Author guidelines for journals could help to promote transparency, openness, and reproducibility
Theories of cognition frequently assume the existence of inhibitory mechanisms that deactivate mental representations. Justifying this assumption is difficult because cognitive effects thought to reflect inhibition can often be explained without recourse to inhibitory processes. This article addresses the uncertain status of cognitive inhibitory mechanisms, focusing on their function in memory retrieval. On the basis of a novel form of forgetting reported herein, it is shown that classical associative theories of interference are insufficient as accounts of forgetting and that inhibitory processes must be at work. It is argued that inhibitory processes are used to resolve computational problems of selection common to memory retrieval and selective attention and that retrieval is best regarded as conceptually focused selective attention.
Crisis of replicability is one term that psychological scientists use for the current introspective phase we are in-I argue instead that we are going through a revolution analogous to a political revolution. Revolution 2.0 is an uprising focused on how we should be doing science now (i.e., in a 2.0 world). The precipitating events of the revolution have already been well-documented: failures to replicate, questionable research practices, fraud, etc. And the fact that none of these events is new to our field has also been well-documented. I suggest four interconnected reasons as to why this time is different: changing technology, changing demographics of researchers, limited resources, and misaligned incentives. I then describe two reasons why the revolution is more likely to catch on this time: technology (as part of the solution) and the fact that these concerns cut across social and life sciences-that is, we are not alone. Neither side in the revolution has behaved well, and each has characterized the other in extreme terms (although, of course, each has had a few extreme actors). Some suggested reforms are already taking hold (e.g., journals asking for more transparency in methods and analysis decisions; journals publishing replications) but the feared tyrannical requirements have, of course, not taken root (e.g., few journals require open data; there is no ban on exploratory analyses). Still, we have not yet made needed advances in the ways in which we accumulate, connect, and extract conclusions from our aggregated research. However, we are now ready to move forward by adopting incremental changes and by acknowledging the multiplicity of goals within psychological science.
Confident witnesses are deemed more credible than unconfident ones, and accurate witnesses are deemed more credible than inaccurate ones. But are those effects independent? Two experiments show that errors in testimony damage the overall credibility of witnesses who were confident about the erroneous testimony more than that of witnesses who were not confident about it. Furthermore, after making an error, less confident witnesses may appear more credible than more confident ones. Our interpretation of these results is that people make inferences about source calibration when evaluating testimony and other social communication.
The crediting causality hypothesis states that when people attribute causality for an outcome, each individual event in the sequence leading to the outcome is evaluated as to how much it changed the probability of the outcome, given what had already occurred. Causality is then assigned on the basis of the relative contributions. In 4 experiments, college students show this effect both for noncausal sequences, in which previous experiments suggest that the last event to occur is most causal, and for causal sequences, in which previous experiments suggest that the first event to occur is most causal. Both the order in which events occur and the order in which people learn about events affect causal attributions. Mutability is ruled out as an explanation, although it may contribute to the assessment of probabilities.The turbulence caused by a butterfly flapping its wings today in Brazil may cause a tornado next month in Texas.-The Butterfly Effect of Edward Lorenz Sue everyone who so much as breathed on you.-An unscrupulous lawyerIt is easy to imagine that as we move through the world, we leave a causal wake behind us. By our presence or our absence, by our commissions and our omissions, the course not only of our own world, but also of the world in general, may be changed. Because of the two extra seconds you spent at the stoplight changing the radio station, the traffic pattern is affected, and a major accident, killing 10 people on a bus, occurs minutes later and miles behind you. Because you pushed yourself onto a crowded elevator, the tall man with the flu sneezes on the short woman about to board a plane back to her Peace Corps assignment. His germs incapacitate an entire country.To what extent, however, might you be called a cause of the accident or of the epidemic? That is, how is the word because being used in the above examples? In these two
Nelson and Dunlosky (Psychologcal Science, Ju!, 1991) reported that subjects making judgments of learning (JOLs) can be extreme11 accurate at predicting subsequent re. tall pedormance on a paired-associate task when the JOL tash i r delayed for a short while after study Thev argued that thi4 result is surprising given the results of earlier rerearc h , as well as their own current experiment, indicating that JOLs are quite inaccurate when made imrnediatelv after stud) We note that the delayed-JOL procedure used by Nelson and Ditnloskv invited covert recall practice (which waq reported bv their subjec ts) Retrieval prac rice is a well-known determinant of subsequent recall Accordingly, Nelson and Dunloskv sfindings can be explained by the simple asrumption that people base delaved JOLs on an arsessment of retrieval success which in turn injluences their retrieval success on the subsequent recall test Nelson and Dunlosky (1991) reported that they have identified a particular circumstance in which subjects' judgments of learning (JOLs) are extremely accurate-a finding that they view as surprising given the generally inaccurate character of such judgments as reported in the literature We argue here, however, that the specific JOL task used by Nelson and Dunlosky invited subjects to employ a strategy that, in effect, turned their predictions of future performance into a self-fulfilling prophecy Subjects in Nelson and Dunlosky's expenment were told to study word pairs so that later they could recall the second word (response) when cued with the first word (stimulus) In addition to these study tnals were tnals in which subjects were asked to judge their state of learning with respect to particular pairs presented earlier On such JOL tnals, subjects were shown the stimulus alone and were asked "How confident are you that in about ten minutes from now you will be able to recall the second word of the item when prompted with the first3" (p 268) For half of the pairs, the JOL was made immediately after the study tnal for that pair, for the other half of the pairs, the JOL was delayed by at least I0 intervening mixed study and JOL tnals Nelson and Dunlosky found that JOL accuracy increased dramatically with delay, in fact, on delayed JOLs, subjects were almost perfect at pre-
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