A paper in Cognition by Harvard professor Marc Hauser and others has been retracted:
The paper tested cotton-top tamarin monkeys’ ability to learn generalized patterns, an ability that human infants had been found to have, and that may be critical for learning language. The paper found that the monkeys were able to learn patterns, suggesting that this was not the critical cognitive building block that explains humans’ ability to learn language.
The note to be published about the retraction says almost nothing about why: “An internal examination at Harvard University . . . found that the data do not support the reported findings.”
Several other papers from Hauser’s lab have also been questioned.
The usual explanation would be that someone in Hauser’s lab made the results better than they actually were. A co-author of the paper said Hauser had told him “there were problems with the videotape record of the study”. That’s consistent with the usual explanation: Someone edited the tapes (via deletions) to make the results appear better than they were. But it’s also possible that many tapes are missing, which might be an accident. When The New Yorker archives were moved from Building A to Building B several years ago, much of the archives was lost.
Thanks to Aaron Blaisdell.