Mixed News about the Bad News Game.

Basol et al. (2020) tested the "the Bad News Game" (BNG), an app designed to improve ability to spot false claims on social media. Participants rated simulated Tweets, then played either the BNG or an unrelated game, then re-rated the Tweets.

Variability across subjects in free recall versus cued recall.

Memory scientists usually compare mean performance on some measure(s) (accuracy, confidence, latency) as a function of experimental condition. Some researchers have made within-subject variability in task performance a focal outcome measure (e.g.

A direct replication and extension of Popp and Serra (2016, experiment 1): better free recall and worse cued recall of animal names than object names, accounting for semantic similarity.

Introduction: Free recall tends to be better for names of animate concepts such as animals than for names of inanimate objects. In Popp and Serra's 2016 article, the authors replicated this "animacy effect" in free recall but when participants studied words in pairs (animate-animate pairs intermixed with inanimate-inanimate pairs) and were tested with cued recall, performance was better for inanimate-inanimate pairs than for animate-animate pairs ("reverse animacy"). We tested the replicability of this surprising effect and one possible explanation for the effect (semantic similarity).

The effect of pre-event instructions on eyewitness identification.

Research on eyewitness identification often involves exposing participants to a simulated crime and later testing memory using a lineup. We conducted a systematic review showing that pre-event instructions, instructions given before event exposure, are rarely reported and those that are reported vary in the extent to which they warn participants about the nature of the event or tasks. At odds with the experience of actual witnesses, some studies use pre-event instructions explicitly warning participants of the upcoming crime and lineup task.