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Investigators in the cognitive neurosciences have turned to Big Data to address persistent replication and reliability issues by increasing sample sizes, statistical power, and representativeness of data. While there is tremendous potential to advance science through open data sharing, these efforts unveil a host of new questions about how to integrate data arising from distinct sources and instruments. We focus on the most frequently assessed area of cognition - memory testing - and demonstrate a process for reliable data harmonization across three common measures. We aggregated raw data from 53 studies from around the world which measured at least one of three distinct verbal learning tasks, totaling N = 10,505 healthy and brain-injured individuals. A mega analysis was conducted using empirical bayes harmonization to isolate and remove site effects, followed by linear models which adjusted for common covariates. After corrections, a continuous item response theory (IRT) model estimated each individual subject’s latent verbal learning ability while accounting for item difficulties. Harmonization significantly reduced inter-site variance by 37% while preserving covariate effects. The effects of age, sex, and education on scores were found to be highly consistent across memory tests. IRT methods for equating scores across AVLTs agreed with held-out data of dually-administered tests, and these tools are made available for free online. This work demonstrates that large-scale data sharing and harmonization initiatives can offer opportunities to address reproducibility and integration challenges across the behavioral sciences.
This study is a contribution to the knowledge of the weevil species present in the State of Guanajuato, Mexico. During this study, 73 genera and 125 species were identified. The subfamilies best represented were Baridinae, Curculioninae and Entiminae with 24, 24 and 23 species, respectively. The genera best represented were Geraeus and Anthonomus with seven species and Conotrachelus with six, Of the 125 species identified, 18 represent new country records. Of the weevil species found in Guanajuato, 53.7% are Neotropical, 26% are Nearctic, 18.4% are cosmopolitan, and the remainder (1.9%) previously were known only from the West Indies.
Four species of Anchonus Schonherr occur in Florida: A. flol'idanus Schwarz, A. dul'yi Blatchley, A. blatchleyi Sleeper, and A. suillus (Fabricius), which is recorded from Florida and the continental United States for the first time. The species are distinguished in a key and illustrated. A lectotype is selected for A. floridanus.