Confidence Intervals from Normalized Data: A correction to Cousineau (2005)

Abstract

Presenting confidence intervals around means is a common method of expressing uncertainty in data. Loftus and Masson (1994) describe confidence intervals for means in within-subjects designs. These confidence intervals are based on the ANOVA mean squared error. Cousineau (2005) presents an alternative to the Loftus and Masson method, but his method produces confidence intervals that are smaller than those of Loftus and Masson. I show why this is the case and offer a simple correction that makes the expected size of Cousineau confidence intervals the same as that of Loftus and Masson confidence intervals. Confidence intervals (CIs) are a staple in the presentation of psychological data because they allow researchers to quickly gage the amount of uncertainty in data (Rouder & Morey, 2005). For within-subjects designs, there are several approaches to creating confidence intervals. For a given design it may not be clear which to choose. Consider a simple within-subjects design with two conditions, a pre-test and post-test. For this design, there are multiple methods of generating confidence intervals. I will discuss each in turn. Approaches to confidence intervals The standard way to build confidence intervals is to compute the standard error of the mean for each condition, and multiply it by the appropriate t-distribution quantile. In order to make this concrete, Table 1 lists hypothetical data for N = 10 participants. A paired t-test reveals a significant effect of condition (MSE = 5:19; t(9) = 3:65; p =:005;