What's the News: A new study suggests that watching brain activity when subjects are shown images of naked children can identify which are pedophiles. But what does this really mean in practical terms? How the Heck:
24 self-identified pedophiles, from a clinic that offers anonymous treatment, and 32 male controls were shown pictures of naked men, women, and children. Blogger Neuroskeptic, who brought this study to the web's attention, notes in an aside that getting that past a university ethics board is quite a coup.
Using fMRI, the researchers recorded their brains' responses and found that by comparing an individual's brain to the average of the pedophiles and the average of the controls, they could assign them to the correct group more than 90% of the time. Their handling of the statistics avoids the most obvious pitfalls: they used an analyses technique called leave-one-out cross-validation to avoid comparing a given ...
