University of Edinburgh Developmental Lab Pre-Registration Template.
[Title of your project goes here]
Rationale
In the rationale section, your should very briefly describe the background to
your study (e.g., prior work you are drawing on for your hypotheses and
methods) and describe the critical manipulations you will be performing, and the
type of data you will be collecting. This section need not be more than a few
paragraphs.
Methods
Participants
Describe and justify your sample size and sample characteristics. E.g., How many
people are you looking to include and why? Describe what type of participants
you are intending to include. It is better to use inclusive rather than exclusive
language (e.g., we aim to include native speakers of English, rather than, we will
exclude non-native speakers of English).
Design
Precisely describe your independent and dependent variables. Pay particular
attention to the type of initial data that you will be collecting during the
experiment. In the Analysis section, later, describe how that data will be
processed before statistical analysis, and analysed later.
 Independent variables:
 Dependent variables:
Materials
Precisely describe the materials for your experiment (e.g., the sentences or
pictures that are being used). Explain how they materials match up with the
design (e.g., how the structure of your sentences reflects the experimental
design, or how the pictures you are showing are divided into regions of interest
for eye tracking analysis). Explain how the materials were normed, if there was
any norming.
Procedure
1. Describe the laboratory setup. E.g., where are children tested? What is the
layout of the room? What is being measured?
2. Describe in as much detail as possible what happens when the participant
enters the lab and begins the experiment. Consider making a checklist
that the researcher goes through before running each participant. Include
that checklist with the pre-registration file.
3. If running a standard experiment, describe the trial procedure precisely,
including what is displayed to the participant and what is recorded.
4. How will the experimenter be blind to conditions, if they are? How are
participants assigned to different conditions?
Analysis
University of Edinburgh Developmental Lab Pre-Registration Template.
Describe, in as much detail as possible, how the raw data is processed to a form
suitable for analysis. For instance, if you are collecting eye movement measures,
what data will you be extracting from the eye tracker? Will you be working with
the raw data, or will you be transforming it in some way (e.g., looking at
measures of saccades)? If the latter, how are those transformations done (e.g.,
using EyeLink software)?
State the statistical analyses that you plan to do. If you are using R, you can write
down the models that you plan to test. In an ideal world, you would write down
all of your R code ahead of time.
Make sure to precisely state any exclusion criteria (e.g., excluding trials in which
participants fail to look at the screen for more than 60% of the trial, excluding
participants who have more than 25% of excluded trials, etc). If you are going to
exclude participants for fussiness of failing to follow instructions, write down
some indicators of what might count as fussiness.
Consider drawing a graph to illustrate your predictions. Make sure to label your
axes properly.
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