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 mere perception of high-calorie food items can trigger strong action tendencies towards these foods. Go/no-go training has successfully been applied to reduce such action tendencies. This study investigated the electrophysiological mechanisms that may underlie the beneficial effects of go/no-go training on food consumption. EEG was measured while 19 participants passively observed pictures of food and non-food items, both before and after the go/no-go training. During training, 50% of the food and non-food items were consistently paired with a go/no-go response. After training, food items that had been associated with a response induced larger mu desynchronization at electrodes over sensorimotor regions, whereas food items that had been associated with withholding from responding induced larger increases in theta power at frontal midline electrodes. These findings suggest that the exerted cognitive control during go/no-go training with attractive food stimuli may become associated with these stimuli and signal the required level of control during subsequent encounters.

The exploration-exploitation trade-off shows conceptual, functional, and neural analogies with the persistence-flexibility trade-off. We investigated whether mood, which is known to modulate the persistence-flexibility balance, would similarly affect the exploration-exploitation trade-off in a foraging task. More specifically, we tested whether interindividual differences in foraging behavior can be predicted by mood-related arousal and valence. In 119 participants, we assessed mood-related interindividual differences in exploration-exploitation using a foraging task that included minimal task constraints to reduce paradigm-induced biases of individual control tendencies. We adopted the marginal value theorem as a model-based analysis approach, which approximates optimal foraging behavior by tackling the patch-leaving problem. To assess influences of mood on foraging, participants underwent either a positive or negative mood induction. Throughout the experiment, we assessed arousal and valence levels as predictors for explorative/exploitative behavior. Our mood manipulation affected participants' arousal and valence ratings as expected. Moreover, mood-related arousal was found to predict exploration while valence predicted exploitation, which only partly matched our expectations and thereby the proposed conceptual overlap with flexibility and persistence, respectively. The current study provides a first insight into how processes related to arousal and valence differentially modulate foraging behavior. Our results imply that the relationship between exploration-exploitation and flexibility-persistence is more complicated than the semantic overlap between these terms might suggest, thereby calling for further research on the functional, neural, and neurochemical underpinnings of both trade-offs.

Working memory (WM)-based decision making depends on a number of cognitive control processes that control the flow of information into and out of WM and ensure that only relevant information is held active in WM’s limited-capacity store. Although necessary for successful decision making, recent work has shown that these control processes impose performance costs on both the speed and accuracy of WM-based decisions. Using the reference-back task as a benchmark measure of WM control, we conducted evidence accumulation modeling to test several competing explanations for six benchmark empirical performance costs. Costs were driven by a combination of processes, running outside of the decision stage (longer non-decision time) and showing the inhibition of the prepotent response (lower drift rates) in trials requiring WM control. Individuals also set more cautious response thresholds when expecting to update WM with new information versus maintain existing information. We discuss the promise of this approach for understanding cognitive control in WM-based decision making.

The olfactory system provides us with rich information about the world, but the odours around us are not always detectable. Previous research has shown that disgust enhances olfactory sensitivity to n-butanol. Because n-butanol incidentally is mildly negative, it is unclear whether disgust, being a negative, avoidant emotion, enhances sensitivity to stimuli with negative qualities (valence-fit effect), or across stimuli in general (general sensitivity effect). Here we tested these competing hypotheses by examining thresholds to two scents, one positive (phenylethanol) and one mildly negative (n-butanol), during a disgust, happiness, and neutral emotion induction. We found that exposure to disgusting pictures lowered olfactory threshold across both scents. Thus our current results replicated the results of previous research, and also revealed support for a general sensitivity rather than a valence-fit effect. This suggests that disgust facilitates the perceptual detection of extremely faint targets presumably because avoidant emotions enhance perceptual vigilance in general.