52% Yes, a signiicant crisis 3% No, there is no crisis 7% Don't know 38% Yes, a slight crisis 38% Yes, a slight crisis 1,576 RESEARCHERS SURVEYED M ore than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments. Those are some of the telling figures that emerged from Nature's survey of 1,576 researchers who took a brief online questionnaire on reproducibility in research. The data reveal sometimes-contradictory attitudes towards reproduc-ibility. Although 52% of those surveyed agree that there is a significant 'crisis' of reproducibility, less than 31% think that failure to reproduce published results means that the result is probably wrong, and most say that they still trust the published literature. Data on how much of the scientific literature is reproducible are rare and generally bleak. The best-known analyses, from psychology 1 and cancer biology 2 , found rates of around 40% and 10%, respectively. Our survey respondents were more optimistic: 73% said that they think that at least half of the papers in their field can be trusted, with physicists and chemists generally showing the most confidence. The results capture a confusing snapshot of attitudes around these issues, says Arturo Casadevall, a microbiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland. "At the current time there is no consensus on what reproducibility is or should be. " But just recognizing that is a step forward, he says. "The next step may be identifying what is the problem and to get a consensus. "

Theories of learning styles suggest that individuals think and learn best in different ways. These are not differences of ability but rather preferences for processing certain types of information or for processing information in certain types of way. If accurate, learning styles theories could have important implications for instruction because student achievement would be a product of the interaction of instruction and the student's style. There is reason to think that people view learning styles theories as broadly accurate, but, in fact, scientific support for these theories is lacking. We suggest that educators' time and energy are better spent on other theories that might aid instruction.

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Confidence judgments for eyewitness identifications play an integral role in determining guilt during legal proceedings. Past research has shown that confidence in positive identifications is strongly associated with accuracy. Using a standard lineup recognition paradigm, we investigated accuracy using signal detection and ROC analyses, along with the tendency to choose a face with both simultaneous and sequential lineups. We replicated past findings of reduced rates of choosing with sequential as compared to simultaneous lineups, but notably found an accuracy advantage in favor of simultaneous lineups. Moreover, our analysis of the confidence-accuracy relationship revealed two key findings. First, we observed a sequential mistaken identification overconfidence effect: despite an overall reduction in false alarms, confidence for false alarms that did occur was higher with sequential lineups than with simultaneous lineups, with no differences in confidence for correct identifications. This sequential mistaken identification overconfidence effect is an expected byproduct of the use of a more conservative identification criterion with sequential than with simultaneous lineups. Second, we found a steady drop in confidence for mistaken identifications (i.e., foil identifications and false alarms) from the first to the last face in sequential lineups, whereas confidence in and accuracy of correct identifications remained relatively stable. Overall, we observed that sequential lineups are both less accurate and produce higher confidence false identifications than do simultaneous lineups. Given the increasing prominence of sequential lineups in our legal system, our data argue for increased scrutiny and possibly a wholesale reevaluation of this lineup format.

How do we know eyewitness statements of confidence are interpreted accurately by others? When eyewitnesses provide a verbal expression of confidence about a lineup identification, such as I'm fairly certain it's him, how well do others understand the intended meaning of this statement of confidence? And, how is this perception of the meaning influenced by justifications of the level of confidence, such as when eyewitnesses say, I remember his chin? The answers to these questions are unknown, as there is no research on how others interpret the intended meaning of eyewitness confidence. Three experiments show that an additional justification of confidence, relative to seeing a confidence statement alone, can increase misunderstanding in others' estimation of the meaning of the expression of confidence. Moreover, this justification-induced increase in misunderstanding only occurs when the justification refers to an observable facial feature and not when it refers to an unobservable quality (e.g., He is very familiar). Even more noteworthy, both Experiments 2 and 3 show that this featural justification effect is strongest when eyewitnesses express absolute certainty in an identification, such as by stating I am positive. When a highly confident assertion is accompanied by a featural justification others will be most likely to misinterpret the intended meaning.