumulation models are a useful tool to allow researchers to investigate the latent cognitive variables that underlie response time and response accuracy. However, applying evidence accumulation models can be difficult because they lack easily computable forms. Numerical methods are required to determine the parameters of evidence accumulation that best correspond to the fitted data. When applied to complex cognitive models, such numerical methods can require substantial computational power which can lead to infeasibly long compute times. In this paper, we provide efficient, practical software and a step-by-step guide to fit evidence accumulation models with Bayesian methods. The software, written in C++, is provided in an R package: 'ggdmc'. The software incorporates three important ingredients of Bayesian computation, (1) the likelihood functions of two common response time models, (2) the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm (3) a population-based MCMC sampling method. The software has gone through stringent checks to be hosted on the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) and is free to download. We illustrate its basic use and an example of fitting complex hierarchical Wiener diffusion models to four shooting-decision data sets

Using social and behavioural science to support COVID-19 pandemic response

The COVID-19 pandemic represents a massive global health crisis. Because the crisis requires large-scale behaviour change and places significant psychological burdens on individuals, insights from the social and behavioural sciences can be used to help align human behavior with the recommendations of epidemiologists and public health experts. Here we discuss evidence from a selection of research topics relevant to pandemics, including work on navigating threats, social and cultural influences on behaviour, science communication, moral decision-making, leadership, and stress and coping. In each section, we note the nature and quality of prior research, including uncertainty and unsettled issues. We identify several insights for effective response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and also highlight important gaps researchers should move quickly to fill in the coming weeks and months

Science Communication as a Collective Intelligence Endeavor: A Manifesto and Examples for Implementation

Effective science communication is challenging when scientific messages are informed by a continually updating evidence base and must often compete against misinformation. We argue that we need a new program of science communication as collective intelligence—a collaborative approach, supported by technology. This would have four key advantages over the typical model where scientists communicate as individuals: scientific messages would be informed by (a) a wider base of aggregated knowledge, (b) contributions from a diverse scientific community, (c) participatory input from stakeholders, and (d) better responsiveness to ongoing changes in the state of knowledge

Fluids and barriers of the CNS: a historical viewpoint

Tracing the exact origins of modern science can be a difficult but rewarding pursuit. It is possible for the astute reader to follow the background of any subject through the many important surviving texts from the classical and ancient world. While empirical investigations have been described by many since the time of Aristotle and scientific methods have been employed since the Middle Ages, the beginnings of modern science are generally accepted to have originated during the 'scientific revolution' of the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe. The scientific method is so fundamental to modern science that some philosophers consider earlier investigations as 'pre-science'. Notwithstanding this, the insight that can be gained from the study of the beginnings of a subject can prove important in the understanding of work more recently completed. As this journal undergoes an expansion in focus and nomenclature from cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) into all barriers of the central nervous system (CNS), this review traces the history of both the blood-CSF and blood-brain barriers from as early as it was possible to find references, to the time when modern concepts were established at the beginning of the 20th century