Stage 1 IPA at Royal Society Open Science

Bilinguals often outperform monolinguals in nonverbal tasks of cognitive control. For example, a meta-analysis of studies that compared the performance of bilinguals and monolinguals on conflict resolution tasks (e.g., the Stroop task) revealed a moderately significant bilingual advantage (Donnelly, Brooks, & Homer, 2015). At first blush, this finding augments our understanding of far transfer effects (how practice in one domain [language] results in changes to other [non-language] domains) and may inform educational policies and social practice. However, close inspection of the empirical data yield inconclusive results. For example, the effect reported in the above meta-analysis appears to be driven by data from a single study. Furthermore, the meta-analysis also revealed a large and significant main effect of ‘lab’ (research group). The inconsistent results, combined with publication bias (de Bruin, Treccani, & Della Sala, 2015), has led many scientists (e.g., Duñabeitia & Carreiras, 2015; Klein, 2016; Paap, Johnson, & Sawi, 2016) to question whether the bilingual advantage is real or merely an artefact of particular research practices. Moreover, significant bilingual advantages have not been observed in studies with large sample sizes (see Paap, Johnson, & Sawi, 2016, for discussion). To progress beyond the controversy and advance the science, in addition to carrying out more studies, we must come up with a theory that can account for the inconsistencies in the literature and explain when, how, and why learning two or more languages improve cognitive control. This is the focus of the current project.

This component contains the approved protocol of this registered report, as well as the exploratory data reported in the stage 1 registered report.

Sleep aids the consolidation of recently acquired memories. Evidence strongly indicates that sleep yields substantial improvements on recognition memory tasks relative to an equivalent period of wake. Despite the known benefits that sleep has on memory, researchers have not yet investigated the impact of sleep on eyewitness identifications. Eyewitnesses to crimes are often presented with a lineup (which is a type of recognition memory test) that contains the suspect (who is innocent or guilty) and fillers (who are known to be innocent). Sleep may enhance the ability to identify the guilty suspect and not identify the innocent suspect (i.e., discriminability). Sleep may also impact reliability (i.e. the likelihood that the identified suspect is guilty). In the current study, we manipulate the presence or absence of sleep in a forensically relevant memory task. Participants witness a video of a mock crime, make an identification, or reject the lineup, and rate their confidence. Critically, some participants sleep between witnessing the crime and making a lineup decision, while others remain awake. Based on prior memory research we predict that those in the sleep condition will have greater discriminability compared to those who had equivalent periods of wake. Sleep’s role in shaping reliability is completely unknown and our work will be the first to explore this variable. This work will be of significant theoretical and applied importance.

The aim of this study is to understand people’s experiences and emotions during time spent alone at home as a function of both motivation and preference for solitude. People who prefer to be alone (Burger, 1995) have been shown to be vulnerable to poor ill-being, although there are mixed findings concerning their ill-being in solitude. Further, it might be expected that higher preference for solitude would mean that individuals tolerate it better and therefore report less ill-being. A separate literature suggests that having autonomous motivation for spending time alone - seeing time alone as beneficial and valuable - moderated the effect of time alone on loneliness (Nguyen, Ryan, & Deci, 2018; Study 4). A study also showed that for first-year university students who don’t feel belonging to their school, having autonomous motivation for spending time alone buffer the negative link between low belonging and well-being (Nguyen, Werner, & Soenens, 2019). Further, endorsing self-determined reasons for spending time alone correlates negatively with ill-being outcomes like depression, loneliness, and anxiety (Thomas & Azmitia, 2019). Although preference and motivation for solitude show different patterns of influence on ill-being, those who prefer solitude may generally report more autonomous motivation for it as well, since autonomy reflects finding the value in solitude (Nguyen, Ryan, & Deci, 2018; Nguyen, Werner, & Soenens, 2019; Thomas & Azmitia, 2019). However, self-isolation offers a time when preference and autonomy would show more distinct relations. People who generally prefer social situations may now find the value in time spent alone, and it may be either their preference, or their motivation, driving the effects on ill-being. We plan to conduct a timely study when many people in places like the US and UK are likely to go into self-isolation now or in the next few days. Particularly, we will target those living alone, individuals who may be more prone to loneliness and psychological isolation.

Incentive structures shape scientists' research practices. One incentive in science is the priority rule, which allocates disproportionate rewards to the first scientist to discover a novel result. Priority rewards create a "race to publish," encouraging scientists to work quickly. To test whether this rush reduces the amount of information scientists collect before publishing, we developed a laboratory experiment in which participants played a research game. Players could choose how much information to acquire before making a claim, balancing the cost and benefits of gathering more data against the risk of being scooped by a competitor. We found that competition for priority led participants to collect significantly less information before publishing compared to non-competitive conditions, which resulted in a higher rate of false claims. Our experiment provides proof of concept that rewarding priority of publication can incentivize individuals to acquire less information, producing lower-quality research as a consequence.

In this study, we investigated the extent to which adolescents who spend time playing violent video games exhibit higher levels of aggressive behaviour when compared with those who do not. A large sample of British adolescent participants (n = 1004) aged 14 and 15 years and an equal number of their carers were interviewed. Young people provided reports of their recent gaming experiences. Further, the violent contents of these games were coded using official EU and US ratings, and carers provided evaluations of their adolescents' aggressive behaviours in the past month. Following a preregistered analysis plan, multiple regression analyses tested the hypothesis that recent violent game play is linearly and positively related to carer assessments of aggressive behaviour. Results did not support this prediction, nor did they support the idea that the relationship between these factors follows a nonlinear parabolic function. There was no evidence for a critical tipping point relating violent game engagement to aggressive behaviour. Sensitivity and exploratory analyses indicated these null effects extended across multiple operationalizations of violent game engagement and when the focus was on another behavioural outcome, namely, prosocial behaviour. The discussion presents an interpretation of this pattern of effects in terms of both the ongoing scientific and policy debates around violent video games, and emerging standards for robust evidence-based policy concerning young people's technology use.