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237 real negative results, null findings, and replication failures in Neuroscience · Negative / Null Result Report. 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

Comparing fear and anxiety chemosignals: Do they modulate facial muscle activity and facilitate identifying facial expressions?

Nuno Gomes, Bettina M. Pause, Monique A. M. Smeets et al. · 2023 · Chemical Senses

Fear and anxiety are the most frequently studied emotional states in chemosignal research. Despite differences between these two emotional states, findings from research using fear and anxiety body odors (BOs) are often treated as part of…

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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

Adaptive scaling of reward in episodic memory: a replication study

Alice Mason, Casimir J. H. Ludwig, Simon Farrell · 2016 · Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

Reward is thought to enhance episodic memory formation via dopaminergic consolidation. Bunzeck, Dayan, Dolan, and Duzel [(2010). A common mechanism for adaptive scaling of reward and novelty. Human Brain Mapping, 31, 1380-1394] provided functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and behavioural evidence that reward and episodic memory systems are sensitive to the contextual value of a reward-whether it is relatively higher or lower-as opposed to absolute value or prediction error. We carried out a direct replication of their behavioural study and did not replicate their finding that memory p

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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 ReportNeuroscience

How does Stroop interference change with practice? A reappraisal from the musical Stroop paradigm.

Laurent Grégoire, Pierre Perruchet, Bénédicte Poulin-Charronnat · 2014 · Journal of Experimental Psychology Learning Memory and Cognition

Most earlier studies investigating the evolution of the Stroop effect with the amount of reading practice have reported data consistent with an inverted U-shaped curve, whereby the Stroop effect appears early during reading acquisition,…

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

Music and Language Processing Share Behavioral and Cerebral Features

Clara E. James · 2012 · Frontiers in Psychology

A commentary on Musical expertise and statistical learning of musical and linguistic structures by Schön, D., and François, C. (2011). Front. Psychology 2:167. doi: 10.3389/ fpsyg.2011.00167 Both language and music consist of discrete elements organized in embedded hierarchical structures. Schön and François nicely expose in this review that musical expertise facilitates learning of both linguistic and musical structures. At the behavioral level, the musicians did not outperform the nonmusicians. However, ERP analyses showed that acquisition of boundary perception (segmentation) between units

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

Higher visual areas act like domain-general filters with strong selectivity and functional specialization

Meenakshi Khosla, Leila Wehbe · 2026 · Nature Communications

Neuroscientific studies rely heavily on a-priori hypotheses, which can bias results toward existing theories. Here, we use a hypothesis-neutral approach to study category selectivity in higher visual cortex. Using only stimulus images and their associated fMRI activity, we constrain randomly initialized neural networks to predict voxel activity. Despite no category-level supervision, units in the trained networks act as detectors for semantic concepts like 'faces' or 'words', providing solid empirical support for categorical selectivity. Importantly, this selectivity is mostly maintained when

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

Predicting ‘Brainage’ in late childhood to adolescence (6-17yrs) using structural MRI, morphometric similarity, and machine learning

Daniel Griffiths-King, Amanda Wood, Jan Novák · 2023 · Scientific Reports

Brain development is regularly studied using structural MRI. Recently, studies have used a combination of statistical learning and large-scale imaging databases of healthy children to predict an individual's age from structural MRI. This data-driven, predicted 'Brainage' typically differs from the subjects chronological age, with this difference a potential measure of individual difference. Few studies have leveraged higher-order or connectomic representations of structural MRI data for this Brainage approach. We leveraged morphometric similarity as a network-level approach to structural MRI t

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Negative / Null Result ReportNeuroscience

Does testing impair relational processing? Failed attempts to replicate the negative testing effect.

Katherine A. Rawson, Kathryn T. Wissman, Kalif E. Vaughn · 2015 · Journal of Experimental Psychology Learning Memory and Cognition

Recent research on testing effects (i.e., practice tests are more effective than restudy for enhancing subsequent memory) has focused on explaining when and why testing enhances memory. Of particular interest for present purposes, Zaromb…

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

TREM2 expression level is critical for microglial state, metabolic capacity and efficacy of TREM2 agonism

Astrid Feiten, Kilian Dahm, Kai Schlepckow et al. · 2026 · Nature Communications

Triggering receptor expressed on myeloid cells 2 (TREM2) is a central regulator of microglial activity and loss-of-function coding variants are major risk factors for late onset Alzheimer's disease (LOAD). To better understand the molecular and functional changes associated with TREM2 signalling in microglia, we generated a TREM2 reporter mouse. In APP transgenic animals, bulk RNA-sequencing of isolated microglia sorted based on reporter expression highlighted TREM2 level-related changes in major immunometabolic pathways, and enrichment of genes in oxidative phosphorylation and cholesterol met

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

Null effect of perceived drum pattern complexity on the experience of groove

Olivier Senn, Florian Hoesl, Toni Bechtold et al. · 2024 · PLoS ONE

There is a broad consensus in groove research that the experience of groove, understood as a pleasurable urge to move in response to music, is to some extent related to the complexity of the rhythm. Specifically, music with medium rhythmic complexity has been found to motivate greater urge to move compared to low or high complexity music (inverted-U hypothesis). Studies that confirmed the inverted-U hypothesis usually based their measure of complexity on the rhythmic phenomenon of syncopation, where rhythms with more and/or stronger syncopation are considered to be more complex than less synco

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

Tactile processing in mouse cortex depends on action context

Eric A. Finkel, Yi-Ting Chang, Rajan Dasgupta et al. · 2024 · Cell Reports

The brain receives constant tactile input, but only a subset guides ongoing behavior. Actions associated with tactile stimuli thus endow them with behavioral relevance. It remains unclear how the relevance of tactile stimuli affects…

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

Accelerated transcranial magnetic stimulation for psychological distress in advanced cancer: A phase 2a feasibility and preliminary efficacy clinical trial

James Downar, James Downar, Julie Lapenskie et al. · 2024 · Palliative Medicine

Background: Psychological and existential suffering affects many people with advanced illness, and current therapeutic options have limited effectiveness. Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) is a safe and effective therapy…

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