Although in recent years some studies have found evidence suggesting that working memory (WM) may operate on unconscious perceptual contents, decisive demonstrations of the existence of unconscious WM are lacking. In the present Registered Report, we replicate the first study on this topic by Soto et al. (Working memory without consciousness. Curr Biol 2011;21:R912–3.): a visual discrimination task asking participants to report the direction in which a subliminal Gabor grating was rotated after a 2-s delay. We acquired a multisite sample from 19 laboratories, with a larger number of participants (N = 531) and trials (720 in two sessions) than those typically used in previous studies. As a result, a large-sample, international, and open-access dataset is now available for researchers and future analyses. Furthermore, some minimal baseline requirements were guaranteed for the experimental task (i.e. number of valid trials, motivation, and consistent labels for the Perceptual Awareness Scale). The results showed (1) above-chance WM performance in cue-present trials reported as unseen (.55 accuracy), (2) a significant positive correlation between WM performance and cue detection sensitivity (r = .228), and (3) a significant above-chance intercept in the regression of performance on sensitivity (β0 = .521). These findings suggest that WM can operate on unconscious representations, although it remains positively associated with perceptual sensitivity. Crucially, because measurement error could compromise the interpretation of these three results, we provide evidence for our measures’ excellent reliability and, more fundamentally, for their validity.

The relationship between body and mind plays an important role in many spiritual and religious experiences. Previous studies that looked into embodiment in the psychology of religion have mainly focused on the motoric system or embodied cognition phenomena. Despite interoceptive sensibility (IS) playing an important role in cognition, emotion, and well-being, a systematic investigation of the relationship between religiosity, spirituality, and IS has not yet been conducted. In this preregistered report, we performed such an investigation. We used established measures and collected data from a large sample to guarantee sufficient statistical power. We contrasted groups with different religious backgrounds (Christians n = 271, Buddhists n = 236, and Muslims, n = 229) to explore possible religious differences in the relationship between religiosity, spirituality, and IS. As expected, the results showed that adaptive forms of IS were linked to spirituality. Significant correlations between IS and spirituality were observed across all religious groups. However, contrary to our hypothesis, these associations were strongest among Christians rather than Buddhists. While spirituality showed significant correlations with IS, the correlations between religiosity and IS were mostly non-significant when accounting for the shared variance between spirituality and IS. Our results indicate that IS, as the inner dimension of embodiment, may be a fundamental factor in shaping spiritual experiences across diverse faiths and denominations. The preregistered analysis plan, materials, raw data, and the analysis code are publicly available.