Some of the ‘best practice’ approaches to ensuring reproducibility of research can be difficult to implement in the developmental and clinical domains, where sample sizes and session lengths are constrained by the practicalities of recruitment and testing. For this reason, an important area of improvement to target is the reliability of measurement. Here we demonstrate that best–worst scaling (BWS) provides a superior alternative to Likert ratings for measuring children’s subjective impressions. Seventy-three children aged 5–6 years rated the trustworthiness of faces using either Likert ratings or BWS over two sessions. Individual children’s ratings in the BWS condition were significantly more consistent from session 1 to session 2 than those in the Likert condition, a finding we also replicate with a large adult sample (N = 72). BWS also produced more reliable ratings at the group level than Likert ratings in the child sample. These findings indicate that BWS is a developmentally appropriate response format that can deliver substantial improvements in reliability of measurement, which can increase our confidence in the robustness of findings with children.

Familiar size is known to influence our perception of object's size and distance. In this study, we examined whether or not simple RTs (RTs) are also affected by prior knowledge of objects' size. In a series of experiments, participants were asked to respond as quickly as possible to briefly presented images of familiar objects, equated for luminance and retinal size. The effects of familiar size and object animacy on RTs were investigated under natural (Experiment 1) and reduced (Experiment 2) viewing conditions. Restricted viewing conditions were introduced to manipulate the availability of depth cues. A systematic effect of familiar size on RTs was considered for progressively "shrunken" (Experiment 3) and "enlarged" (Experiment 4) objects on the screen with respect to their familiar size. Measures of perceived size were also taken by means of a manual estimation task (Experiment 5). Results showed an effect of animacy on simple RTs: Participants were faster to respond to images of animals than nonanimals. An effect of familiar size on simple RTs was also observed under reduced viewing conditions only: Objects shown closer to their real-world size were detected significantly more quickly than those further from their familiar size. However, this familiar-size advantage did not reflect perceived size. Hence, simple RTs under reduced viewing conditions are modulated by the degree of compatibility between physical size and long-term representations of size. (PsycINFO Database Record