Female rodents are not more variable than male rodents: A meta-analysis of preclinical studies of fear and anxiety.

Recent meta-analyses have demonstrated that data from female rodents, tested without regard for estrous stage, is no more variable than male data across a range of traits. Nonetheless, widespread use of male-only samples persists in preclinical studies of anxiety disorders, despite this condition being twice more prevalent amongst women relative to men. We conducted a meta-analysis of over 4900 data points obtained from 263 articles assessing behavioural measures of fear and anxiety in rodents.

Always look on the bright side of logic? Testing explanations of intuitive sensitivity to logic in perceptual tasks.

Much recent research and theorizing in the field of reasoning has been concerned with intuitive sensitivity to logical validity, such as the logic-brightness effect, in which logically valid arguments are judged to have a "brighter" typeface than invalid arguments. We propose and test a novel signal competition account of this phenomenon. Our account makes two assumptions: (a) as per the demands of the logic-brightness task, people attempt to find a perceptual signal to guide brightness judgments, but (b) when the perceptual signal is hard to discern, they instead attend to cues such as argument validity.