When we familiarise with new faces over repeated exposures, it is generally in situations that have meaning for us. Seeing a face more often tends to go along with learning more about the person, and their likely contexts and actions. In this Registered Report, Noad and Andrews (2024) tested whether meaningful context during exposure improves the consolidation of faces into long-term memory. Participants were shown video clips from the TV series Life on Mars, either in their original chronological sequence, which provides meaningful context, or in a scrambled sequence. It was expected that the original sequence would provide a better conceptual understanding, and this was confirmed by free recall and structured question tests. Face recognition memory was tested with images of the actor from the original clips (‘in show’) and the same actor from another show (‘out-of-show’), to test whether memory was modulated by the similarity of appearance to that at encoding. Face recognition was tested immediately after exposure and after four weeks, to allow time for consolidation. As expected, recognition memory was better for participants in the meaningful context condition, and for in-show faces. However, meaningful context did not lead to less forgetting of the faces at the follow up test, even for in-show faces, which did not support the original predictions. An exploratory analysis found that a metric of overlap between pairs of participants’ conceptual understanding was related to overlap in the set of faces they recognised. This relationship was stronger after four weeks, which suggests increased interaction of conceptual knowledge and face recognition after consolidation.

 

The Stage 2 manuscript was assessed over two rounds of review, and the recommender judged that the manuscript met the Stage 2 criteria for recommendation.

 

URL to the preregistered Stage 1 protocol: https://osf.io/8wp6f
 
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. 
 
List of eligible PCI RR-friendly journals:

 

 

References
 
1. Noad, K. & Andrews, T. J. (2024). The importance of conceptual knowledge when becoming familiar
with faces during naturalistic viewing [Stage 2]. Acceptance of Version 4 by Peer Community in Registered Reports. https://osf.io/thgrz

We may not believe what our memory tells us: Memory may deliver a compelling recollection we believe did not happen (we know we were not there at the time); and we may know an event happened that we fail to remember (even for when we were not drunk!). That is, there can be distrust in remembering and distrust in forgetting. Previous work by the authors has looked at this through a signal detection lens, reporting in separate studies that people who have distrust in remembering have either a high or low criterion for saying "old" (Zhang et al, 2023, 2024a). A plausible explanation for these contrasting results is that the criterion can either be the means by which false memories are generated enabling the distrust (low criterion); or rather, in conditions where accuracy is at stake, the means for compensating for the distrust (high criterion).

 

In the current study by Zhang et al (2024b), participants will be incentivised to be as accurate as possible, and in a memory test given feedback about commission errors or, in another group, ommission errors. As a manipulation check, the authors will test that the feedback increases distrust in remembering or distrust in forgetting, respectively, compared to a no feedback control group. Crucially, the authors hypothesize that people will adjust the criterion to say "old" in a compensatory way in each group. The study uses inference by intervals to provide a fairly severe test of this hypothesis.

 

The Stage 1 manuscript was evaluated over multiple rounds of in-depth review. Based on detailed responses to the reviewers' and recommender's comments, 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/x69qt
 
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. 
 
List of eligible PCI RR-friendly journals:

 

 

 

1. Zhang, Y., Qi, F., Otgaar, H., Nash, R. A., & Jelicic, M. (2023). A Tale of Two Distrusts: Memory Distrust towards Commission and Omission Errors in the Chinese Context. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition. https://doi.org/10.1037/mac0000134

 

2. Zhang, Y., Otgaar, H., Nash, R. A., & Rosar, L. (2024). Time and memory distrust shape the dynamics of recollection and belief-in-occurrence. Memory, 32, 484–501. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658211.2024.2336166

 

3. Zhang, Y., Otgaar, H., Nash, R. A., & Li, C. (2024b). The effects of memory distrust toward commission and omission on recollection-belief correspondence and memory errors. In principle acceptance of Version 5 by Peer Community in Registered Reports. https://osf.io/x69qt

 

A poor diet has severe detrimental health effects, and attempts to reduce caloric intake often prove unsuccessful. Unhealthy foods, high in fat, sugar, and salt tend to be highly appetitive, and can undermine individuals’ ability to refrain themselves from consuming them. Computerized cognitive retraining techniques have shown promise in curbing the intake of unhealthy foods and promoting weight loss. However, in real-world scenarios, adherence to such retraining programs can be suboptimal, potentially diminishing their effectiveness.

 

In the present study, Maclellan et al. (2023) aim to investigate whether the incorporation of gamified elements, transforming the cognitive retraining task into a game-like experience, can enhance adherence and overall intervention effectiveness by boosting engagement and motivation. These findings could deepen our understanding of the mechanisms through which cognitive retraining mitigates caloric intake and pave the way for more compelling and successful interventions.

 

The Stage 1 manuscript was evaluated over one round of review and revision. Based on detailed evaluations by two expert reviewers, the recommender judged that the manuscript met the Stage 1 criteria and therefore awarded in-principle acceptance (IPA).

 

URL to the preregistered Stage 1 protocol: https://osf.io/jspf3 (under temporary private embargo)

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.
 
List of eligible PCI RR-friendly journals:
 

Previous research has shown that 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 remains untested: when a difference in luminance is perceptually eliminated from awareness, does pupil size still track cognitive factors? In this study, Vilotijević and Mathôt (2024) seek 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. The researchers will present this fading manipulation and a control condition where no fading occurs in separate blocks. Participants are instructed to covertly attend one of the patches. If pupil size reflects attentional selection, pupil responses should be reduced in the fading condition, and this should evolve with time as the stimuli are perceptually fading.

 

The Stage 1 manuscript was evaluated by three reviewers and the Recommender over three rounds of review. One reviewer advises conducting robustness checks to rule out eye movements confounds. This constitutes exploratory analyses at Stage 2 that probably require some flexibility. Despite this, the Recommender decided to grant in-principle acceptance of this study. While these robustness tests can put the eventual results in context, the general hypotheses and predictions specified in this version are clear and straightforward.

 

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 will be used to answer the research question yet exists and no part will be generated until after IPA.
 
List of eligible PCI RR-friendly journals:

 

 

 

1. Vilotijević, A. & Mathôt, S. (2024). The effect of covert visual attention on pupil size during perceptual fading. In principle acceptance of Version 3 by Peer Community in Registered Reports. https://osf.io/bmtp6

 

The world is seemingly awash with conspiracy theories – from well-trodden examples such as fake Moon landings, the 9/11 truth movement, and Holocaust denial, to relative newcomers including COVID as a bioweapon, QAnon, and the belief that the science of climate change has been invented or falsified. While there is a public perception that conspiracy theories are becoming more prevalent, recent evidence suggests that the rate of conspiracism is relatively stable over time (Uscinski et al., 2022). At any point in history, it seems that a certain proportion of people find themselves vulnerable to conspiracy beliefs, but what distinguishes those who do from those who don’t, and what are the causal factors?

 

In the current study, Liekefett et al. (2023) investigated the critical role of rumination – a perseverative and repetitive focus on negative content leading to emotional distress. In particular, the authors asked whether one component of rumination referred to as brooding (dwelling on one’s worries and distressing emotions) has a specific causal role in the formation of conspiracy beliefs. In a series of preliminary experiments, the authors first established a procedure for successfully inducing rumination, identifying various boundary conditions and requirements for a successful design. In the main study (N=1,638 to 2,007 depending on the analysis), they asked whether the induction of brooding causes a significant increase in conspiracy beliefs. Manipulation checks were also included to confirm intervention fidelity (independently of this hypothesis), and exploratory analyses tested the effect of various moderators, as well as the causal role of a complementary manipulation of reflection – a component of rumination in which attention is focused on the issue at hand rather than one’s emotions.

 

As expected by the authors' preliminary work, manipulation checks independently confirmed the effectiveness of the brooding intervention. In answer to the main research question, participants who brooded over the worries and negative emotions associated with an issue were more susceptible to conspiracy beliefs compared to a control group. However, while this effect of brooding was statistically significant, the confidence interval of the effect size estimate overlapped with the authors' proposed smallest effect size of interest (d = 0.20), suggesting that the practical value of the effect remains to be determined.

 

Overall the findings are consistent with a range of psychological theories suggesting that rumination induces negative affect and/or narrows attention to negative information, which in turn may make conspiracy theories seem more probable and render individuals more vulnerable to cognitive bias. The authors note the importance of future work to define the smallest effect of practical significance, analagous to the criteria used to determine the 'minimal clinically important difference’ in medical research.

 

The Stage 2 manuscript was evaluated over one round of in-depth review. Based on detailed responses to the reviewers' comments, the recommender judged that the manuscript met the Stage 2 criteria and awarded a positive recommendation.

 

URL to the preregistered Stage 1 protocol: https://osf.io/y82bs
 
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.
 
List of eligible PCI RR-friendly journals:
 

• Advances in Cognitive Psychology
• Collabra Psychology
• Experimental Psychology
• International Review of Social Psychology
• Journal of Cognition
• Peer Community Journal
• PeerJ
• Royal Society Open Science
• Studia Psychologica
• Swiss Psychology Open

 

References
 

1. Uscinski, J., Enders, A., Klofstad, C., Seelig, M., Drochon, H., Premaratne, K. & Murthi, M. (2022) Have beliefs in conspiracy theories increased over time? PLOS ONE 17: e0270429. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0270429

2. Liekefett, L. Sebben, S. & Becker, J. C. (2023). The Effect of Brooding about Societal Problems on Conspiracy Beliefs: A Registered Report. Acceptance of Version 2 by Peer Community in Registered Reports. https://osf.io/3e8wc