The tainted altruism effect: a successful pre-registered replication.

Newman and Cain (Newman, Cain 2014 , 648-655 (doi:10.1177/0956797613504785)) reported that observers view a person's choices as less ethical when that person has acted in response to both altruistic and selfish (commercial) motivations, as compared with purely selfish interests. The altruistic component reduces the observers' approval rather than raising it.

Mitigating cue competition effects in human category learning.

When people learn perceptual categories, if one feature makes it easy to determine the category membership, learning about other features can be reduced. In three experiments, we asked whether this cue competition effect could be fully eradicated with simple instructions. For this purpose, in a pilot experiment, we adapted a classical overshadowing paradigm into a human category learning task.

Author Correction: A consensus-based transparency checklist.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

A consensus-based transparency checklist.

We present a consensus-based checklist to improve and document the transparency of research reports in social and behavioural research. An accompanying online application allows users to complete the form and generate a report that they can submit with their manuscript or post to a public repository.

Perceptions of newsworthiness are contaminated by a political usefulness bias.

Are people's perceptions of the newsworthiness of events biased by a tendency to rate as more important any news story that seems likely to lead others to share their own political attitudes? To assess this, we created six pairs of hypothetical news stories, each describing an event that seemed likely to encourage people to adopt attitudes on the opposite side of a particular controversial issue (e.g. affirmative action and gay marriage).

How effective is incidental learning of the shape of probability distributions?

The idea that people learn detailed probabilistic generative models of the environments they interact with is intuitively appealing, and has received support from recent studies of implicit knowledge acquired in daily life. The goal of this study was to see whether people efficiently induce a probability distribution based upon incidental exposure to an unknown generative process. Subjects played a 'whack-a-mole' game in which they attempted to click on objects appearing briefly, one at a time on the screen.

Learning to exploit a hidden predictor in skill acquisition: Tight linkage to conscious awareness.

It is often assumed that implicit learning of skills based on predictive relationships proceeds independently of awareness. To test this idea, four groups of subjects played a game in which a fast-moving "demon" made a brief appearance at the bottom of the computer screen, then disappeared behind a V-shaped occluder, and finally re-appeared briefly on either the upper-left or upper-right quadrant of the screen. Points were scored by clicking on the demon during the final reappearance phase.

With practice, keyboard shortcuts become faster than menu selection: A crossover interaction.

It is widely believed that a graphical user interface (GUI) is superior to a command line interface (CLI) for novice users, but less efficient than the CLI after practice. However, there appears to be no detailed study of the crossover interaction that this implies. The rate of learning may shed light on the reluctance of experienced users to adopt keyboard shortcuts, even though, when mastered, shortcut use would reduce task completion times.

Fragile associations coexist with robust memories for precise details in long-term memory.

What happens to memories as we forget? They might gradually lose fidelity, lose their associations (and thus be retrieved in response to the incorrect cues), or be completely lost. Typical long-term memory studies assess memory as a binary outcome (correct/incorrect), and cannot distinguish these different kinds of forgetting. Here we assess long-term memory for scalar information, thus allowing us to quantify how different sources of error diminish as we learn, and accumulate as we forget.

Do subtle reminders of money change people's political views?

A number of researchers have reported studies showing that subtle reminders of money can alter behaviors and beliefs that are seemingly unrelated to money. In 1 set of studies published in this journal, Caruso, Vohs, Baxter, and Waytz (2013) found that incidental exposures to money led subjects to indicate greater support for inequality, socioeconomic differences, group-based discrimination, and free market economies. We conducted high-powered replication attempts of these 4 money priming effects and found no evidence of priming (weighted Cohen's d = 0.

Elastic analysis procedures: an incurable (but preventable) problem in the fertility effect literature. Comment on Gildersleeve, Haselton, and Fales (2014).

Gildersleeve, Haselton, and Fales (2014) presented a meta-analysis of the effects of fertility on mate preferences in women. Research in this area has categorized fertility using a great variety of methods, chiefly based on self-reported cycle length and time since last menses. We argue that this literature is particularly prone to hidden experimenter degrees of freedom.

Retrieval practice: the lack of transfer to deductive inferences.

Retrieval practice has been shown to enhance later recall of information reviewed through testing, whereas final-test measures involving making inferences from the learned information have produced mixed results. In four experiments, we examined whether the benefits of retrieval practice could transfer to deductive inferences. Participants studied a set of related premises and then reviewed these premises either by rereading or by taking fill-in-the-blank tests.

Retrieval practice over the long term: should spacing be expanding or equal-interval?

If multiple opportunities are available to review to-be-learned material, should a review occur soon after initial study and recur at progressively expanding intervals, or should the reviews occur at equal intervals? Landauer and Bjork (1978) argued for the superiority of expanding intervals, whereas more recent research has often failed to find any advantage. However, these prior studies have generally compared expanding versus equal-interval training within a single session, and have assessed effects only upon a single final test. We argue that a more generally important goal would be to maintain high average performance over a considerable period of training.

Improving students' long-term knowledge retention through personalized review.

Human memory is imperfect; thus, periodic review is required for the long-term preservation of knowledge and skills. However, students at every educational level are challenged by an ever-growing amount of material to review and an ongoing imperative to master new material. We developed a method for efficient, systematic, personalized review that combines statistical techniques for inferring individual differences with a psychological theory of memory.

The specificity of learned parallelism in dual-memory retrieval.

Retrieval of two responses from one visually presented cue occurs sequentially at the outset of dual-retrieval practice. Exclusively for subjects who adopt a mode of grouping (i.e.

Two failures to replicate high-performance-goal priming effects.

Bargh et al. (2001) reported two experiments in which people were exposed to words related to achievement (e.g.

Reviewing erroneous information facilitates memory updating.

Reviewing information stored in memory will generally strengthen that information, so it seems reasonable that reviews should make it harder to replace the information in memory if it is later found to be erroneous. In Experiment 1, subjects learned three facts about each of 12 topics. On Day 2, the same facts were either reread, tested, or not reviewed; then the facts were "corrected" with new replacement facts.

Divided attention: an undesirable difficulty in memory retention.

How can we improve memory retention? A large body of research has suggested that difficulty encountered during learning, such as when practice sessions are distributed rather than massed, can enhance later memory performance (see R. A. Bjork & E.

Don't just repeat after me: retrieval practice is better than imitation for foreign vocabulary learning.

Second language (L2) instruction programs often ask learners to repeat aloud words spoken by a native speaker. However, recent research on retrieval practice has suggested that imitating native pronunciation might be less effective than drill instruction, wherein the learner is required to produce the L2 words from memory (and given feedback). We contrasted the effectiveness of imitation and retrieval practice drills on learning L2 spoken vocabulary.

Effects of extensive dual-task practice on processing stages in simultaneous choice tasks.

Schumacher et al. Psychological Science 12:101-108, (2001) demonstrated the elimination of most dual-task costs ("perfect time-sharing") after extensive dual-task practice of a visual and an auditory task in combination. For the present research, we used a transfer methodology to examine this practice effect in more detail, asking what task-processing stages were sped up by this dual-task practice.

Effects of spaced versus massed training in function learning.

A robust finding in the literature is that spacing material leads to better retention than massing; however, the benefit of spacing for concept learning is less clear. When items are massed, it may help the learner to discover the relationship between instances, leading to better abstraction of the underlying concept. Two experiments addressed this question through a typical function learning task in which subjects were trained via presentations of input points (cue values) for which output responses (criterion values) were required.

When does fading enhance perceptual category learning?

Training that uses exaggerated versions of a stimulus discrimination (fading) has sometimes been found to enhance category learning, mostly in studies involving animals and impaired populations. However, little is known about whether and when fading facilitates learning for typical individuals. This issue was explored in 7 experiments.

Is the Replicability Crisis Overblown? Three Arguments Examined.

We discuss three arguments voiced by scientists who view the current outpouring of concern about replicability as overblown. The first idea is that the adoption of a low alpha level (e.g.

Priming of social distance? Failure to replicate effects on social and food judgments.

Williams and Bargh (2008) reported an experiment in which participants were simply asked to plot a single pair of points on a piece of graph paper, with the coordinates provided by the experimenter specifying a pair of points that lay at one of three different distances (close, intermediate, or far, relative to the range available on the graph paper). The participants who had graphed a more distant pair reported themselves as being significantly less close to members of their own family than did those who had plotted a more closely-situated pair. In another experiment, people's estimates of the caloric content of different foods were reportedly altered by the same type of spatial distance priming.