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246 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

Neuroinflammation in Schizophrenia: An Overview of Evidence and Implications for Pathophysiology

Evgeny A. Ermakov, Irina A. Mednova, Anastasiia S. Boiko et al. · 2025 · Journal of Integrative Neuroscience

Neuroinflammation, meaning an inflammatory process primarily occurring within the central nervous system (CNS), is thought to be associated with the pathogenesis of psychiatric disorders including schizophrenia (SC), although existing evidence is sometimes contradictory. This review critically summarizes the existing data on neuroinflammation and possible neuroinflammatory mechanisms in the pathogenesis of SC. Despite heterogeneity and inconsistency, the existing evidence indicates dysregulation of inflammatory genes and infiltration of the CNS parenchyma by immune cells, disturbances in the b

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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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Negative / Null Result ReportNeuroscience

Failure to replicate talker-specific syntactic adaptation.

Linda Liu, Zachary Burchill, Michael K. Tanenhaus et al. · 2017 · eScholarship (California Digital Library)

Sentence understanding is affected by recent experience. Animportant open question is whether this reflects adaptationto the statistics of the input. Support for this hypothesiscomes from the recent finding that listeners can…

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

Pharmacological Interventions in Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Comprehensive Review of Mechanisms and Efficacy

Eva Sclabassi, Sophie Peret, Chunqi Qian et al. · 2025 · Biomedicines

Background and Objectives: Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a heterogeneous neuro-developmental condition characterized by social communication deficits, restricted interests, and repetitive behaviors. Pharmacological management is challenging given the complex neurobiology and frequent comorbidities. This review summarizes the current evidence for pharmacological treatments in ASD, highlighting efficacy, mechanisms, limitations, and emerging therapeutic targets. Methods: A comprehensive literature review was conducted across PubMed, Cochrane Library, and Embase to identify clinical trials, s

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

Majority language skill, not measures of bilingualism, predicts executive attention in bilingual children

David Giguere, Daniel J. Dickson, Michelle K. Tulloch et al. · 2021 · Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

Evidence is mixed regarding whether and why bilingual children might be advantaged in the development of executive functions. Five preregistered hypotheses regarding sources of a bilingual advantage were tested with data from 102 Spanish-English bilingual children and 25 English monolingual children who were administered a test of executive attention, the flanker task, at 7, 8, and 9 years of age. Measures of the children's early and concurrent bilingual exposure and their concurrent English and Spanish skill were available from a larger longitudinal study in which these children participated.

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

TSANN-TG: Temporal–Spatial Attention Neural Networks with Task-Specific Graph for EEG Emotion Recognition

Chao Jiang, Yingying Dai, Yunheng Ding et al. · 2024 · Brain Sciences

Electroencephalography (EEG)-based emotion recognition is increasingly pivotal in the realm of affective brain-computer interfaces. In this paper, we propose TSANN-TG (temporal-spatial attention neural network with a task-specific graph), a novel neural network architecture tailored for enhancing feature extraction and effectively integrating temporal-spatial features. TSANN-TG comprises three primary components: a node-feature-encoding-and-adjacency-matrices-construction block, a graph-aggregation block, and a graph-feature-fusion-and-classification block. Leveraging the distinct temporal sca

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Negative / Null Result ReportNeuroscience

Combined lipid emulsion and ACLS resuscitation following bupivacaine- and hypoxia-induced cardiovascular collapse in unanesthetized swine.

Brent A Bushey, Victor H Auld, John E Volk et al. · 2011 · PubMed

This study examined whether combining lipid emulsion and advanced cardiac life support (ACLS) improves survival in an unanesthetized swine model of bupivacaine- and hypoxia-induced cardiovascular collapse. Arterial and venous catheters and…

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

Hierarchical interactions between sensory cortices defy predictive coding

Jacob A. Westerberg, Pieter R. Roelfsema · 2025 · Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Perceptual experience depends on recurrent interactions between lower and higher cortices. One theory, predictive coding, posits that feedback from higher to lower brain regions decreases neuronal activity predicted by higher-level representations. Despite the widespread adoption of predictive coding in neuroscience, the correspondence to neurophysiological findings in sensory cortices remains elusive. Here, we review how the canonical patterns of intra- and inter-cortical interactions that occur during perception and shifts of attention deviate from those predicted by predictive coding. We ar

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

Exploring Bottom-Up Visual Processing and Visual Hallucinations in Parkinson's Disease With Dementia

Nicholas Murphy, Alison Killen, Rajnish Kumar Gupta et al. · 2021 · Frontiers in Neurology

Visual hallucinations (VH) are a common symptom of Parkinson's disease with dementia (PDD), affecting up to 65% of cases. Integrative models of their etiology posit that a decline in executive control of the visuo-perceptual system is a primary mechanism of VH generation. The role of bottom-up processing in the manifestation of VH in this condition is still not clear although visual evoked potential (VEP) differences have been associated with VH at an earlier stage of PD. Here we compared the amplitude and latency pattern reversal VEPs in healthy controls ( n = 21) and PDD patients ( n = 34) w

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

Melatonin as a Guardian of Mitochondria: Mechanisms and Therapeutic Potential in Neurodegenerative Diseases

Yanyu Bao, Guoying Miao, Nannan He et al. · 2026 · Biology

Mitochondrial dysfunction is a key early pathological process in neurodegenerative diseases (NDs), leading to oxidative stress, impaired energy metabolism, and neuronal apoptosis prior to the onset of clinical symptoms. Although mitochondria represent important therapeutic targets, effective interventions targeting mitochondrial function remain limited. This review summarizes current evidence regarding the mechanisms by which melatonin protects mitochondria and evaluates its therapeutic relevance, with a primary focus on Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and Huntington's disease-the ma

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

The myth of the Bayesian brain

Madhur Mangalam · 2025 · European Journal of Applied Physiology

The Bayesian brain hypothesis-the idea that neural systems implement or approximate Bayesian inference-has become a dominant framework in cognitive neuroscience over the past two decades. While mathematically elegant and conceptually unifying, this paper argues that the hypothesis occupies an ambiguous territory between useful metaphor and testable, biologically plausible mechanistic explanation. We critically examine the key claims of the Bayesian brain hypothesis, highlighting issues of unfalsifiability, biological implausibility, and inconsistent empirical support. The framework's remarkabl

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

Memory out of context: Spacing effects and decontextualization in a computational model of the medial temporal lobe

James W. Antony · 2026

Abstract Some neural representations change across multiple timescales. Here we argue that modeling this “drift” could help explain the spacing effect (the long-term benefit of distributed learning), whereby differences between stored and current temporal context activity patterns produce greater error-driven learning. We trained a neurobiologically realistic model of the entorhinal cortex and hippocampus to learn paired associates alongside temporal context vectors that drifted between learning episodes and/or before final retention intervals. In line with spacing effects, greater drift led t

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

Chinmo function in cockroaches provides new insights into the regulation and evolution of insect metamorphosis

Jorge Escudero, Judit Gonzalvo, Maria-Dolors Piulachs et al. · 2025 · PLoS Genetics

Insect metamorphosis occurs in two main forms, hemimetaboly (simple) and holometaboly (complete), both regulated by hormonal and genetic pathways involving the transcription factors Krüppel homolog 1 (Kr-h1), Broad-Complex (BR-C), and Ecdysone-induced protein 93F (E93). The BTB-zinc finger protein Chronologically inappropriate morphogenesis (Chinmo), recently identified in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, an holometabolan, as a larval state maintainer, was studied here in the German cockroach, Blattella germanica, an hemimetabolan. We also examined another BTB transcription factor, Abrup

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

Glymphatic system impairment in cerebral small vessel disease: associations with perivascular space volume and cognition

Lulu Ai, Zhiwei Li, Huipeng Huang et al. · 2025 · Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience

Objective While emerging evidence links glymphatic dysfunction to cerebral small vessel disease (CSVD), its clinical relevance remains poorly defined. This study aimed to investigate the relationships among glymphatic function, perivascular space (PVS), and cognitive performance in CSVD. Methods We enrolled 120 CSVD patients [52 with no cognitive impairment (CSVD-NCI) and 68 with mild cognitive impairment (CSVD-MCI)] and 40 healthy controls (HCs). Glymphatic function was assessed using the left ALPS index derived from diffusion tensor imaging analysis along the perivascular space (DTI-ALPS). G

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

Disconnected and Hyperactive: A Replication of Sensorimotor Cortex Abnormalities in Patients With Schizophrenia During Proactive Response Inhibition

Christopher J. Wertz, Faith M Hanlon, Nicholas A. Shaff et al. · 2018 · Schizophrenia Bulletin

Inhibitory failure represents a core dysfunction in patients with schizophrenia (SP), which has predominantly been tested in the literature using reactive (ie, altering behavior after a stimulus) rather than proactive (ie, purposefully…

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

EEG-based classification of alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal dementia using functional connectivity

Tjaša Mlinarič, Arne Van Den Kerchove, Zoe I. Barinaga et al. · 2026 · Scientific Reports

Abstract Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD) are two major causes of dementia, with overlapping clinical and pathophysiological characteristics. We investigated whether resting-state EEG functional connectivity could distinguish AD, FTD, and healthy controls (HC) using a stacked ensemble learning approach. A publicly available dataset (openneuro.org/datasets/ds004504) was used to extract multiple connectivity metrics across frequency bands. Base classifiers were trained using the Fisher’s Geodesic Minimum Distance to Mean (FgMDM) approach with Euclidean or Riemannian dis

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

Cognitive load, fatigue and aversive simulator symptoms but not manipulated zeitgebers affect duration perception in virtual reality

Magdalena Sabat, Bartosz Haładus, Michał Klincewicz et al. · 2022 · Scientific Reports

The perceived duration of an interval depends on numerous aspects of the passed event both endogenous, including physiological arousal, level of wakefulness, attention, and surprise, as well as exogenous such as valence, salience, or context in the environment. There is some evidence that "time-giving" cues from the environment (zeitgebers) are coupled with time perception. The movement of the sun on the horizon was demonstrated to affect interval perception in a study conducted by Schatzschneider et al. (2016) claiming that the sun's motion is a zeitgeber that influences time perception. In t

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Negative / Null Result ReportNeuroscience

The burden of secrecy? No effect on hill slant estimation and beanbag throwing.

Diane Pecher, Heleen van Mierlo, Rouwen Cañal‐Bruland et al. · 2015 · Journal of Experimental Psychology General

Slepian, Masicampo, Toosi, and Ambady (2012, Experiment 1) reported that participants who recalled a big secret estimated a hill as steeper than participants who recalled a small secret. This finding was interpreted as evidence that…

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

Update on the Symptomatic Treatment of Huntington’s Disease: From Pathophysiology to Clinical Practice

Gonzalo Olmedo‐Saura, E Bernardi, Lidia Bojtos et al. · 2025 · International Journal of Molecular Sciences

Huntington's disease (HD) is the most common autosomal dominant neurodegenerative disorder, characterized by a triad of motor dysfunction, cognitive decline, and psychiatric disturbances. While recent efforts have focused on developing disease-modifying therapies, no treatment has yet demonstrated clinical efficacy. As a result, symptomatic treatment remains the cornerstone of care. However, high-quality evidence from large randomized trials is limited, and therapeutic decisions must rely on clinical expertise and extrapolation from other neurological or psychiatric conditions. This narrative

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

Broadband synergy versus oscillatory redundancy in the visual cortex

Louis Roberts, Juho Äijälä, Florian Bürger et al. · 2026 · Nature Communications

The cortex generates diverse neural dynamics, ranging from broadband fluctuations to narrowband oscillations at specific frequencies. Here, we investigated whether broadband and oscillatory dynamics play different roles in the encoding and transmission of visual information. We used information-theoretical measures to dissociate neural signals sharing common information (i.e., redundancy) from signals encoding complementary information (i.e., synergy). We analyzed electrocorticography (ECoG) and local field potentials (LFP) in the visual cortex of human and non-human primates (macaque) to inve

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

Diffusion tensor image analysis along the perivascular space (DTI-ALPS): redefining its interpretation and role

Toshiaki Taoka, Rintaro Ito, Rei Nakamichi et al. · 2026 · Japanese Journal of Radiology

Diffusion tensor image analysis along the perivascular space (DTI-ALPS) was originally developed and defined as a noninvasive diffusion MRI method intended to evaluate glymphatic function and is now widely used in neuroimaging research. However, accumulating evidence suggests that the biological meaning of the ALPS index is more complex than initially assumed as a simple marker of glymphatic function. The ALPS index does not directly measure whole-brain fluid transport but rather reflects localized directional diffusivity based on the Brownian motion of water molecules. Its value is strongly i

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