e-ISSN: Pending

Browse the failure-mode index

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

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

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

Precision fMRI reveals that the language network exhibits adult-like left-hemispheric lateralization by 4 years of age

Ola Ozernov‐Palchik, Amanda O’Brien, Elizabeth Jiachen Lee et al. · 2026 · Nature Communications

In adults, left hemisphere (LH) damage often leads to aphasia, but many cases of early damage leave linguistic processing intact, with a functional language system developing in the right hemisphere. To explain this early apparent equipotentiality of the two hemispheres for language, some have proposed that the language system is more bilateral during early development and becomes increasingly left-lateralized with age. We examined language lateralization using fMRI in two large developmental cohorts (total n=273 children aged 4-16 years; n=107 adults). Strong, adult-like LH lateralization (in

View details →
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

View details →
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…

View details →
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.

View details →
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…

View details →
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

View details →
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

View details →
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

View details →
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…

View details →
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

View details →
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

View details →
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

View details →
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

View details →
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

View details →
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

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

Computational genetics analysis of grey matter density in Alzheimer’s disease

Amanda Zieselman, Jonathan Fisher, Ting Hu et al. · 2014 · BioData Mining

BACKGROUND: Alzheimer's disease is the most common form of progressive dementia and there is currently no known cure. The cause of onset is not fully understood but genetic factors are expected to play a significant role. We present here a bioinformatics approach to the genetic analysis of grey matter density as an endophenotype for late onset Alzheimer's disease. Our approach combines machine learning analysis of gene-gene interactions with large-scale functional genomics data for assessing biological relationships. RESULTS: We found a statistically significant synergistic interaction among t

View details →
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

View details →
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…

View details →
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessNeuroscience

Regulation of LEAP2 by insulin and glucagon in mice and humans

Valdemar Brimnes Ingemann Johansen, Anna Katrina Jógvansdóttir Gradel, Stephanie Kjærulff Holm et al. · 2025 · Cell Reports Medicine

Liver-expressed antimicrobial peptide 2 (LEAP2) is an endogenous antagonist and inverse agonist of the ghrelin receptor, countering ghrelin's effects on cell signaling and feeding. However, despite an emerging interest in LEAP2's…

View details →