Scientific advances across a range of disciplines hinge on the ability to make inferences about unobservable theoretical entities on the basis of empirical data patterns. Accurate inferences rely on both discovering valid, replicable data patterns and accurately interpreting those patterns in terms of their implications for theoretical constructs. The replication crisis in science has led to widespread efforts to improve the reliability of research findings, but comparatively little attention has been devoted to the validity of inferences based on those findings. Using an example from cognitive psychology, we demonstrate a blinded-inference paradigm for assessing the quality of theoretical inferences from data. Our results reveal substantial variability in experts’ judgments on the very same data, hinting at a possible inference crisis.

Differentiation is a theory that originally emerged from the perception literature and proposes that with experience, the representation of stimuli becomes more distinct from or less similar to the representation of other stimuli. In recent years, the role of differentiation has played a critical role in models of memory. Differentiation mechanisms have been implemented in episodic memory models by assuming that information about new experiences with a stimulus in a particular context accumulates in a single memory trace and these updated memory traces become more distinct from the representations of other stimuli. A key implication of such models is that well encoded events are less confusable with other events. This prediction is particularly relevant for two important phenomena. One is the role of encoding strength on memory. The strength based mirror effect is the finding of higher hit rates and lower false alarm rates for a list composed of all strongly encoded items compared to a list composed of all weakly encoded items. The other is output interference, the finding that accuracy decreases across a series of test trials. Results from four experiments show a tight coupling between these two empirical phenomena such that strongly encoded target items are less prone to interference. By proposing a process model and evaluating the predictions of the model, we show how a single theoretical principle, differentiation, provides a unified explanation for these effects.

Performance in episodic memory is determined both by accurate retrieval from memory and by decision processes. A substantial body of literature suggests slightly poorer episodic memory accuracy for older than younger adults; however, age-related changes in the decision mechanisms in memory have received much less attention. Response bias, the willingness to endorse an item as remembered, is an important decision factor that contributes to episodic memory performance, and therefore understanding age-related changes in response bias is critical to theoretical development. We manipulate list strength in order to investigate two aspects of response bias. First, we evaluate whether criterion placement in episodic memory differs for older and younger adults. Second, we ask whether older adults have the same degree of flexibility to adjust the criterion in response to task demands as younger adults. Participants were tested on weakly and strongly encoded lists where word frequency (Experiment 1) or similarity between targets and foils (Experiment 2) was manipulated. Both older and younger adults had higher hit rates and lower false-alarm rates for strong lists than for weak lists (i.e., a strength-based mirror effect). Older adults were more conservative (less likely to endorse an item as studied) than younger adults, and we found no evidence that older and younger adults differ in their ability to flexibly adjust their criterion based on the demands of the task.

The contiguity effect refers to the tendency to recall an item from nearby study positions of the just recalled item. Causal models of contiguity suggest that recalled items are used as probes, causing a change in the memory state for subsequent recall attempts. Noncausal models of the contiguity effect assume the memory state is unaffected by recall per se, relying instead on the correlation between the memory states at study and at test to drive contiguity. We examined the contiguity effect in a probed recall task in which the correlation between the study context and the test context was disrupted. After study of several lists of words, participants were given probe words in a random order and were instructed to recall a word from the same list as the probe. The results showed both short-term and long-term contiguity effects. Because study order and test order are uncorrelated, these contiguity effects require a causal contiguity mechanism that operates across time scales.

The present study combined dimensional and categorical approaches to emotion to develop normative ratings for a large set of Turkish words on two major dimensions of emotion: arousal and valence, as well as on five basic emotion categories of happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust. A set of 2031 Turkish words obtained by translating Affective Norms for English Words to Turkish and pooling from the Turkish Word Norms were rated by a large sample of 1527 participants. This is the first comprehensive and standardized word set in Turkish offering discrete emotional ratings in addition to dimensional ratings along with concreteness judgments. Consistent with Affective Norms for English Words and word databases in several other languages, arousal increased as valence became more positive or more negative. As expected, negative emotions (anger, sadness, fear, and disgust) were positively correlated with each other, whereas the positive emotion, happiness, was negatively correlated with the negative emotion categories. Data further showed that the valence dimension was strongly correlated with happiness, and the arousal dimension was mostly correlated with fear. These findings show highly similar and consistent patterns with word sets provided in other languages in terms of the relationships between arousal and valence dimensions, relationships between dimensions and specific emotion categories, relationships among specific emotions, and further support the stability of the relationship between basic discrete emotions at the word level across different cultures.