The Dougherty Lab published a paper recently in Autism Research, “Erroneous inference based on a lack of preference within one group: Autism, mice, and the social approach task.” The paper looks at Erroneous Within‐group Only Comparisons, or EWOCs, a term coined by the lab to refer to a common, unsound way of interpreting behavior data when studying autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in mice.
“Overall, elimination of EWOCs and adoption of direct comparisons should result in more accurate, reliable, and reproducible data interpretations from the Social Approach Task across ASD liability models,” the team writes in the paper.
Kayla Nygaard, a graduate student in the Dougherty Lab, is first author on the paper. Susan Maloney, Instructor of Psychiatry at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and a member of the Dougherty Lab, and Joseph Dougherty, Associate Professor in the Department of Genetics at Washington University in St. Louis, are also authors on the paper. Congratulations, all!