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Gilbert et al. conclude that evidence from the Open Science Collaboration's Reproducibility Project: Psychology indicates high reproducibility, given the study methodology. Their very optimistic assessment is limited by statistical misconceptions and by causal inferences from selectively interpreted, correlational data. Using the Reproducibility Project: Psychology data, both optimistic and pessimistic conclusions about reproducibility are possible, and neither are yet warranted., (Copyright © 2016, American Association for the Advancement of Science.)

It takes children considerable learning and development to accurately predict whether an object is safely balanced or will fall -- something that happens if its center of mass is not supported from below. In the meantime, children go through a characteristic set of mistaken beliefs. Here we use an adapted version of the classical balance task to evaluate whether different models go through the same stages. Preliminary results show that convolutional neural networks (CNNs) do learn the task but do not necessarily go through the same stages. We are also testing several simulation-based accounts. We anticipate completing this work in time for the conference. The findings will help clarify the space of possible accounts of children's acquisition of intuitions about gravity and balance.

Humans are born with an intuitive representation of the physics world. How accurate is intuitive physics? Researchers from education focus on the failures, students' errors and misconceptions while cognitive psychologists argue humans anticipate and manipulate physical environments in ways betraying veridical knowledge of classical mechanics. One solution is to hypothesize there are distinct systems of “cognitive physics” with different limitations and deployment in the tasks favored by the two literatures. The goal of current study is to gather evidence from psychometric studies by estimating how many distinct factors explain performance on intuitive physics assessments. We build an augmented concept inventory including several previously-validated concept inventories, around 120 items. The pilot study indicated that participants recruited online from Prolific displayed expected accuracy on the tasks. We are now collecting around 1,000 participants and applying multidimensional item response theory (MIRT) analyzes to identify the latent structure.

Bilingualism varies greatly in terms of language background, age of acquisition, and learning environment, making it complex to study the relationship between language and brain structure. Age of acquisition and linguistic proficiency are both crucial factors in language acquisition research and are closely related. To better understand the relationship between bilingualism and brain structure, we created a dataset of 2,000+ brain 3D images from bilinguals and monolinguals and trained a neural network (Contrastive Variational Autoencoder, CVAE) to distinguish bilingual-specific neuroanatomical variations from those shared by monolingual groups. The initial results reveal that the common variation (e.g. scanner and sex) in brain structure shared by two groups can be identified by CVAE. More importantly, CVAE disentangled linguistic proficiency from the common variation but not age of acquisition. It suggests that compared to age of acquisition, linguistic proficiency is more correlated with brain’s structure.

The impact of an individual's first language (L1) on their acquisition of a second language (L2) is widely recognized in the field of psycholinguistics. However, previous research has focused on limited L1-L2 pairs, leaving questions about how different linguistic structures, such as genetic relationship, phonology, or syntax, can either facilitate or impede the learning of a new language. In our current study, we aimed to address these gaps by analyzing standardized English assessment scores of English Language Learners (ELLs) from 46 international schools across 30 countries. We compared linguistic similarities between more than 40 L1s and examined how different linguistic structures of the L1 influenced the acquisition of L2, specifically in terms of genetic, phonological, and syntactic similarities. Our findings indicate that older ELLs learn English at a faster rate than younger ELLs, and among older ELLs, those who speak an L1 that shares linguistic similarities with English acquire the language faster than ELLs whose L1 is less closely related to English. These results highlight the transfer of linguistic knowledge from L1 to L2 and emphasize the importance of age of acquisition in L2 learning. Our study has important theoretical and pedagogical implications for research on second language acquisition.

Humans, even from infancy, are capable of unsupervised (“sta- tistical”) learning of linguistic information. However, it re- mains unclear which of the myriad algorithms for unsuper- vised learning captures human abilities. This matters because unsupervised learning algorithms vary greatly in how much can be learned how quickly. Thus, which algorithm(s) humans use may place a strong bound on how much of language can ac- tually be learned in an unsupervised fashion. As a step towards more precisely characterizing human unsupervised learning capabilities, we quantitatively synthesize the literature on adult unsupervised (“statistical”) word segmentation. Unfortunately, most confidence intervals were very large, and few moderators were found to be significant. These findings are consistent with prior work suggesting low power and precision in the litera- ture. Constraining theory will require more, higher-powered studies.

The Simon, Stroop, and flanker tasks are commonly used to investigate cognitive control. However, it remains unclear whether these three tasks in fact measure the same cognitive abilities and in the same proportion. We take a developmental approach to this question: if the tasks all roughly measure the same capacity, they should show similar patterns of age-related change. We present data from two massive online studies: Study 1 included 9,642 participants 10 to 80 years of age who completed the Simon and Stroop tasks, and Study 2 included 13,448 participants 10 to 79 years of age who completed the flanker task. The results revealed markedly different developmental trajectories among the tasks, with only the flanker task following an inverted U-shaped trajectory. These findings caution against using standard congruency tasks to draw general conclusions about the development of cognitive control and underscore the importance of developing more psychometrically rigorous measures.

Replication studies in psychological science sometimes fail to reproduce prior findings. If these studies use methods that are unfaithful to the original study or ineffective in eliciting the phenomenon of interest, then a failure to replicate may be a failure of the protocol rather than a challenge to the original finding. Formal pre-data-collection peer review by experts may address shortcomings and increase replicability rates. We selected 10 replication studies from the Reproducibility Project: Psychology (RP:P; Open Science Collaboration, 2015) for which the original authors had expressed concerns about the replication designs before data collection; only one of these studies had yielded a statistically significant effect (p

Women are better than men at verbal memory tasks, such as remembering word lists. These tasks depend on declarative memory. The declarative/procedural model of language, which posits that the lexicon of stored words is part of declarative memory, while grammatical composition of complex forms depends on procedural memory, predicts a female superiority in aspects of lexical memory. Other neurocognitive models of language have not made this prediction. Here we examine the prediction in past-tense over-regularizations (e.g. holded ) produced by children. We expected that girls would remember irregular past-tense forms (held ) better than boys, and thus would over-regularize less. To our surprise, girls over-regularized far more than boys. We investigated potential explanations for this sex difference. Analyses showed that in girls but not boys, over-regularization rates correlated with measures of the number of similar-sounding regulars (folded, molded ). This sex difference in phonological neighborhood effects is taken to suggest that girls tend to produce over-regularizations in associative lexical memory, generalizing over stored neighboring regulars, while boys are more likely to depend upon rule-governed affixation (hold +-ed ). The finding is consistent with the hypothesis that, likely due to their superior lexical abilities, females tend to retrieve from memory complex forms (walked ) that men generally compose with the grammatical system (walk +-ed ). The results suggest that sex may be an important factor in the acquisition and computation of language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]