Working memory (WM) bootstrapping involves an initiation of the episodic buffer by linking visuospatial and verbal WM with long-term memory. Assessments of visuospatial bootstrapping for WM have assessed a typical keypad (TKP) stimulus presentation in comparison to single display conditions, novel keypad conditions, as well as a full numeric array where numbers are presented on a number line between. Consistently, for WM recall tasks, the TKP condition has scored highest thus supporting visuospatial bootstrapping. The current experiment was designed to examine whether bootstrapping would be observed with a visual display other than the TKP. To assess the generalizability of the visuospatial bootstrapping effect, participants completed a working memory recall tasks across 3 stimulus types (TKP, Clock Face, and Single Digit). The Clock Face has similar properties to the TKP making it a viable option for exploring the visuospatial bootstrapping. Results show the bootstrapping effect generalised to the clock face display.

Replications in psychological science sometimes fail to reproduce prior findings. If replications use methods that are unfaithful to the original study or ineffective in eliciting the phenomenon of interest, then a failure to replicate may be a failure of the protocol rather than a challenge to the original finding. Formal pre-data collection peer review by experts may address shortcomings and increase replicability rates. We selected 10 replications from the Reproducibility Project: Psychology (RP:P; Open Science Collaboration, 2015) in which the original authors had expressed concerns about the replication designs before data collection and only one of which was “statistically significant” (p < .05). Commenters suggested that lack of adherence to expert review and low-powered tests were the reasons that most of these RP:P studies failed to replicate (Gilbert et al., 2016). We revised the replication protocols and received formal peer review prior to conducting new replications. We administered the RP:P and Revised protocols in multiple laboratories (Median number of laboratories per original study = 6.5; Range 3 to 9; Median total sample = 1279.5; Range 276 to 3512) for high-powered tests of each original finding with both protocols. Overall, Revised protocols produced similar effect sizes as RP:P protocols following the preregistered analysis plan (Δr = .002 or .014, depending on analytic approach). The median effect size for Revised protocols (r = .05) was similar to RP:P protocols (r = .04) and the original RP:P replications (r = .11), and smaller than the original studies (r = .37). The cumulative evidence of original study and three replication attempts suggests that effect sizes for all 10 (median r = .07; range .00 to .15) are 78% smaller on average than original findings (median r = .37; range .19 to .50), with very precisely estimated effects.

Many Labs 3 is a crowdsourced project that systematically evaluated time-of-semester effects across many participant pools. See the Wiki for a table of contents of files and to download the manuscript.

The university participant pool is a key resource for behavioral research, and data quality is believed to vary over the course of the academic semester. This crowdsourced project examined time of semester variation in 10 known effects, 10 individual differences, and 3 data quality indicators over the course of the academic semester in 20 participant pools (N=2696) and with an online sample (N=737). Weak time of semester effects were observed on data quality indicators, participant sex, and a few individual differences—conscientiousness, mood, and stress. However, there was little evidence for time of semester qualifying experimental or correlational effects. The generality of this evidence is unknown because only a subset of the tested effects demonstrated evidence for the original result in the whole sample. Mean characteristics of pool samples change slightly during the semester, but these data suggest that those changes are mostly irrelevant for detecting effects.

Recent public-opinion polls indicate that Americans have shown a decline in support for animal experimentation, and several reports suggest a relationship between people's knowledge of animal welfare regulations and their attitudes toward animal research. Therefore, this study was designed to assess respondent's knowledge of several provisions in the Animal Welfare Act (AWA) and Animal Welfare Regulations (AWR), and determine whether exposure to elements of this legislation would influence an individual's attitudes toward the use of animals in research. A survey was used to assess knowledge of animal research regulations and attitudes toward animal research from a sample of individuals recruited through Amazon's Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing marketplace. Results from study 1 confirmed the hypothesis that respondents had little knowledge of various federal regulations that govern animal research activities. Data from study 2 revealed that exposure to elements of the AWA and AWR influenced participants' attitudes toward the use of animals in research. These results suggest that providing information to the general public about the AWA and AWR that protect laboratory animals from abuse and neglect may help alleviate concerns about using animals in research settings.

Gallup and Beckstead's (1988) commentary in the American Psychologist reported an assessment of college student's attitudes toward animal research. Among many findings, one main conclusion reached by the authors was that the participants in their study were generally concerned about the welfare of animals used in research, but that they also appreciated and valued the need for animal experimentation. Given the declining support for animal research from the general population over the past few decades, the present study administered the same questionnaire to a contemporary sample of university students to determine whether any patterns would emerge in a current sample's responses to these items. While the results suggest that respondents still demonstrate significant concern for animal welfare, importantly, the present sample of participants showed significantly less agreement with items that stressed the importance and value of conducting animal research. Educating college students about the importance of animal research and its valuable contributions to science as an enduring component of instructional practice in neuroscience and other courses may be an important step toward reversing these trends.

Directed forgetting (DF) occurs when stimuli presented during the study phase are followed by "forget" and "remember" cues. On a subsequent memory test, poor memory is observed for stimuli followed by the forget cues, compared to stimuli followed by the remember cues. Although DF is most commonly observed with verbal tasks, the present study extended intentional forgetting research for nonverbal stimuli and examined whether faces were susceptible to DF. Results confirmed that the presentation of a forget cue significantly reduced recognition for faces, as compared to faces followed by a remember cue. Additionally, a well-established finding in face recognition is that distinctive faces are better remembered than typical faces, and Experiment 2 assessed whether face appearance influenced the degree of DF. Results indicate that the DF effect observed in Experiment 1 was replicated in Experiment 2 and that the effect was more pronounced for those faces that were typical in appearance.

Numerous studies have demonstrated that the forgetting of stimulus attributes is a common occurrence; that is, organisms forget the specific characteristics of training stimuli over long retention intervals, while retaining general information of the training stimuli themselves. However, most studies have examined this effect after a learning episode, and there have been virtually no accounts to test whether the forgetting of attributes occurs for stimuli presented prior to training. Therefore, this experiment was designed to test that possibility, and it examined whether the forgetting of stimulus attributes occurred prior to training for the flavor stimulus in a conditioned taste aversion (CTA) procedure. Specifically, a latent inhibition (LI) procedure was used to measure the extent of forgetting for a pre-exposed flavor over short and long retention intervals. The results indicate that rats forgot the specific characteristics of the flavor stimulus (CS) while retaining memory for pre-exposure sessions over a long retention interval. That is, subjects pre-exposed and conditioned with different concentrations of sucrose showed no LI effect with a 1-day delay between pre-exposure and training, but demonstrated a generalized LI with an 8-day delay between pre-exposure and conditioning. This experiment provides further evidence for the robustness of the forgetting of stimulus attributes, and demonstrates that this specific type of forgetting also occurs prior to the learning of a CTA task.

The author investigated the effect of delayed testing on participants' memory for distinctive and typical faces. Participants viewed distinctive and typical faces and were then tested for recognition immediately or after a delay of 3, 6, or 12 weeks. Consistent with prior research, analysis of measure of sensitivity (d') showed that participants performed better on distinctive rather than typical faces, and memory performance declined with longer retention intervals between study and testing. Furthermore, the superior performance on distinctive faces had vanished by the 12-week test. Contrary to d' data, however, an analysis of confidence scores indicated that participants were still significantly more confident on trials depicting distinctive faces, even with a 12-week delay between study and recognition testing.

In recent years, a growing number of psychological researchers have turned to the World Wide Web (WWW) as a resource to access participants in experimental studies. While there are benefits to this approach in conducting psychological research (e.g., access to a potentially large subject pool and faster data collection), there are also concerns regarding this medium (e.g., the validity of the data). In recent years, data collected on-line has been validated by comparing it to data collected in the traditional laboratory setting. This study attempted to build on these previous reports by comparing face recognition data collected on the web and data collected in a laboratory. In two separate experiments, data collected from WWW participants did not statistically differ from data collected with undergraduate college students in a classroom setting. These findings strongly suggest that the WWW may be a viable alternative for researchers conducting face recognition experiments.

Glucose improves memory on a variety of tasks has been well established in both the animal and human literature. Of particular relevance to the present experiment is the finding that administration of glucose improves face recognition performance in both healthy, young adults and in Alzheimer's patients. This experiment attempted to expand on these findings to determine if glucose-enhanced performance for face recognition is specific to certain face features (e.g., nose, eyes, or hair). In a between subjects experiment that tested healthy, young adults, a pre-training administration of glucose (50 g) was shown to improve face recognition performance relative to placebo (27.3mg saccharin); however, the significant improvement on the task was not specific to a particular feature. This result suggests that glucose did not enhance memory for individual face features, but rather enhanced overall memory for face stimuli.

Previous research has demonstrated that repeated exposure to cold water results in cold tolerance. The present set of experiments examined whether spontaneous behavioral activity and the rate of rewarming differed between cold tolerant and nontolerant rats. Animals receiving six cold exposures (one per day) were compared to subjects receiving a single cold exposure but cooled to match the final day temperature of the six-exposure group. Immediately following the final or only cold exposure, activity was measured by an activity monitor (Exp. 1) or was videotaped and scored by an independent observer (Exp. 2). Furthermore, rats' temperatures were monitored for 90 min (Exp. 2) and 60 min (Exp. 3) following the activity measurement. The results indicated that cold-tolerant rats exhibited activity similar to normal, noncooled subjects, whereas the activity in the single exposure group was impeded. Moreover, rats in the multiple exposure groups rewarmed more quickly than subjects in the single exposure condition. The third experiment also examined if the procedures of Experiments 1 and 2 resulted in associative cold tolerance. Experiment 3 replicated earlier findings, which have shown that exposure to the same cold stimulus in an altered context resulted in a loss of tolerance. These findings suggest that the processing of contextual stimuli is necessary for the acquisition of cold tolerance and that behavioral activity and rewarming rates can be used as alternative measures of cold tolerance.

In the literature on face recognition, there is a considerable volume of data indicating that transforming a face between a familiarization procedure and recognition testing impairs performance. As many different types of transformations have been shown to produce this effect, it seems tempting to assume that any type of transformation can lead to this performance decrement. However, to date, there have been no systematic attempts to identify which transformations produce the most impairment in facial recognition. Therefore, an experiment was conducted in which subjects viewed facial stimuli during the familiarization phase and were then required to perform a memory test with either transformed or unaltered stimuli. The transformations examined in this experiment were a disguise (the addition of sunglasses), lateral reversal, and inversion. Results suggest that inversion produced the largest decrease in recognition, and the addition of a disguise or lateral reversal of the stimuli produced similar, but smaller, detrimental effects.

Numerous studies have reported that glucose administration enhances memory processes in both elderly and young adult subjects. Although these studies have utilized a variety of procedures and paradigms, investigations of both young and elderly subjects have typically used verbal tasks (word list recall, paragraph recall, etc.). In the present study, the effect of glucose consumption on a nonverbal, facial recognition task in young adults was examined. Lemonade sweetened with either glucose (50 g) or saccharin (23.7 mg) was consumed by college students (mean age of 21.1 years) 15 min prior to a facial recognition task. The task consisted of a familiarization phase in which subjects were presented with "target" faces, followed immediately by a recognition phase in which subjects had to identify the targets among a random array of familiar target and novel "distractor" faces. Statistical analysis indicated that there were no differences on hit rate (target identification) for subjects who consumed either saccharin or glucose prior to the test. However, further analyses revealed that subjects who consumed glucose committed significantly fewer false alarms and had (marginally) higher d-prime scores (a signal detection measure) compared to subjects who consumed saccharin prior to the test. These results parallel a previous report demonstrating glucose enhancement of a facial recognition task in probable Alzheimer's patients; however, this is believed to be the first demonstration of glucose enhancement for a facial recognition task in healthy, young adults.

In studies of experimentally induced retrograde amnesia (RA), as the interval between training and the amnestic treatment is lengthened, amnesia decreases (4). This temporal gradient for RA has been reported with a wide variety of amnestic agents, including RA produced by thermoregulatory disturbances (8). This temporal gradient for RA is not unlike certain characteristics of classical conditioning, where weaker conditioned responding occurs when the interval between the conditioned stimulus (CS) and unconditioned stimulus (US) is lengthened. Furthermore, there is evidence that administration of anesthetics can lengthen the “effective conditioning” interval between the CS and US, as demonstrated in a conditioned taste-aversion (CTA) procedure (10). In that study, little conditioning was observed when a 3-h delay (or more) was incorporated between presentations of the CS (flavor) and the US (toxin). However, if subjects were anesthetized immediately after the CS was delivered and remained anesthetized during the CS–US interval, strong conditioning was observed with CS–US intervals of up to 9 h. The aim of the present experiment was to determine if the temporal gradient for hypothermia-induced RA could also be lengthened. That is, we tested whether the interval between training and hypothermia treatment could be lengthened by anesthetizing subjects with Ketaset–Rompun. The results indicate that the training-to-amnestic agent interval could be lengthened within moderate limits. The implications for hypothermia-induced RA is further discussed.

Studies examining adaptation to thermoregulatory challenges have shown that tolerance to hypothermia is mediated, in part, by associative (Pavlovian) learning mechanisms. This study examined whether acquired tolerance to deep body cooling (hypothermia) could be extinguished by conditions in which presentations of the environmental cues were presented in the absence of hypothermia treatment. The results of Experiment 1 indicate that five extinction exposures in which the context was presented alone were not sufficient to extinguish established hypothermia tolerance in rats. Experiment 2 demonstrated that tripling the number of daily extinction exposures from 5 to 15 also did not disrupt adaptation to cold, and further demonstrated that the presentation of a challenge condition (heat exposure) over the 15-day extinction phase of the experiment had no effect on established cold tolerance. Furthermore, Experiment 2 confirmed associative control of tolerance by demonstrating a context shift effect in resistance to cold. The lack of an extinction effect in these two experiments suggests that the environmental context may be acting as an occasion setter.