Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessConsciousness. Cognition
Alessandro Mazza, Ellen Voorrips, Gethin Hughes et al. · 2025 · Journal of Cognition
Daily, we perform activities in the presence of others (e.g., office work). While it’s well-established that the mere presence of others can influence our performance, it is less clear whether others’ performance, rather than just their presence, influences us. To address this, we replicated Desender et al.’s (2016) study, Is mental effort contagious?, and conducted a second experiment to follow up on our failure to replicate their findings. Desender et al. (2016) used a modified joint Simon task where two participants performed side by side. The manipulated participant completed an easy (most
View details →Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessConsciousness. Cognition
Chiara Gambi, Jaroslaw R. Lelonkiewicz, Davide Crepaldi · 2024 · Journal of Cognition
Influential theories and computational models suggest error-based learning plays an important role in language acquisition: Children learn new words by generating predictions about upcoming utterances and revising those predictions when they are erroneous. Critically, revising stronger (rather than weaker) predictions should further enhance learning. Although previously demonstrated in adults, such prediction error boost has not been conclusively shown in children. To close this gap, we tested 107 participants between the ages of 5 and 10. We found little evidence that word learning in this ag
View details →Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessConsciousness. Cognition
Ronald Andringa, Walter R. Boot, Nelson A. Roque et al. · 2018 · Cognitive Research
Abstract Placing one’s hands near an object has been reported to enhance visual processing in a number of ways. We explored whether hand proximity confers an advantage when applied to complex visual search. In one experiment, participants indicated the presence or absence of a target item in a baggage x-ray image by pressing response boxes located at the edge of a tablet computer screen, requiring them to grip the display between their hands. Alternatively, they responded using a mouse held within their lap. Contrary to expectations, hand position did not influence search performance. In a sec
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