A registered report survey of open research practices in psychology departments in the UK and Ireland.

Open research practices seek to enhance the transparency and reproducibility of research. While there is evidence of increased uptake in these practices, such as study preregistration and open data, facilitated by new infrastructure and policies, little research has assessed general uptake of such practices across psychology university researchers. The current study estimates psychologists' level of engagement in open research practices across universities in the United Kingdom and Ireland, while also assessing possible explanatory factors that may impact their engagement. Data were collected from 602 psychology researchers in the United Kingdom and Ireland on the extent to which they have implemented various practices (e.g., use of preprints, preregistration, open data, open materials). Here we present the summarized descriptive results, as well as considering differences between various categories of researcher (e.g., career stage, subdiscipline, methodology), and examining the relationship between researcher's practices and their self-reported capability, opportunity, and motivation (COM-B) to engage in open research practices. Results show that while there is considerable variability in engagement of open research practices, differences across career stage and subdiscipline of psychology are small by comparison. We observed consistent differences according to respondent's research methodology and based on the presence of institutional support for open research. COM-B dimensions were collectively significant predictors of engagement in open research, with automatic motivation emerging as a consistently strong predictor. We discuss these findings, outline some of the challenges experienced in this study, and offer suggestions and recommendations for future research. Estimating the prevalence of responsible research practices is important to assess sustained behaviour change in research reform, tailor educational training initiatives, and to understand potential factors that might impact engagement.

A guide for social science journal editors on easing into open science.

Journal editors have a large amount of power to advance open science in their respective fields by incentivising and mandating open policies and practices at their journals. The Data PASS Journal Editors Discussion Interface (JEDI, an online community for social science journal editors: www.dpjedi.org ) has collated several resources on embedding open science in journal editing ( www.dpjedi.org/resources ). However, it can be overwhelming as an editor new to open science practices to know where to start. For this reason, we created a guide for journal editors on how to get started with open science. The guide outlines steps that editors can take to implement open policies and practices within their journal, and goes through the what, why, how, and worries of each policy and practice. This manuscript introduces and summarizes the guide (full guide: https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/hstcx ).

Assessing the impact of LEGO® construction training on spatial and mathematical skills.

Lego construction ability is associated with a variety of spatial skills and mathematical outcomes. However, it is unknown whether these relations are causal. We aimed to establish the causal impact of Lego construction training on: Lego construction ability; a broad range of spatial skills; and on mathematical outcomes in 7-9-year-olds. We also aimed to identify how this causal impact differs for digital versus physical Lego construction training. One-hundred and ninety-eight children took part in a six-week training programme, delivered twice weekly as a school lunch time club. They completed either physical Lego training (N = 59), digital Lego training (N = 64), or an active control condition (crafts; N = 75). All children completed baseline and follow-up measures of spatial skills (disembedding, visuo-spatial working memory, spatial scaling, mental rotation, and performance on a spatial-numerical task, the number line task), mathematical outcomes (geometry, arithmetic, and overall mathematical skills) and Lego construction ability. Exploratory analyses revealed evidence for near transfer (Lego construction ability) and some evidence for far transfer (arithmetic) of Lego training, but overall transfer was limited. Despite this, we identified key areas for further development (explicit focus on spatial strategies, training for teachers, and embedding the programme within a mathematical context). The findings of this study can be used to inform future development of Lego construction training programmes to support mathematics learning.

Associations and indirect effects between LEGO® construction and mathematics performance.

There is a known association between LEGO® construction ability and mathematics achievement, yet the mechanisms which drive this association are largely unknown. This study investigated the spatial mechanisms underlying this association, and whether this differs for concrete versus digital construction. Between January 2020 and July 2021, children aged 7-9 years (N = 358, 189 female, ethnicity not recorded) completed spatial and mathematics tasks, and either a concrete or digital Lego construction task. Mediation analyses examining direct and indirect pathways (through spatial skills) between Lego construction ability and mathematics explained 8.4% to 26.6% of variance in mathematics scores. Exploratory moderated mediation analyses revealed that only the indirect path through mental rotation differed between Lego conditions. Findings are discussed in relation to theories of spatial-numerical associations and the potential of Lego training for mathematics improvement.

Effects of delay, length, and frequency on onset RTs and word durations: Articulatory planning uses flexible units but cannot be prepared.

There is debate regarding whether most articulatory planning occurs offline (rather than online) and whether the products of off-line processing are stored in a separate articulatory buffer until a large enough chunk is ready for production. This hypothesis predicts that delayed naming conditions should reduce not only onset RTs but also word durations because articulatory plans will be buffered and kept ready. We have tested this hypothesis with young control speakers, an aphasic speaker , and an age and education-matched speaker, using repetition, reading and picture-naming tasks. Contrary to the off-line hypothesis, delayed conditions strongly reduced onset RTs, but had no benefit for word durations. In fact, we found small effects in the opposite direction. Moreover, frequency and imageability affected word durations even in delayed conditions, consistent with articulatory processing continuing on-line. The same pattern of results was found in CS and in control participants, strengthening confidence in our results. There is debate regarding whether most articulatory planning occurs offline (rather than online) and whether the results of off-line processing are stored in a separate articulatory buffer until a large enough chunk is ready for production. This hypothesis predicts that delayed naming conditions should reduce not only onset RTs but also word durations because articulatory plans will be buffered and kept ready. We have tested young control speakers, an aphasic speaker, and an age and education matched speaker, using repetition, reading and picture naming tasks. Contrary to the off-line hypothesis, delayed conditions strongly reduced onset RTs, but had no benefit for word durations. In fact, we found small effects in the opposite direction. Moreover, frequency and imageability affected word durations even in delayed conditions, consistent with articulatory processing continuing on-line. The same pattern of results was found in CS and in control participants, strengthening confidence in our results.

Infants Learn to Follow Gaze in Stages: Evidence Confirming a Robotic Prediction.

Gaze following is an early-emerging skill in infancy argued to be fundamental to joint attention and later language development. However, how gaze following emerges is a topic of great debate. Representational theories assume that in order to follow adults' gaze, infants must have a rich sensitivity to adults' communicative intention from birth. In contrast, learning-based theories hold that infants may learn to gaze follow based on low-level social reinforcement, without the need to understand others' mental states. Nagai et al. (2006) successfully taught a robot to gaze follow through social reinforcement and found that the robot learned in stages: first in the horizontal plane, and later in the vertical plane-a prediction that does not follow from representational theories. In the current study, we tested this prediction in an eye-tracking paradigm. Six-month-olds did not follow gaze in either the horizontal or vertical plane, whereas 12-month-olds and 18-month-olds only followed gaze in the horizontal plane. These results confirm the core prediction of the robot model, suggesting that children may also learn to gaze follow through social reinforcement coupled with a structured learning environment.

Two-year-old children preferentially transmit simple actions but not pedagogically demonstrated actions.

Children are sensitive to both social and non-social aspects of the learning environment. Among social cues, pedagogical communication has been shown to not only play a role in children's learning, but also in their own active transmission of knowledge. Vredenburgh, Kushnir and Casasola, Developmental Science, 2015, 18, 645 showed that 2-year-olds are more likely to demonstrate an action to a naive adult after learning it in a pedagogical than in a non-pedagogical context. This finding was interpreted as evidence that pedagogically transmitted information has a special status as culturally relevant. Here we test the limits of this claim by setting it in contrast with an explanation in which the relevance of information is the outcome of multiple interacting social (e.g., pedagogical demonstration) and non-social properties (e.g., action complexity). To test these competing hypotheses, we varied both pedagogical cues and action complexity in an information transmission paradigm with 2-year-old children. In Experiment 1, children preferentially transmitted simple non-pedagogically demonstrated actions over pedagogically demonstrated more complex actions. In Experiment 2, when both actions were matched for complexity, we found no evidence of preferential transmission of pedagogically demonstrated actions. We discuss possible reasons for the discrepancy between our results and previous literature showing an effect of pedagogical cues on cultural transmission, and conclude that our results are compatible with the view that pedagogical and other cues interact, but incompatible with the theory of a privileged role for pedagogical cues.

Probing communication-induced memory biases in preverbal infants: Two replication attempts of Yoon, Johnson and Csibra (2008).

In a seminal study, Yoon, Johnson and Csibra [PNAS, 105, 36 (2008)] showed that nine-month-old infants retained qualitatively different information about novel objects in communicative and non-communicative contexts. In a communicative context, the infants encoded the identity of novel objects at the expense of encoding their location, which was preferentially retained in non-communicative contexts. This result had not yet been replicated. Here we attempted two replications, while also including a measure of eye-tracking to obtain more detail of infants' attention allocation during stimulus presentation. Experiment 1 was designed following the methods described in the original paper. After discussion with one of the original authors, some key changes were made to the methodology in Experiment 2. Neither experiment replicated the results of the original study, with Bayes Factor Analysis suggesting moderate support for the null hypothesis. Both experiments found differential attention allocation in communicative and non-communicative contexts, with more looking to the face in communicative than non-communicative contexts, and more looking to the hand in non-communicative than communicative contexts. High and low level accounts of these attentional differences are discussed.