Systematic reviews and meta-analyses are becoming more popular across sciences, often influencing future research, policies, interventions, and similar. The conclusions of evidence synthesis will depend on the quality of the primary studies (i.e. evidence) included. Thus, the quality and risk of bias in these primary studies must be essential components of evidence synthesis. However, in many scientific fields, including behavioural sciences, this is rarely so.

 

In this Stage 1 manuscript, Batinović et al. (2025) propose to conduct a systematic map of the existing tools to assess methodological quality of risk of bias tools across scientific fields, and map their applicability for primary studies within the broad field of behavioral sciences. The review will provide a comprehensive overview of how existing tools can be applied to the behavioral sciences, and identify gaps for future development of relevant tools in the field. The protocol and its methods were thoroughly developed, and are suitable to reach the research aims.

 

The Stage 1 submission was evaluated by two expert reviewers. After two rounds of revision, the recommender judged that the manuscript met the Stage 1 criteria, and the manuscript was awarded in-principle acceptance (IPA).

 

Level of bias control achieved: Level 4. At least some of the data/evidence that will be used to answer the research question already exists AND is accessible in principle to the authors (e.g. residing in a public database or with a colleague) BUT the authors certify that they have not yet accessed any part of that data/evidence.
 
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References
 
1. Batinović, L., Pickering, J. S., van den Akker, O. R., Bishop, D., Elsherif, M., Evans, T. R., Gibbs, M., Kalandadze, T., Staaks, J., & Topor, M., Gold in, gold out. Quality appraisal and risk of bias tools to assess non-intervention studies for systematic reviews in the behavioural sciences: A scoping review. In principle acceptance of Version 3 by Peer Community in Registered Reports. https://osf.io/4gy5b

Higher-level cognitive processes like attention, memory, or mental imagery can produce pupil responses, without any actual difference in luminance of the visual stimulus. Interestingly, the inverse scenario remained untested to date: when a physical luminance difference is perceptually eliminated from awareness, does pupil size still track attention to the stimulus? In this Registered Report, Vilotijević and Mathôt (2024) sought to test this experimentally using a perceptual fading phenomenon where two Gaussian patches with different luminances fade from consciousness and are thus perceived as mid-level uniform grey (or at least the subjective difference is much reduced). This fading manipulation, as well as a control condition without perceptual fading, were presented in separate blocks. Participants were instructed to covertly attend one of the patches.

The authors hypothesised that if pupil size reflects attentional selection, these pupil responses in the fading condition​ should be eliminated or at least reduced, and this should evolve with time as the stimuli are perceptually fading. Their results show that pupil responses during covert attention are indeed reduced during perceptual fading - but they are not eliminated. Interestingly, this reduction did not depend on time or self-reports of the strength of perceptual fading. The findings therefore suggest that pupil dilation tracks subjective brightness differences.

 

One inherent issue with experiments like these is that the experimental and control conditions necessarily involve a physical difference in the stimulus. Here, the fading condition had the same spatial configuration of light and dark stimuli throughout a block while in the control (non-fading) condition the light and dark stimuli alternated sides between trials. It is therefore impossible to completely rule out that the physical difference affects the results. However, the only alternative to this would be an experimental design in which the stimuli never change, but only the subjective perceptual state varies. Such a design is completely at the mercy of the participant's subjective state and therefore loses experimental control and statistical sensitivity. The present results confirmed the authors' prediction that there are indeed differences in overall pupil responses during the fading and control conditions, irrespective of covert attention.

 

Critically, the fact that the attention effect did not vary with time or subjective self-reports of the illusion supports the authors' interpretation that this reflects higher-level cognition: the mere act of attending to the dark side - even if the actual appearance has faded - could cause a sustained pupil dilation. This would be consistent with the type of pupil effects for memory and mental imagery that motivated the present study. However, a simpler alternative is that the experience of perceptual fading was incomplete (as possibly suggested by Figures 2D and 2F) but that self-reports fail to capture this subjective experience accurately. Perhaps a future study could compare the magnitude of the attentional pupil effects when the initial stimulus is completely removed. If similar differences in pupil response persist this would suggest that the present results are due to high-level modulation or the residual low-level luminance difference.

 

The Stage 2 manuscript was evaluated by two reviewers and the recommender over two rounds of review. One reviewer again advised additional robustness checks to rule out eye movement confounds, an issue they had already raised during Stage 1 review. The researchers provide clear evidence that this is unlikely to have confounded their findings. This has been added to the supplementary data repository. Following this review and revision, the recommender judged that the Stage 2 criteria were met and awarded a positive recommendation.

 

URL to the preregistered Stage 1 protocol: https://osf.io/bmtp6
 
Level of bias control achieved: Level 6. No part of the data or evidence that was used to answer the research question was generated until after IPA.
 
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1. Vilotijević, A. & Mathôt, S. (2024). The effect of covert visual attention on pupil size during perceptual fading [Stage 2]. Acceptance of Version 2 by Peer Community in Registered Reports. https://osf.io/ku8qc?view_only=f331df53b50f431386fabba9e386b387

 

The replication crisis/credibility revolution has driven a vast number of changes to our research environment (Korbmacher et al., 2023) including a much needed spotlight on issues surrounding measurement (Flake & Fried, 2020). As general understanding and awareness has increased surrounding the 'garden of forking paths' or 'researcher degrees of freedom' (Simmons et al., 2011), and the various decisions made during the scientific process that could impact the conclusions drawn by the process, so too should our interest in meta-research that tells us more about the methodological processes we follow, and how discretionary decisions may influence the design, analysis and reporting of a project.

 

Peeters et al. (2025) have proposed a systematic literature review of this nature, mapping the methodological variation in experience sampling methods (ESM) from the design stage all the way to dissemination. It starts this journey by mapping how ESM studies vary e.g., in design, considering a variety of factors like sample size, number of measurements, and sampling scheme. It also evaluates reporting quality, rationales provided, and captures the extent of open science practices adopted. Covering many parts of the research process that get assumed, unreported or otherwise unjustified, the proposed work looks set to springboard an important body of work that can tell us more effectively how to design, implement and report ESM studies.

 

The Stage 1 submission was reviewed over one round of in-depth review with two reviewers. Based on detailed responses to reviewers’ feedback, the recommender judged that the manuscript met the Stage 1 criteria and therefore awarded in-principle acceptance.

 

 
Level of bias control achieved: Level 1. At least some of the data/evidence that will be used to the answer the research question has been accessed and observed by the authors, including key variables, but the authors certify that they have not yet performed any of their preregistered analyses, and in addition they have taken stringent steps to reduce the risk of bias.
 
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1. Flake, J. K., & Fried, E. I. (2020). Measurement schmeasurement: Questionable measurement practices and how to avoid them. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 3, 456-465. https://doi.org/10.1177/2515245920952393

 

2. Korbmacher, M., Azevedo, F., Pennington, C. R., Hartmann, H., Pownall, M., Schmidt, K., ... & Evans, T. (2023). The replication crisis has led to positive structural, procedural, and community changes. Communications Psychology, 1, 3. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-023-00003-2

 

3. Peeters, L., Van Den Noortgate, W., Blanchard, M. A., Eisele, G., Kirtley, O., Artner, R., & Lafit, G. (2025). Mapping Methodological Variation in ESM Research from Design to Data Analysis: A Systematic Review. In principle acceptance of Version 3 by Peer Community in Registered Reports. https://osf.io/ztvn3

 

4. Simmons, J. P., Nelson, L. D., & Simonsohn, U. (2011). False-positive psychology: Undisclosed flexibility in data collection and analysis allows presenting anything as significant. Psychological Science, 22, 1359-1366. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797611417632

Effort moralization is the well known idea that, unrelated to actual performance, people doing more effort are judged better, attributed more morality and seen as better collaborators than people doing less effort. However, the series of studies on this topic mostly used vignettes with a man or a neutral protagonist. The current study by Roth et al. (2025) proposes to tackle the gender problem by testing the difference in attribution morality between a man and a woman protagonist, and two contexts: a “care” and a “work” context, mirroring the stereotypes associated with men and women.

 

The authors included two different and adequate power analyses, various interpretation of the possible effects, and filtering to ensure a high quality of data collection. They also provide a supplementary repository including the qualtrics survey, R script, and simulated data.
 
The Stage 1 manuscript was evaluated over two rounds of in-depth review. Based on ​detailed responses to the reviewers’ and the recommender’s comments, the recommender judged that the manuscript met the Stage 1 criteria and therefore awarded in-principle acceptance.​​​
 
URL to the preregistered Stage 1 protocol: https://osf.io/xd87r

 
Level of bias control achieved: Level 6. No part of the data or evidence that will be used to answer the research question yet exists, and no part will be generated until after IPA.
 
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Roth, L. H. O., Tissot, T. T., Fischer, T. & Masak, S. C. (2025). See me, judge me, pay me: Gendered effort moralization in work and care. In principle acceptance of Version 3 by Peer Community in Registered Reports. https://osf.io/xd87r

Social cognition involves complex processes including empathy, mentalizing, and compassion, which rely on structural connectivity and specifically white matter (WM) integrity. Prior research suggests that deficits in social cognition are linked to deficient structural connectivity, indicating that the latter might be an essential foundation for social cognitive abilities. In the current study, Hansl et al. (2025) explore the relationship between social cognition and white matter (WM) integrity in the brain across different populations, by means of a systematic review and meta-analyses. Using diffusion-weighted imaging data, the authors aim to identify specific WM tracts most associated with social cognition. Meta-analyses of region-of-interest (ROI)-based studies will provide further insights, while meta-regression and subgroup analyses will examine differences across social cognitive constructs, imaging metrics, clinical conditions, and age groups. The findings could clarify global and specific WM contributions to social cognition, guiding future research on brain structure-function relationships in social cognition across various populations.

 

The Stage 1 submission was evaluated by two expert reviewers. After two rounds of revision, the recommender judged that the manuscript met the Stage 1 criteria and awarded in-principle acceptance (IPA).

 

URL to the preregistered Stage 1 protocol: https://osf.io/6n3jy (under temporary private embargo)

 

Level of bias control achieved: Level 2. At least some data/evidence that will be used to answer the research question has been accessed and partially observed by the authors, but the authors certify that they have not yet observed the key variables within the data that will be used to answer the research question and they have taken additional steps to maximise bias control and rigour.

 
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1. Hansl, R., Maliske, L. Z., Valk, S. L., & Kanske, P. (2025). Social cognition as a matter of structural brain connections? A systematic review and diffusion weighted imaging meta-analysis. In principle acceptance of Version 3 by Peer Community in Registered Reports. https://osf.io/6n3jy