Does a brief exposure to literary fiction improve social ability? Assessing the evidential value of published studies with a p-curve.

Humans have long suspected that stories can help us better understand others, and, indeed, lifelong exposure to narrative fiction does predict better social cognition. Several experiments have attempted to investigate the causal direction of this relationship to see if random assignment to a brief narrative directly improves social cognition. Although these experiments have yielded mixed results, a recent meta-analysis did find a small causal effect of narrative fiction on social cognition. What remains unanswered is whether the published findings reflect questionable research practices or trustworthy evidence. In order to rule out the possibility that this body of work has been meaningfully impacted by selective reporting, we conducted a p-curve on the experimental literature on narrative fiction and social cognition. The results of the p-curve indicated that this work does indeed have evidential value but that this conclusion is not very robust. Thus, further experimental work on the causal effect of narrative fiction on social cognitive skills is required before substantial conclusions can be drawn. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Positional uncertainty in the Brown-Peterson paradigm.

Since McGeoch's (1932) influential article, no accounts of long-term memory have invoked decay as a cause of forgetting. In contrast, multiple accounts of short-term memory (STM) invoke decay, with many appealing to results from the Brown-Peterson paradigm as offering support. Two experiments are reported that used a standard Brown-Peterson task but which scored the data in 2 ways. With traditional scoring (was the entire 3-letter consonant trigram recalled?) performance decreased with increasing delay. With immediate serial recall scoring (e.g., was the first letter recalled first, was the second letter recalled second?), standard position error gradients (Experiment 1), and protrusion gradients (Experiment 2) were observed. That is, when the first letter of the consonant trigram was not recalled first, it was more likely to be recalled second than last. In addition, if a letter from a previous list was mistakenly recalled in a later list, it most likely retained its original position. The presence of such gradients is inconsistent with claims of decay but is predicted by SIMPLE, a local distinctiveness model of memory. Moreover, the presence of such gradients is consistent with the claim that forgetting in the Brown-Peterson paradigm follows the same principles observed in other memory tasks.