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Open research practices seek to enhance the transparency and reproducibility of research. While there is evidence of increased uptake in these practices, such as study preregistration and open data, facilitated by new infrastructure and policies, little research has assessed general uptake of such practices across psychology university researchers. The current study estimates psychologists' level of engagement in open research practices across universities in the United Kingdom and Ireland, while also assessing possible explanatory factors that may impact their engagement. Data were collected from 602 psychology researchers in the United Kingdom and Ireland on the extent to which they have implemented various practices (e.g., use of preprints, preregistration, open data, open materials). Here we present the summarized descriptive results, as well as considering differences between various categories of researcher (e.g., career stage, subdiscipline, methodology), and examining the relationship between researcher's practices and their self-reported capability, opportunity, and motivation (COM-B) to engage in open research practices. Results show that while there is considerable variability in engagement of open research practices, differences across career stage and subdiscipline of psychology are small by comparison. We observed consistent differences according to respondent's research methodology and based on the presence of institutional support for open research. COM-B dimensions were collectively significant predictors of engagement in open research, with automatic motivation emerging as a consistently strong predictor. We discuss these findings, outline some of the challenges experienced in this study, and offer suggestions and recommendations for future research. Estimating the prevalence of responsible research practices is important to assess sustained behaviour change in research reform, tailor educational training initiatives, and to understand potential fa

Open research practices seek to enhance the transparency and reproducibility of research. Whilst there is evidence of increased uptake in these practices, such as study preregistration and open data, facilitated by new infrastructure and policies, little research has assessed general uptake of such practices across university researchers. The current study estimates psychologists’ level of engagement in open research practices across universities in the United Kingdom and Ireland, while also assessing possible explanatory factors that may impact their engagement. Data were collected from [insert final number of participants] psychology researchers in the UK and Ireland on the extent to which individual researchers have implemented various practices (e.g., use of preprints, preregistration, open data, open materials). Here we present the summarised descriptive results, as well as considering differences between various categories of researcher (e.g., career stage, subdiscipline, methodology), and examining the link between researcher’s practices and their self-reported capability, opportunity, and motivation (COM-B) to engage in open research practices. Results show [e.g., that there is wide/little variability across the discipline as well as differences between established researchers and postgraduate research students/postdoctoral researchers, who are more/less likely to be engaging in responsible research practices]. Estimating the prevalence of responsible research practices is important to assess sustained behaviour change in research reform, tailor educational training initiatives, and to understand potential factors that might impact engagement.

Gaze following is an early-emerging skill in infancy argued to be fundamental to joint attention and later language development. However, how gaze following emerges is a topic of great debate. Representational theories assume that in order to follow adults’ gaze, infants must have a rich sensitivity to adults’ communicative intention from birth. In contrast, learning-based theories hold that infants may learn to gaze follow based on low-level social reinforcement, without the need to understand others’ mental states. Nagai, Asada and Hosoda [Advanced Robotics, 20, 10 (2016)] successfully taught a robot to gaze follow through social reinforcement and found that the robot learned in stages: first in the horizontal plane, and later in the vertical plane – a prediction that does not follow from representational theories. In the current study, we tested this prediction in an eye-tracking paradigm. Six-month-olds did not follow gaze in either the horizontal or vertical plane, whereas 12-month-olds and 18-month-olds only followed gaze in the horizontal plane. These results confirm the core prediction of the robot model, suggesting that children may also learn to gaze follow through social reinforcement coupled with a structured learning environment.

Gaze following is an early-emerging skill in infancy argued to be fundamental to joint attention and later language development. However, how gaze following emerges is a topic of great debate. Representational theories assume that in order to follow adults’ gaze, infants must have a rich sensitivity to adults’ communicative intention from birth. In contrast, learning-based theories hold that infants may learn to gaze follow based on low-level social reinforcement, without the need to understand others’ mental states. Nagai, Asada and Hosoda [Advanced Robotics, 20, 10 (2016)] successfully taught a robot to gaze follow through social reinforcement and found that the robot learned in stages: first in the horizontal plane, and later in the vertical plane – a prediction that does not follow from representational theories. In the current study, we tested this prediction in an eye-tracking paradigm. Six-month-olds did not follow gaze in either the horizontal or vertical plane, whereas 12-month-olds and 18-month-olds only followed gaze in the horizontal plane. These results confirm the core prediction of the robot model, suggesting that children may also learn to gaze follow through social reinforcement coupled with a structured learning environment.

In a seminal study, Yoon, Johnson and Csibra [PNAS, 105, 36 (2008)] showed that nine-month-old infants retained qualitatively different information about novel objects in communicative and non-communicative contexts. In a communicative context, the infants encoded the identity of novel objects at the expense of encoding their location, which was preferentially retained in non-communicative contexts. This result had not yet been replicated. Here we attempted two replications, while also including a measure of eye-tracking to obtain more detail of infants’ attention allocation during stimulus presentation. Experiment 1 was designed following the methods described in the original paper. After discussion with one of the original authors, some key changes were made to the methodology in Experiment 2. Neither experiment replicated the results of the original study, with Bayes Factor Analysis suggesting moderate support for the null hypothesis. Both experiments found differential attention allocation in communicative and non-communicative contexts, with more looking to the face in communicative than non-communicative contexts, and more looking to the hand in non-communicative than communicative contexts. High and low level accounts of these attentional differences are discussed.

Two-year-old children are more likely to transmit new information after learning it in a pedagogical rather than an intentional but non-pedagogical context (Vredenburgh, Kushnir, & Casasola, 2015). In the present study we asked whether action complexity could mediate the effect of pedagogical cues on information transmission. Twenty-four-month-old children (N = 31) interacted with two unfamiliar adults who demonstrated them two actions leading to a comparable outcome on two novel toys. One of the demonstrators showed a simpler action in an intentional, but non-pedagogical manner, while the other showed a more complex action in a pedagogical manner by using verbal cues, direct eye contact, and child-directed speech. Following demonstration, children were equally likely to imitate both actions, but achieved the action outcome significantly more often with the simpler action. The children were then encouraged to demonstrate either action to an ignorant familiar adult who was not present during demonstrations. While children showed both actions during transmission, they were significantly more likely to demonstrate the simple action, even though it was presented without the explicit pedagogical cues. These results suggest that action complexity may undermine the role of explicit pedagogical cues in information transmission mechanisms in infancy.