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. "

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The theory of mental models postulates that individuals infer that a spatial description is consistent only if they can construct a model in which all the assertions in the description are true. Individuals prefer a parsimonious representation, and so, when a description is consistent with more than one possible layout of entities on the left-right dimension, individuals in our culture prefer to construct models working from left to right. They also prefer to locate entities referred to in the same assertion as adjacent to one another in a model. And, if possible, they tend to chunk entities into a single unit in order to capture several possibilities in a single model. We report four experiments corroborating these predictions. The results shed light on the integration of relational assertions, and they show that participants exploit implicit constraints in building models of spatial relations.

Observers can visually track multiple objects that move independently even if the scene containing the moving objects is rotated in a smooth way. Abrupt scene rotations yield tracking more difficult but not impossible. For nonrotated, stable dynamic displays, the strategy of looking at the targets' centroid has been shown to be of importance for visual tracking. But which factors determine successful visual tracking in a nonstable dynamic display? We report two eye tracking experiments that present evidence for centroid looking. Across abrupt viewpoint changes, gaze on the centroid is more stable than gaze on targets indicating a process of realigning targets as a group. Further, we show that the relative importance of centroid looking increases with object speed.Watching and understanding a football game on television requires the ability to keep track of multiple moving objects: For example, in a scene in front of the goal, at least two players (offence and goal-keeper) and the ball have to be tracked. More complex situations (e.g., an off-side position) involve even more players. In contrast to real life scenarios, in television a tactic move (e.g., a counterattack) is often shown in sequential shots from

We examined whether surface feature information is utilized to track the locations of multiple objects. In particular, we tested whether surface features and spatiotemporal information are weighted according to their availability and reliability. Accordingly, we hypothesized that surface features should affect location tracking across spatiotemporal discontinuities. Three kinds of spatiotemporal discontinuities were implemented across five experiments: abrupt scene rotations, abrupt zooms, and a reduced presentation frame rate. Objects were briefly colored across the spatiotemporal discontinuity. Distinct coloring that matched spatiotemporal information across the discontinuity improved tracking performance as compared with homogeneous coloring. Swapping distinct colors across the discontinuity impaired performance. Correspondence by color was further demonstrated by more mis-selected distractors appearing in a former target color than distractors appearing in a former distractor color in the swap condition. This was true even when color never supported tracking and when participants were instructed to ignore color. Furthermore, effects of object color on tracking occurred with unreliable spatiotemporal information but not with reliable spatiotemporal information. Our results demonstrate that surface feature information can be utilized to track the locations of multiple objects. This is in contrast to theories stating that objects are tracked based on spatiotemporal information only. We introduce a flexible-weighting tracking account stating that spatiotemporal information and surface features are both utilized by the location tracking mechanism. The two sources of information are weighted according to their availability and reliability. Surface feature effects on tracking are particularly likely when distinct surface feature information is available and spatiotemporal information is unreliable.

Explaining symptoms by the most likely cause is a process during which hypotheses are activated and updated in memory. By letting participants learn about causes and symptoms in a spatial array, we could apply eye tracking during diagnostic reasoning to trace the activation level of hypotheses across a sequence of symptoms. Fixation proportions on former locations of possible causes reflected the causal strength of initial symptoms, a bias towards focal hypotheses, and the final diagnosis. Looking-at-nothing revealing memory activation consistent with process models of diagnostic reasoning was stable even after one week.

We validate an eye-tracking method applicable for studying memory processes in complex cognitive tasks. The method is tested with a task on probabilistic inferences from memory. It provides valuable data on the time course of processing, thus clarifying previous results on heuristic probabilistic inference. Participants learned cue values of decision alternatives that were arranged within spatial frames. Later, they were told about the validities of cue dimensions and performed memory-based binary choice tasks: first, according to spontaneously adopted decision strategies and, subsequently, according to instructed decision strategies (a noncompensatory lexicographic strategy and a compensatory equal weighting strategy). During decision making, participants saw only the empty spatial frames without cue values. The spontaneously adopted and instructed decision strategies were reflected in discriminable gaze patterns on the empty spatial frames. When retrieving information no longer visible, participants tended to fixate on locations at which information was visible during the learning phase (the looking-at-nothing phenomenon). Gaze patterns were consistent with cue-wise and alternative-wise patterns of information search predicted for the instructed decision strategies as well as for the spontaneously adopted strategies identified based on decision outcomes. These findings extend previous results on the connection between memory and gaze. Furthermore, the successful application of memory indexing suggests its wider applicability in studying memory-based tasks.

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