Use one system for all results to avoid contradiction: Advice for using significance tests, equivalence tests, and Bayes factors.

A nonsignificant result against an H0 of no effect does not distinguish evidence for no effect from no evidence at all one way or the other. Thus, a researcher engaged primarily in significance testing may decide to follow up just the nonsignificant results with a test from another system of inference, such as equivalence tests (more generally, inference by intervals) or Bayes factors. However, selectively using two systems of inference in this way, can lead to inferential inconsistency because different tests are based on different principles, and therefore a researcher can be tempted to select the way each system is used to get the results the researcher wants for just the tests that system is applied to. For a related set of tests, one system of inference should be consistently used. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Beyond kindness: a proposal for the flourishing of science and scientists alike.

We argue that many of the crises currently afflicting science can be associated with a present failure of science to sufficiently embody its own values. Here, we propose a response beyond mere crisis resolution based on the observation that an ethical framework of flourishing derived from the Buddhist tradition aligns surprisingly well with the values of science itself. This alignment, we argue, suggests a recasting of science from a competitively managed activity of knowledge production to a collaboratively organized moral practice that puts kindness and sharing at its core. We end by examining how Flourishing Science could be embodied in academic practice, from individual to organizational levels, and how that could help to arrive at a flourishing of scientists and science alike.

Feasibility of unconscious instrumental conditioning: A registered replication.

The extent to which high-level, complex functions can proceed unconsciously has been a topic of considerable debate. While unconscious processing has been demonstrated for a range of low-level processes, from feature integration to simple forms of conditioning and learning, theoretical contributions suggest that increasing complexity requires conscious access. Here, we focus our attention on instrumental conditioning, which has been previously shown to proceed without stimulus awareness. Yet, instrumental conditioning also involves integrating information over a large temporal scale and distinct modalities in order to deploy selective action, constituting a process of substantial complexity. With this in mind, we revisit the question of feasibility of instrumental conditioning in the unconscious domain. Firstly, we address the theoretical and practical considerations relevant to unconscious learning in general. Secondly, we aim to replicate the first study to show instrumental conditioning in the absence of stimulus awareness (Pessiglione et al., 2008), following the original design and supplementing the original crucial analyses with a Bayesian approach (Experiment 1). We found that apparent unconscious learning took place when replicating the original methods directly and according to the tests of awareness used. However, we could not establish that the full sample was unaware in a separate awareness check. We therefore attempted to replicate the effect yet again with improved methods to address the issues related to sensitivity and immediacy (Experiment 2), including an individual threshold-setting task and a trial-by-trial awareness check permitting exclusion of individual aware trials. Here, we found evidence for absence of unconscious learning. This result provides evidence that instrumental conditioning did not occur without stimulus awareness in this paradigm, supporting the view that complex forms of learning may rely on conscious access. Our results provides support for the proposal that perceptual consciousness may be necessary for complex, flexible processes, especially where selective action and behavioural adaptation are required.

The credibility crisis and democratic governance: how to reform university governance to be compatible with the nature of science.

To address the credibility crisis facing many disciplines, change is needed at the institutional level. Science will only function optimally if the culture by which it is governed becomes aligned with the way of thinking required in science itself. The paper suggests a series of graduated reforms to university governance, to radically reform the operation of universities. The reforms are based on existing established open democratic practices. The aim is for universities to become consistent with the flourishing of science and research more generally.

A review of applications of the Bayes factor in psychological research.

The last 25 years have shown a steady increase in attention for the Bayes factor as a tool for hypothesis evaluation and model selection. The present review highlights the potential of the Bayes factor in psychological research. We discuss six types of applications: Bayesian evaluation of point null, interval, and informative hypotheses, Bayesian evidence synthesis, Bayesian variable selection and model averaging, and Bayesian evaluation of cognitive models. We elaborate what each application entails, give illustrative examples, and provide an overview of key references and software with links to other applications. The article is concluded with a discussion of the opportunities and pitfalls of Bayes factor applications and a sketch of corresponding future research lines. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Implicit learning of regularities followed by realistic body movements in virtual reality.

The existence of implicit (unconscious) learning has been demonstrated in several laboratory paradigms. Researchers have also suggested that it plays a role in complex real-life human activities. For instance, in social situations, we may follow unconscious behaviour scripts or intuitively anticipate the reaction of familiar persons based on nonconscious cues. Still, it is difficult to make inferences about the involvement of implicit learning in realistic contexts, given that this phenomenon has been demonstrated, almost exclusively, using simple artificial stimuli (e.g., learning structured patterns of letters). In addition, recent analyses show that the amount of unconscious knowledge learned in these tasks has been overestimated by random measurement error. To overcome these limitations, we adapted the artificial grammar learning (AGL) task, and exposed participants (N = 93), in virtual reality, to a realistic agent that executed combinations of boxing punches. Unknown to participants, the combinations were structured by a complex artificial grammar. In a subsequent test phase, participants accurately discriminated novel grammatical from nongrammatical combinations, showing they had acquired the grammar. For measuring awareness, we used trial-by-trial subjective scales, and an analytical method that accounts for the possible overestimation of unconscious knowledge due to regression to the mean. These methods conjointly showed strong evidence for implicit and for explicit learning. The present study is the first to show that humans can implicitly learn, in VR, knowledge regarding realistic body movements, and, further, that implicit knowledge extracted in AGL is robust when accounting for its possible inflation by random measurement error.

Expressing unconscious general knowledge using Chevreul's pendulum.

Can unconscious knowledge be elicited by ideomotor action when the knowledge fails to be elicited by verbal reports? Using an Ouija board, previous research found ideomotor action produced substantial accuracy for general knowledge questions previously rated as pure "guesses," and for which later verbal reports produced accuracy close to chance. We replicated the procedure substituting Chevreul's pendulum rather than an Ouija board. We found that questions whose answer was previously rated as a guess, were answered equally well and at about chance levels by ideomotor action and verbal responses. Thus, one cannot presume that ideomotor action rather than verbal report will allow greater knowledge to be expressed in any particular context, including therefore the hypnotherapy one. An ideomotor action may elicit only conscious knowledge. Further research is recommended to clarify this important issue.

Reforms to improve reproducibility and quality must be coordinated across the research ecosystem: the view from the UKRN Local Network Leads.

Many disciplines are facing a "reproducibility crisis", which has precipitated much discussion about how to improve research integrity, reproducibility, and transparency. A unified effort across all sectors, levels, and stages of the research ecosystem is needed to coordinate goals and reforms that focus on open and transparent research practices. Promoting a more positive incentive culture for all ecosystem members is also paramount. In this commentary, we-the Local Network Leads of the UK Reproducibility Network-outline our response to the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee's inquiry on research integrity and reproducibility. We argue that coordinated change is needed to create (1) a positive research culture, (2) a unified stance on improving research quality, (3) common foundations for open and transparent research practice, and (4) the routinisation of this practice. For each of these areas, we outline the roles that individuals, institutions, funders, publishers, and Government can play in shaping the research ecosystem. Working together, these constituent members must also partner with sectoral and coordinating organisations to produce effective and long-lasting reforms that are fit-for-purpose and future-proof. These efforts will strengthen research quality and create research capable of generating far-reaching applications with a sustained impact on society.

Raising awareness about measurement error in research on unconscious mental processes.

Experimental psychologists often neglect the poor psychometric properties of the dependent measures collected in their studies. In particular, a low reliability of measures can have dramatic consequences for the interpretation of key findings in some of the most popular experimental paradigms, especially when strong inferences are drawn from the absence of statistically significant correlations. In research on unconscious cognition, for instance, it is commonly argued that the lack of a correlation between task performance and measures of awareness or explicit recollection of the target stimuli provides strong support for the conclusion that the cognitive processes underlying performance must be unconscious. Using contextual cuing of visual search as a case study, we show that given the low reliability of the dependent measures collected in these studies, it is usually impossible to draw any firm conclusion about the unconscious character of this effect from correlational analyses. Furthermore, both a psychometric meta-analysis of the available evidence and a cognitive-modeling approach suggest that, in fact, we should expect to see very low correlations between performance and awareness at the empirical level, even if both constructs are perfectly related at the latent level. Convincing evidence for the unconscious character of contextual cuing and other effects will most likely demand richer and larger data sets, coupled with more powerful analytic approaches.

Sensitivity to changes in rate of heartbeats as a measure of interoceptive ability.

Individuals vary in their ability to perceive, as conscious sensations, signals like the beating of the heart. Tests of such interoceptive ability are, however, constrained in nature and reliability. Performance of the heartbeat tracking task, a widely used test of cardiac interoception, often corresponds well with individual differences in emotion and cognition, yet is susceptible to reporting bias and influenced by higher-order knowledge, e.g., of expected heart rate. The present study introduces a new way of assessing cardiac interoceptive ability, focusing on sensitivity to short-term, naturalistic changes in frequency of heartbeats. At rest, such heart rate variability typically reflects the dominant influence of respiration on vagus parasympathetic control of the sinoatrial pacemaker. We observed an overall tendency of healthy participants to report feeling fewer heartbeats during increases in heart rate, which we speculate reflects a reduction in heartbeat strength and salience during inspiratory periods when heart rate typically increases to maintain a stable cardiac output. Within-participant performance was more variable on this measure of cardiac interoceptive sensitivity relative to the "classic" heartbeat tracking task. Our findings indicate that cardiac interoceptive ability, rather than reflecting the veridical monitoring of subtle variations in physiology, appears to involve more interpolation wherein interoceptive decisions are informed by dynamic working estimates derived from the integration of afferent signaling and higher-order predictions.NEW & NOTEWORTHY This study presents a new method for evaluating cardiac interoceptive ability, measuring sensitivity to naturalistic changes in the number of heartbeats over time periods. Results show participants have an overall tendency toward sensing fewer heartbeats during higher heart rates. This likely reflects the influence of changing heartbeat strength on cardiac interoception at rest, which should be taken into account when evaluating cardiac interoceptive ability and its relationship to anxiety and psychosomatic conditions.

Correlation analysis to investigate unconscious mental processes: A critical appraisal and mini-tutorial.

As a method to investigate the scope of unconscious mental processes, researchers frequently obtain concurrent measures of task performance and stimulus awareness across participants. Even though both measures might be significantly greater than zero, the correlation between them might not, encouraging the inference that an unconscious process drives task performance. We highlight the pitfalls of this null-correlation approach and provide a mini-tutorial on ways to avoid them. As reference, we use a recent study by Salvador et al. (2018) reporting a non-significant correlation between the extent to which memory was suppressed by a Think/No-Think cue and an index of cue awareness. In the Null Hypothesis Significance Testing (NHST) framework, it is inappropriate to interpret failure to reject the null hypothesis (i.e., correlation = 0) as evidence for the null. Furthermore, psychological measures are often unreliable, which can dramatically attenuate the size of observed correlations. A Bayesian approach can circumvent both problems and compare the extent to which the data provide evidence for the null versus the alternative hypothesis (i.e., correlation > 0), while considering the usually low reliabilities of the variables. Applied to Salvador et al.'s data, this approach indicates no to moderate support for the claimed unconscious nature of participants' memory-suppression performance-depending on the model of the alternative hypothesis. Hence, more reliable data are needed. When analyzing correlational data, we recommend researchers to employ the Bayesian methods developed here (and made freely available as R scripts), rather than standard NHST methods, to take account of unreliability.

Look into my eyes: Pupillometry reveals that a post-hypnotic suggestion for word blindness reduces Stroop interference by marshalling greater effortful control.

The mechanisms underpinning the apparently remarkable levels of cognitive and behavioural control following hypnosis and hypnotic suggestion are poorly understood. Numerous independent studies have reported that Stroop interference can be reduced following a post-hypnotic suggestion that asks participants to perceive words as if made up of characters from a foreign language. This effect indicates that frontal executive functions can be more potent than is generally accepted and has been described as resulting from top-down control not normally voluntarily available. We employed eye tracking and pupillometry to investigate whether the effect results from voluntary visuo-attentional strategies (subtly looking away from the word to prevent optimal word processing), reduced response conflict but not overall conflict, Stroop effects being pushed from response selection to response execution (response durations) or increased proactive effortful control given enhanced contextual motivation (as indexed via pupil dilation). We replicated the reduction in Stroop interference following the suggestion despite removing any trials on which eye movements were not consistent with optimal word processing. Our data were inconclusive with regards to conflict type affected by the suggestion in the latency data, although preserved semantic conflict was evident in the pupil data. There was also no evidence of Stroop effects on response durations. However, we show that baseline-corrected pupil sizes were larger following the suggestion indicating the socio-cognitive context and experimental demands motivate participants to marshal greater effortful control.

Distinguishing the role of conscious and unconscious knowledge in evaluative conditioning.

Evaluative conditioning (EC) refers to a change in liking of a conditioned stimulus (CS) subsequent to its repeated pairing with a valent stimulus (US). Two studies that bring new light on the highly debated question of the role of awareness in EC were conducted. We developed an innovative method motivated by higher order and integration theories of consciousness to distinguish between the role of conscious and unconscious knowledge about the pairings. On each trial of the awareness test, participants had to indicate the valence of the US associated with a given CS and to make a 'structural knowledge attribution' by reporting the basis of their response. Valence identification accuracy was used to evaluate knowledge while the knowledge attribution was used to measure the conscious status of knowledge. Memory attribution indicated conscious knowledge about the pairings while feeling-based and random attributions indicated unconscious knowledge. A meta-analysis of the two studies revealed that valence identification accuracy was above chance level for memory and feeling-based attributions but not for the random attribution. EC was found in the three attributions. While EC effect size was medium for the memory attribution it was small for feeling-based and random attributions. Moreover, Experiment 2 included a delayed test. EC was still present 24 h after the conditioning took place. The results obtained for memory and feeling-based attributions suggest that both conscious and unconscious knowledge may underlie EC. The results obtained for random attribution suggest that EC may also occur without any knowledge of US valence.

Evaluative conditioning of artificial grammars: Evidence that subjectively-unconscious structures bias affective evaluations of novel stimuli.

Evaluative conditioning (EC) refers to the acquisition of emotional valence by an initially neutral stimulus (conditioned stimulus [CS]) after being paired with an emotional stimulus (unconditioned stimulus [US]). An important issue regards whether, when participants are unaware of the CS-US contingency, the affective valence can generalize to new stimuli that share similarities with the CS. Previous studies have shown that generalization of EC effects appears only when participants are aware of the contingencies, but we suggest that this is because (a) the contingencies typically used in these studies are salient and easy to detect consciously, and (b) the performance-based measures of awareness (so-called "objective measures"), typically used in these studies, tend to overestimate the amount of available conscious knowledge. We report a preregistered study in which participants (N = 217) were exposed to letter strings generated from two complex artificial grammars that are difficult to decipher consciously. Stimuli from one grammar were paired with positive USs, whereas those from the other grammar were paired with negative USs. Subsequently, participants evaluated new, previously unseen, stimuli from the positively conditioned grammar more positively than new stimuli from the negatively conditioned grammar. Importantly, this effect appeared even when trial-by-trial subjective measures indicated lack of relevant conscious knowledge. We provide evidence for the generalization of EC effects even without subjective awareness of the structures that enable those generalizations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Improving Inferences About Null Effects With Bayes Factors and Equivalence Tests.

Researchers often conclude an effect is absent when a null-hypothesis significance test yields a nonsignificant p value. However, it is neither logically nor statistically correct to conclude an effect is absent when a hypothesis test is not significant. We present two methods to evaluate the presence or absence of effects: Equivalence testing (based on frequentist statistics) and Bayes factors (based on Bayesian statistics). In four examples from the gerontology literature, we illustrate different ways to specify alternative models that can be used to reject the presence of a meaningful or predicted effect in hypothesis tests. We provide detailed explanations of how to calculate, report, and interpret Bayes factors and equivalence tests. We also discuss how to design informative studies that can provide support for a null model or for the absence of a meaningful effect. The conceptual differences between Bayes factors and equivalence tests are discussed, and we also note when and why they might lead to similar or different inferences in practice. It is important that researchers are able to falsify predictions or can quantify the support for predicted null effects. Bayes factors and equivalence tests provide useful statistical tools to improve inferences about null effects.

Intentional binding as Bayesian cue combination: Testing predictions with trait individual differences.

We investigated differences in intentional binding in high and low hypnotizable groups to explore two questions relating to (a) trait differences in the availability of motor intentions to metacognitive processes and (b) a proposed cue combination model of binding. An experience of involuntariness is central to hypnotic responding and may arise from strategically being unaware of one's intentions. Trait differences in the ability to respond to hypnotic suggestion may reflect differing levels of access to motor intentions. Intentional binding refers to the subjective compression of the time between an action and its outcome, indicated by a forward shift in the judged time of an action toward its outcome (action binding) and the backward shift of an outcome toward a causal action (outcome binding). Intentional binding is sensitive to intentional action without requiring explicit reflection upon agency. One way of explaining the sensitivity of intentional binding is to see it as a simple case of multisensory cue combination in which awareness of intentions increases knowledge of the timing of actions. Here we present results consistent with such a mechanism. In a contingent presentation of action and outcome events, low hypnotizable had more precise timing judgments of actions and also showed weaker action binding than highs. These results support the theory that trait hypnotizability is related to access to information related to motor intentions, and that intentional binding reflects the Bayesian combination of cross-modal cues. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Time perception and the experience of agency in meditation and hypnosis.

Mindfulness meditation and hypnosis are related in opposing ways to awareness of intentions. The cold control theory of hypnosis proposes that hypnotic responding involves the experience of involuntariness while performing an actually intentional action. Hypnosis therefore relies upon inaccurate metacognition about intentional actions and experiences. Mindfulness meditation centrally involves awareness of intentions and is associated with improved metacognitive access to intentions. Therefore, mindfulness meditators and highly hypnotizable people may lie at opposite ends of a spectrum with regard to metacognitive access to intention-related information. Here we review the theoretical background and evidence for differences in the metacognition of intentions in these groups, as revealed by chronometric measures of the awareness of voluntary action: the timing of an intention to move (Libet's "W" judgments) and the compressed perception of time between an intentional action and its outcome ("intentional binding"). We review these measures and critically evaluate their proposed connection to the experience of volition and sense of agency.

Dataset of implicit sequence learning of chunking and abstract structures.

This article describes the data analyzed in the paper "Implicit sequence learning of chunking and abstract structures" (Fu et al., 2018) [1]. It includes reaction times in the serial reaction time task and generation proformance for each confidence rating or attribution under the inclusion and exclusion tests from three experiments. For the serial reaction time task, the independent varialbles were type of stimuli and blocks or type of deviants; for the generation tests, the independent varialbles were type of stimuli, instructions, and confidence ratings or attribution tests. The data can be used to examine wether a computor model can account for what type of knowledge is acquried in implicit sequence learning.

Cross-cultural differences in implicit learning of chunks versus symmetries.

Three experiments explore whether knowledge of grammars defining global versus local regularities has an advantage in implicit acquisition and whether this advantage is affected by cultural differences. Participants were asked to listen to and memorize a number of strings of 10 syllables instantiating an inversion (i.e. a global pattern); after the training phase, they were required to judge whether new strings were well formed. In Experiment 1, Western people implicitly acquired the inversion rule defined over the Chinese tones in a similar way as Chinese participants when alternative structures (specifically, chunking and repetition structures) were controlled. In Experiments 2 and 3, we directly pitted knowledge of the inversion (global) against chunk (local) knowledge, and found that Chinese participants had a striking global advantage in implicit learning, which was greater than that of Western participants. Taken together, we show for the first time cross-cultural differences in the type of regularities implicitly acquired.