Errors in the Brown et al. critical reanalysis

Brown et al. (1) critique our previous report (2) and judge the results “no more than the product of chance.” We share Brown et al.’s interest in protecting the field against false claims and appreciate their desire to ground their evaluation in reanalysis of our data. However, we have discovered that Brown et al.’s reanalysis itself contains major statistical and factual errors that ultimately invalidate their conclusions [as do new data replicating (2)]. One major error involves the “bitmapping” analysis Brown et al. (1) purport shows inflated false-positive error rates for our approach. Their bitmapping does not involve random sampling of observations (the only valid method for gauging analytic error) (3, …