The Aging & Cognition 2017 Conference took place in Zurich, April 20-22. There were a number of very interesting talks and posters, including very informative overview talks by Matthias Mehl, on ecological sampling to examine effects of aging in everyday life activities and cognition, and Steven Boker, on dynamic systems and distributed testing.

Baker’s report on distributed testing was particular interesting because it introduced the idea of reversing the usual experimenter-participant relation, in which the participants provide data which the experimenter analyses and archives. In Boker’s proof-of-concept study an experiment was distributed on the internet and participants were tested by interacting with a computer program on a portable device that also conducted data analysis autonomously; summary results (i.e., model likelihoods) were then automatically returned to the experimenter, such that the data was kept by the participant at all time. This type of procedure happens to have some nice statistical properties (due to model averaging) and allows participants to never give up their data (which could be particularly interesting for sensitive data about wealth or health). There are of course, some downsides to this as well, for example, one won’t necessarily be able to replicate results if participants withdraw data access at some point during or after data collection.

Of course, even in our post-factual world, scientists aren’t likely to give up control over their data anytime soon – after all, “data is the new oil”!