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Browse the failure-mode index

244 real negative results, null findings, and replication failures in Neuroscience. Search the index →

WASTE indexes published research — it does not host or republish full papers. Each entry is a metadata record compiled from open scholarly databases; the abstract is shown in full only where the paper is openly licensed, otherwise a short excerpt under fair use. Classifications are automated and approximate.

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

Evidence of distinct RELN and TGFB1 genetic associations in familial and non-familial otosclerosis in a British population

Andrew Mowat, Michael Crompton, Joanna L. Ziff et al. · 2018 · Human Genetics

Otosclerosis is a common form of hearing loss which typically presents in young adults. The disease has a familial, monogenic form and a non-familial form with a more complex aetiology. A previous genome wide association study identified evidence that variants within RELN are associated with the condition. Other genes in which an association has been reported include BMP2, COL1A1, FGF2, PPP2R5B and TGFB1. However, follow up studies have often failed to replicate initial positive results. The aim of this study was to establish if an association exists between eight single nucleotide polymorphis

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

Vulnerability to Distraction in Schizophrenia

Chieffi S Iavarone A · 2015 · African Journal of Psychiatry

Attentional processes enhancing relevant information and attenuating competing irrelevant information are required for coherent and effective action. One of deficits that may characterize schizophrenia is the impairment of the ability in focusing on relevant information while inhibiting the irrelevant. The intrusion of irrelevant stimuli during information processing may impair cognitive and behavioral functioning. In this paper we review studies that investigated the vulnerability to distracting stimuli in schizophrenia by using visual interference paradigms, namely flanker, Stroop, and negat

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Negative / Null Result ReportNeuroscience

Does contextual diversity affect serial recall?

Dominic Guitard, Leonie M. Miller, Ian Neath et al. · 2019 · Journal of Cognitive Psychology

People are better at recalling lists of high- than low-frequency words but as Parmentier, Comesãna, and Soares [(2017). Disentangling the effects of word frequency and contextual diversity on serial recall performance. Quarterly Journal of…

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

Phase I/II trial of BMS-986,205 and nivolumab as first line therapy in hepatocellular carcinoma

Jasmine C. Huynh, May Cho, Arta M. Monjazeb et al. · 2023 · Investigational New Drugs

BACKGROUND: Indoleamine-2,3-dioxygenase (IDO) helps orchestrate immune suppression and checkpoint inhibitor resistance in hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). BMS-986,205 is a novel oral drug that potently and selectively inhibits IDO. This Phase I/II study evaluated the safety and tolerability of BMS-986,205 in combination with nivolumab as first-line therapy in advanced HCC. METHODS: IV on Day 1 of each 14-day cycle). The primary objective was to determine the safety and tolerability of this combination; secondary objectives were to obtain preliminary efficacy. RESULTS: Eight patients received a

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

Amygdala and nucleus accumbens involvement in appetitive extinction

Onno Kruse, S. Klein, Isabell Tapia León et al. · 2020 · Human Brain Mapping

Extinction of appetitive conditioning is regarded as an important model for the treatment of psychiatric disorders like addiction. However, very few studies have investigated its neural correlates. Therefore, we investigated neural…

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

Wearable EEG-Based Brain–Computer Interface for Stress Monitoring

Brian Premchand, Liyuan Liang, Kok Soon Phua et al. · 2024 · NeuroSci

Detecting stress is important for improving human health and potential, because moderate levels of stress may motivate people towards better performance at cognitive tasks, while chronic stress exposure causes impaired performance and health risks. We propose a Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) system to detect stress in the context of high-pressure work environments. The BCI system includes an electroencephalogram (EEG) headband with dry electrodes and an electrocardiogram (ECG) chest belt. We collected EEG and ECG data from 40 participants during two stressful cognitive tasks: the Cognitive Vig

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

Single nucleotide polymorphism rs6716901 in SLC25A12 gene is associated with Asperger syndrome

Jaroslava Durdiaková, Varun Warrier, Simon Baron‐Cohen et al. · 2014 · Molecular Autism

BACKGROUND: Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC) are a group of developmental conditions which affect communication, social interactions and behaviour. Mitochondrial oxidative dysfunction has been suggested as a mechanism of autism based on the results of multiple genetic association and expression studies. SLC25A12 is a gene encoding a calcium-binding carrier protein that localizes to the mitochondria and is involved in the exchange of aspartate for glutamate in the inner membrane of the mitochondria regulating the cytosolic redox state. rs2056202 SNP in this gene has previously been associated w

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

The role of plasma inflammatory markers in late-life depression and conversion to dementia: a 3-year follow-up study

Mariia Bocharova, Tom Borza, Leiv Otto Watne et al. · 2025 · Molecular Psychiatry

Late-life depression (LLD) has been linked to increased likelihood of dementia, although mechanisms responsible for this association remain largely unknown. One feature frequently observed in both LLD and dementia is elevated levels of plasma inflammatory markers. The present study aimed to compare the levels of 12 plasma inflammatory markers between older people with LLD and controls, and to explore whether these markers, along with clinical characteristics, can predict dementia in patients with LLD within 3 years of follow-up. Using multiple linear regression with stepwise adjustment, we com

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

Psychological mechanisms of offset analgesia: The effect of expectancy manipulation

Tibor M. Szikszay, Wacław M. Adamczyk, Janina Panskus et al. · 2023 · PLoS ONE

A frequently used paradigm to quantify endogenous pain modulation is offset analgesia, which is defined as a disproportionate large reduction in pain following a small decrease in a heat stimulus. The aim of this study was to determine whether suggestion influences the magnitude of offset analgesia in healthy participants. A total of 97 participants were randomized into three groups (hypoalgesic group, hyperalgesic group, control group). All participants received four heat stimuli (two constant trials and two offset trials) to the ventral, non-dominant forearm while they were asked to rate the

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Negative / Null Result ReportNeuroscience

On the usefulness of formal judgment tasks in syntax and in second-language research: The case of resumptive pronouns in English, Turkish, and Mandarin Chinese

John Hitz, Elaine J. Francis · 2016 · Linguistics

Abstract Gibson and Fedorenko (2013, The need for quantitative methods in syntax and semantics research, Language and Cognitive Processes 28(2), 88–124) have argued against the continued use of informally collected acceptability judgments…

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Null DatasetOpen accessNeuroscience

Data visualization for inference in tomographic brain imaging

Cyril Pernet, Christopher R. Madan · 2019 · European Journal of Neuroscience

Tomographic imaging (i.e. magnetic resonance imaging [MRI], positron emission tomography [PET], X-ray computed tomography [CT]) offers a unique window in understanding structure-function relationships in the living brain. Nowadays, it is standard practice to acquire entire brain volumes and perform statistical analyses at each voxel, an approach known as statistical parametric mapping (Friston, Frith, Liddle, & Frackowiak, 1991). Because it is impossible to report the statistical results in every voxel, summary tables and figures are of importance. The choice made by authors to create such fig

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

A large-scale genome-wide gene expression analysis in peripheral blood identifies very few differentially expressed genes related to antidepressant treatment and response in patients with major depressive disorder

Anne Krogh Nøhr, Morten Lindow, Annika Forsingdal et al. · 2021 · Neuropsychopharmacology

A better understanding of the biological factors underlying antidepressant treatment in patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) is needed. We perform gene expression analyses and explore sources of variability in peripheral blood related to antidepressant treatment and treatment response in patients suffering from recurrent MDD at baseline and after 8 weeks of treatment. The study includes 281 patients, which were randomized to 8 weeks of treatment with vortioxetine (N = 184) or placebo (N = 97). To our knowledge, this is the largest dataset including both gene expression in blood and pl

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

Subthalamic deep brain stimulation in Parkinson׳s disease has no significant effect on perceptual timing in the hundreds of milliseconds range

Thomas Cope, Manon Grube, Arnab Mandal et al. · 2014 · Neuropsychologia

Bilateral, high-frequency stimulation of the basal ganglia (STN-DBS) is in widespread use for the treatment of the motor symptoms of Parkinson׳s disease (PD). We present here the first psychophysical investigation of the effect of STN-DBS upon perceptual timing in the hundreds of milliseconds range, with both duration-based (absolute) and beat-based (relative) tasks; 13 patients with PD were assessed with their STN-DBS 'on', 'off', and then 'on' again. Paired parametric analyses revealed no statistically significant differences for any task according to DBS status. We demonstrate, from the exa

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

Emotion in Chinese Words Could Not Be Extracted in Continuous Flash Suppression

Kaiwen Cheng, Aolin Ding, Lianfang Jiang et al. · 2019 · Frontiers in Human Neuroscience

Previous studies have demonstrated the automatic vigilance effect for faces and pictures and have attributed it to the brain's prioritized unconscious evaluation of early evolutionary stimuli that are critical to survival. Whether this effect exists for evolutionarily more recent stimuli, such as written words, has become the center of much debate. Apparently contradicting results have been reported in different languages, such as Hebrew, English, and Traditional Chinese (TC), with regard to the unconscious processing of emotional words in breaking continuous flash suppression (b-CFS). Our cur

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

Large-scale multi-site study shows no association between musical training and early auditory neural sound encoding

Kelly L. Whiteford, Lucas S. Baltzell, Matt Chiu et al. · 2025 · Nature Communications

Musical training has been reported to be associated with enhanced neural processing of sounds, as measured via the frequency following response (FFR), implying the potential for human subcortical neural plasticity. We conducted a…

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

Little Support for Discrete Item Limits in Visual Working Memory

Klaus Oberauer · 2022 · Psychological Science

Some theorists argue that working memory is limited to a discrete number of items and that additional items are not encoded at all. Adam et al. (2017) presented evidence supporting this hypothesis: Participants reproduced visual features of up to six items in a self-chosen order. After the third or fourth response, error distributions were indistinguishable from guessing. I present four experiments with young adults (each N = 24) reexamining this finding. Experiment 1 presented items slowly and sequentially. Experiment 2 presented them simultaneously but longer than in the experiments of Adam

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

A Psychometric Comparison of Two Carer Quality of Life Questionnaires in Huntington's Disease: Implications for Neurodegenerative Disorders

Peter Hagell, Stephen S. Smith · 2013 · Journal of Huntington s Disease

BACKGROUND: The carer impact of neurodegenerative disorders such as Huntington's disease (HD) is vast. Attempts to measure carer QoL in neurodegenerative disorders include the three-dimensional (Practical aspects of Caregiving, PC;…

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

Retrograde Interference in Perceptual Learning of a Peripheral Hyperacuity Task

Shao-Chin Hung, Aaron R. Seitz · 2011 · PLoS ONE

Consolidation, a process that stabilizes memory trace after initial acquisition, has been studied for over a century. A number of studies have shown that a skill or memory must be consolidated after acquisition so that it becomes resistant to interference from new information. Previous research found that training on a peripheral 3-dot hyperacuity task could retrogradely interfere with earlier training on the same task but with a mirrored stimulus configuration. However, a recent study failed to replicate this finding. Here we address the controversy by replicating both patterns of results, ho

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

Resolution limit of the eye — how many pixels can we see?

Maliha Ashraf, Alexandre Chapiro, Rafał Mantiuk · 2025 · Nature Communications

As large engineering efforts go towards improving the resolution of mobile, augmented reality (AR), and virtual reality (VR) displays, it is important to know the maximum resolution at which further improvements bring no noticeable benefit. This limit is often referred to as the retinal resolution, although the limiting factor may not necessarily be attributed to the retina. To determine the ultimate resolution at which an image appears sharp to our eyes with no perceivable blur, we created an experimental setup with a sliding display, which allows for continuous control of the resolution. The

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

Visual Perceptual Load Does Not Affect the Frequency Mismatch Negativity

Stefan Wiens, Erik van Berlekom, Malina Szychowska et al. · 2019 · Frontiers in Psychology

The mismatch negativity (MMN) has been of particular interest in auditory perception because of its sensitivity to auditory change. It is typically measured in an oddball task and is computed as the difference of deviant minus standard tones. Previous studies suggest that the oddball MMN can be reduced by crossmodal attention to a concurrent, difficult visual task. However, more recent studies did not replicate this effect. Because previous findings seem to be biased, we preregistered the present study and used Bayesian hypothesis testing to measure the strength of evidence for or against an e

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

Quantitative and Qualitative Exploration of Meaningful Change on the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales (Vineland™-II) in Children and Adolescents with Autism Without Intellectual Disability Following Participation in a Clinical Trial

Susanne Clinch, Stacie Hudgens, Elizabeth Gibbons et al. · 2023 · Patient Related Outcome Measures

Purpose: Adaptive Behavior Scale is often used in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) trials. The Adaptive Behavior Composite Score (VABS-ABC) is the standardized overall score (the average of the Socialization, Communication and Daily Living…

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

Target Size Manipulations Affect Error-Processing Duration and Success Perceptions but not Behavioural Indices of Learning

Nicole T. Ong, Jamie Hawke, Nicola J. Hodges · 2019 · Brain Sciences

We evaluated if and how success perceptions, through target size manipulations, impact processes related to motor learning. This work was based on recent literature suggesting that expectations and self-efficacy exert a direct impact on learning. We measured arousal, kinematics, learner expectancies, motivation, and outcomes in a dart-throwing task. Novices (n = 29) were assigned to either a “Large-target” (horizontal target, 10-cm high) or “Small-target” (2-cm high) group for practice (t = 90), and both groups completed 24-h retention tests. The Small-target group took longer to plan and proc

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

FMR1, circadian genes and depression: suggestive associations or false discovery?

Daniel F. Kripke, Caroline M. Nievergelt, Gregory J. Tranah et al. · 2013 · Journal of Circadian Rhythms

BACKGROUND: There are several indications that malfunctions of the circadian clock contribute to depression. To search for particular circadian gene polymorphisms associated with depression, diverse polymorphisms were genotyped in two samples covering a range of depressed volunteers and participants with normal mood. METHODS: Depression mood self-ratings and DNA were collected independently from a sample of patients presenting to a sleep disorders center (1086 of European origin) and from a separate sample consisting of 399 participants claiming delayed sleep phase symptoms and 406 partly-matc

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