These nine cognitive psychology findings all passed a stringent test of their replicability
The failure to reproduce established psychology findings on renewed testing, including some famous effects, has been well-publicised and has led to talk of a crisis in the field. However, psychology is a vast topic and there’s a possibility that the findings from some sub-disciplines may be more robust than others, in the sense of replicating reliably, even in unfavourable circumstances, such as when the participants have been tested on the same effect before.
A new paper currently available as a preprint at PsyArXiv has tested whether this might be the case for nine key findings from cognitive psychology, related to perception, memory and learning. Rolf Zwaan at Erasumus University Rotterdam and his colleagues found that all nine effects replicated reliably. “These results represent good news for the field of psychology,” they said.
The researchers tested hundreds of participants on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk survey website. Whichever cognitive effect they were tested on, each participant completed the test twice (either with the exact same stimuli or new versions), to see whether it made any difference to their behaviour or responses if they already had experience of the experiment.
