There is growing awareness across the neuroscience community that the replicability of findings about the relationship between brain activity and cognitive phenomena can be improved by conducting studies with high statistical power that adhere to welldefined and standardised analysis pipelines. Inspired by recent efforts from the psychological sciences, and with the desire to examine some of the foundational findings using electroencephalography (EEG), we have launched #EEGManyLabs, a large-scale international collaborative replication effort. Since its discovery in the early 20th century, EEG has had a profound influence on our understanding of human cognition, but there is limited evidence on the replicability of some of the most highly cited discoveries. After a systematic search and selection process, we have identified 27 of the most influential and continually cited studies in the field. We plan to directly test the replicability of key findings from 20 of these studies in teams of at least three independent laboratories. The design and protocol of each replication effort will be submitted as a Registered Report and peer-reviewed prior to data collection.Prediction markets, open to all EEG researchers, will be used as a forecasting tool to examine which findings the community expects to replicate. This project will update our confidence in some of the most influential EEG findings and generate a large open access database that can be used to inform future research practices. Finally, through this international effort, we hope to create a cultural shift towards inclusive, highpowered multi-laboratory collaborations.

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Moments of creative inspiration -an evoked state of motivation for creative activity -form a distinct step in creative processes. We hypothesize that the psychological state of being creatively inspired is similar to the state of being aesthetically moved, and that aesthetically moving experiences can serve as prompts for creative inspiration. We tested this hypothesis in a creative writing task: In Experiment 1, 25 participants from the general public were asked to write 12 short creative vignettes (repeated measures) in response to either "aesthetic" prompts (visual artworks they had rated highly aesthetically moving in a preceding task) or "nonaesthetic" prompts (triads of unrelated words). People then rated how inspired they had felt during idea generation. Ratings of inspiration were significantly higher for aesthetic vs. nonaesthetic prompts. In Experiment 2, 34 participants performed the same task with prompts consisting of highly-moving artworks, non-moving artworks (rated in a preceding task), or novel artworks not seen in advance. While pre-exposure to the stimuli had no significant effect, felt inspiration was significantly higher for moving vs. non-moving prompts, and posttest aesthetic ratings of novel artworks were positively correlated with felt inspiration. Furthermore, inspiration ratings correlated positively with the amount of produced text. Being aesthetically moved increases the likelihood of creative inspiration, a finding with implications both for the study of creative and aesthetic processes and also for the potential role of the arts in educational settings.

There is growing awareness across the neuroscience community that the replicability of findings on the relationship between brain activity and cognitive phenomena can be improved by conducting studies with high statistical power that adhere to well-defined and standardized analysis pipelines. Inspired by efforts from the psychological sciences, and with the desire to examine some of the foundational findings using electroencephalography (EEG), we have launched #EEGManyLabs, a large-scale international collaborative replication effort. Since its discovery in the early 20th century, EEG has had a profound influence on our understanding of human cognition, but there is limited evidence on the replicability of some of the most highly cited discoveries. After a systematic search and selection process, we have identified 27 of the most influential and continually cited studies in the field. We plan to directly test the replicability of key findings from 20 of these studies in teams of at least three independent laboratories. The design and protocol of each replication effort will be submitted as a Registered Report and peer-reviewed prior to data collection. Prediction markets, open to all EEG researchers, will be used as a forecasting tool to examine which findings the community expects to replicate. This project will update our confidence in some of the most influential EEG findings and generate a large open access database that can be used to inform future research practices. Finally, through this international effort, we hope to create a cultural shift towards inclusive, high-powered multi-laboratory collaborations.

Aesthetic experiences have an influence on many aspects of life. Interest in the neural basis of aesthetic experiences has grown rapidly in the past decade, and fMRI studies have identified several brain systems supporting aesthetic experiences. Work on the rapid neuronal dynamics of aesthetic experience, however, is relatively scarce. This study adds to this field by investigating the experience of being aesthetically moved by means of ERP and time–frequency analysis. Participants' electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded while they viewed a diverse set of artworks and evaluated the extent to which these artworks moved them. Results show that being aesthetically moved is associated with a sustained increase in gamma activity over centroparietal regions. In addition, alpha power over right frontocentral regions was reduced in high- and low-moving images, compared to artworks given intermediate ratings. We interpret the gamma effect as an indication for sustained savoring processes for aesthetically moving artworks compared to aesthetically less-moving artworks. The alpha effect is interpreted as an indication of increased attention for aesthetically salient images. In contrast to previous works, we observed no significant effects in any of the established ERP components, but we did observe effects at latencies longer than 1 sec. We conclude that EEG time–frequency analysis provides useful information on the neuronal dynamics of aesthetic experience.

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Free gaze and the use of dynamically changing video stimuli are typically avoided in EEG exper- iments to avoid artefacts and confounds related to uncontrolled eye movements. Yet, often it is unclear whether these artificial secondary manipulations might have unwanted effects on the pri- mary measures of interest and for a growing number of research questions removing them would be beneficial: Among those is the investigation of visual aesthetic experiences, which typically involve open-ended exploration of highly variable stimuli. Here we aimed to quantify the effect of fixation task and using still vs. movie stimuli on EEG signal quality and several behavioral and physiological measures of interest during an aesthetic rating task. Participants observed scenes from landscapes and dance performances and rated each stimulus for both aesthetic appeal and their state of boredom while watching it. The scenes were presented either as dynamic video clips or static pictures, and participants observed them either with unconstrained gaze or under attempted fixation We recorded EEG, ECG and eyetracking from 43 participants. An auditory stream of 40Hz amplitude modulated pink noise was played during each trial and signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) of the auditory steady-state response measured at the scalp was extracted as a proxy measure for overall EEG signal quality. The study including hypotheses and a priori power analysis was preregistered. We found that both behavioral ratings were influenced by the experimental conditions: boredom and aesthetic ratings were positively affected by dynamic video stimuli, indicating that these are experienced as more engaging; both these effects were stronger in dance. As already reported before, landscape stimuli were experienced as more appealing. Fixaton task, on the other hand, had no significant effect on the ratings which is encouraging given how canonically it is applied. Eye movements were significantly affected not only by viewing task, but by stimulus dynamics and content as well: we observed fewer eyeblinks, saccades and microsaccades in video stimuli, and fewer saccades but more microsaccades in dance than in landscape stimuli, with several significant interactions. EEG SNR, to our surprise, was barely affected by fixation task - despite only minimal preprocessing and no trial rejection. We nevertheless believe that the new metric is sensitive to capture noise: it was significantly correlated with the number of eye blinks, and after cleaning the dataset with an ICA based preprocessing pipeline the significant effect of fixation task and the correlation with blink rate vanished. We see these as promising results indicating that at least in the lab more liberal experimental conditions could be achieved without significant loss of signal quality. Specifically the use of dynamic video material bears a lot of potential for future investigations in human neurophysiological studies.

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