52% Yes, a signiicant crisis 3% No, there is no crisis 7% Don't know 38% Yes, a slight crisis 38% Yes, a slight crisis 1,576 RESEARCHERS SURVEYED M ore than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments. Those are some of the telling figures that emerged from Nature's survey of 1,576 researchers who took a brief online questionnaire on reproducibility in research. The data reveal sometimes-contradictory attitudes towards reproduc-ibility. Although 52% of those surveyed agree that there is a significant 'crisis' of reproducibility, less than 31% think that failure to reproduce published results means that the result is probably wrong, and most say that they still trust the published literature. Data on how much of the scientific literature is reproducible are rare and generally bleak. The best-known analyses, from psychology 1 and cancer biology 2 , found rates of around 40% and 10%, respectively. Our survey respondents were more optimistic: 73% said that they think that at least half of the papers in their field can be trusted, with physicists and chemists generally showing the most confidence. The results capture a confusing snapshot of attitudes around these issues, says Arturo Casadevall, a microbiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland. "At the current time there is no consensus on what reproducibility is or should be. " But just recognizing that is a step forward, he says. "The next step may be identifying what is the problem and to get a consensus. "

The past 10 years have brought near-revolutionary changes in psychological theories about shortterm memory, with similarly great advances in the neurosciences. Here, we critically examine the major psychological theories (the "mind") of short-term memory and how they relate to evidence about underlying brain mechanisms. We focus on three features that must be addressed by any satisfactory theory of short-term memory. First, we examine the evidence for the architecture of short-term memory, with special attention to questions of capacity and how-or whether-shortterm memory can be separated from long-term memory. Second, we ask how the components of that architecture enact processes of encoding, maintenance, and retrieval. Third, we describe the debate over the reason about forgetting from short-term memory, whether interference or decay is the cause. We close with a conceptual model tracing the representation of a single item through a short-term memory task, describing the biological mechanisms that might support psychological processes on a moment-by-moment basis as an item is encoded, maintained over a delay with some forgetting, and ultimately retrieved.

A prominent theory of hippocampal function proposes that the hippocampus is importantly involved in relating or binding together separate pieces of information to form an episodic representation. This hypothesis has only been applied to studies of long-term memory because the paradigmatic view of the hippocampus is that it is not critical for short-term forms of memory. However, relational processing is important in many working memory tasks, especially tasks using visual stimuli. Here, we test the hypothesis that the medial temporal lobes are important for relational memory even over short delays. The task required patients with medial temporal lobe amnesia and controls to remember three objects, locations, or object-location conjunctions over 1 or 8 s delays. The results show that working memory for objects and locations was at normal levels, but that memory for conjunctions was severely impaired at 8 s delays. Additional analyses suggest that the hippocampus per se is critical for accurate conjunction working memory. We propose that the hippocampus is critically involved in memory for conjunctions at both short and long delays.

In the present study, we investigated whether involuntarily directing attention to a target-colored distractor causes the corresponding attentional set to enter a limited-capacity focus of attention, thereby facilitating the identification of a subsequent target whose color matches the same attentional set. As predicted, in Experiment 1, contingent attentional capture effects from a target-colored distractor were only one half to one third as large when subsequent target identification relied on the same (vs. a different) attentional set. In Experiment 2, this effect was eliminated when all of the target colors matched the same attentional set, arguing against bottom-up perceptual priming of the distractor's color as an alternative account of our findings. In Experiment 3, this effect was reversed when a target-colored distractor appeared after the target, ruling out a feature-based interference account of our findings. We conclude that capacity limitations in working memory strongly influence contingent attentional capture when multiple attentional sets guide selection.

A number of studies suggest a link between musical training and general cognitive abilities. Despite some positive results, there is disagreement about which abilities are improved. One line of research leads to the hypothesis that verbal abilities in general, and verbal memory in particular, are related to musical training. In the present article, we review this line of research and present newly collected data comparing trained musicians to non-musicians on a number of tasks that recruit verbal memory. The results showed an advantage for musicians' long-term verbal memory that disappeared when articulatory suppression was introduced. In addition, we found evidence for a greater verbal working memory span in musicians. Together, these results show that musical training may influence verbal working memory and long-term memory, and they suggest that these improved abilities are due to enhanced verbal rehearsal mechanisms in musicians.