Subject: Re: Experiments with large N From: Henkjan Honing <honing@xxxxxxxx> Date: Wed, 6 Feb 2008 17:34:39 +0100 List-Archive:<http://lists.mcgill.ca/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=AUDITORY>See related discussion just published in Empirical Musicology Review: http://emusicology.org/v3n1/ hh On 3 Dec 2007, at 19:42, Robert Zatorre wrote: > Huge samples are very nice if you can get 'em, though such is not > always the case, alas. > > So one thing that I would like to see from people who do have > gigantic N is to do some analyses to determine at what point the > data reach some asymptote. In other words, if you've collected > 1,000,000 people, at what earlier point in your sampling could you > have stopped, and come to the identical conclusions with valid > statistics? > > Obviously, the answer to this question will be different for > different types of studies with different types of variance and so > forth. But having the large N allows one to perform this > calculation, so that next time one does a similar study, one could > reasonably stop after reaching a smaller and more manageable sample > size. > > Has anybody already done this for those large samples that were > recently discussed? It would be really helpful for those who cannot > always collect such samples. > > Best > > Robert > -+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ > > Robert J. Zatorre, Ph.D. > Montreal Neurological Institute > 3801 University St. > Montreal, QC Canada H3A 2B4 > phone: 1-514-398-8903 > fax: 1-514-398-1338 > e-mail: robert.zatorre@xxxxxxxx > web site: www.zlab.mcgill.ca _____________________________________________ Henkjan Honing Universiteit van Amsterdam I http://www.hum.uva.nl/mmm/hh/ I http://www.musiccognition.nl/blog _____________________________________________