Psychology pilot
Evidence worth keeping up with
Start with one of 24 claims drawn from our published psychology library. Inspect the studies, watch the question, and see what gets updated.
This is a bounded set of cited findings awaiting pilot editorial review. It is not a systematic review of all psychology research. Coverage updates, reviewed research changes, and corrections are distinct.
Working Memory
Working memory capacity is a significant predictor of academic outcomes, specifically in mathematics and reading.4 cited studies · View sources, limits, and history
Executive Function
Physical exercise, motor coordination tasks, and structured yoga routines are linked to improved executive control, visual attention, and cognitive flexibility in children and adolescents.4 cited studies · View sources, limits, and history
Inhibitory Control
Inhibitory control in childhood undergoes rapid development, where accuracy rates on simple tasks level off in early childhood, while processing and execution speeds continue to mature and improve in older cohorts.2 cited studies · View sources, limits, and history
Theory of Mind
Children and adults on the autism spectrum frequently struggle with applying social reasoning in real-life, daily situations, even when they demonstrate high performance on structured, explicit laboratory mind-reading tests.2 cited studies · View sources, limits, and history
Episodic Memory
Sleep helps consolidate newly learned episodic information, reducing the forgetting rate of both associative items and their contextual sources.2 cited studies · View sources, limits, and history
Cognitive Flexibility
Cognitive flexibility is closely linked to reading achievement and comprehension skills in school-aged children.2 cited studies · View sources, limits, and history
Cognitive Reappraisal
The use of cognitive reappraisal is associated with greater psychological well-being, higher positive affect, and lower negative affect.2 cited studies · View sources, limits, and history
Signal Detection Theory
Metacognitive self-evaluation is partially domain-general, meaning an individual's ability to monitor their performance correlates across visual perception and memory tasks.3 cited studies · View sources, limits, and history
Interoception
Emotional susceptibility is strongly related to subjective attitudes toward one's body, such as worry and lack of trust, rather than objective accuracy in tracking physiological signals like heartbeats.2 cited studies · View sources, limits, and history
Metacognition
Metacognitive abilities appear to be largely domain-general, as an individual's self-evaluation accuracy and confidence ratings are significantly correlated across different types of mental tasks.3 cited studies · View sources, limits, and history
Selective Attention
Brief school-based physical exercise sessions, such as 10 to 12 minutes of dancing or coordination workouts, do not result in acute improvements in students' selective attention performance.2 cited studies · View sources, limits, and history
Intrinsic Motivation
Supporting autonomy and satisfying basic psychological needs (autonomy, competence, and relatedness) fosters intrinsic motivation, which in turn enhances subjective vitality and feelings of energy.2 cited studies · View sources, limits, and history
Deontology
Deontological aversion to causing harm is heavily driven by emotional processing, such as empathic concern and brain activity in regions like the subgenual cingulate cortex, rather than purely cognitive calculation.2 cited studies · View sources, limits, and history
Utilitarianism
The reliance on hypothetical, written scenarios across moral psychology research limits our ability to confidently generalize these findings to real-life, high-stakes moral crises.4 cited studies · View sources, limits, and history
Metacognitive Efficiency
Metacognitive efficiency exhibits domain-general properties, meaning that an individual's ability to evaluate their own decisions is significantly correlated across different mental tasks such as memory and perception.2 cited studies · View sources, limits, and history
Ecological Validity
Direct performance-based cognitive tests of executive functioning and real-world behavioral ratings by parents or teachers capture different aspects of functioning and exhibit only moderate correlation.2 cited studies · View sources, limits, and history
Expressive Suppression
Expressive suppression is generally associated with reduced positive affect, higher daily stress, and increased depressive symptoms, although its negative effects are not uniform across all individuals.3 cited studies · View sources, limits, and history
Memory Consolidation
Events are consolidated as structured units, not as an undifferentiated stream.2 cited studies · View sources, limits, and history
Reconsolidation
Both studies moved how a memory felt while leaving what was remembered alone.2 cited studies · View sources, limits, and history
Sleep Architecture
Which measure you take determines which countermeasure appears to work.2 cited studies · View sources, limits, and history
Attention
A busier mind is not uniformly a more distractible one — it depends what it is busy with.2 cited studies · View sources, limits, and history
Learning
Individual history predicted both the sharpness of learning and its persistence.3 cited studies · View sources, limits, and history
Decision Making
A poor score can reflect repeating a choice, or never settling on one, rather than misvaluing outcomes.2 cited studies · View sources, limits, and history
Cognitive Bias
Where an effect appeared, it depended on intensity — and both trials used passive controls.2 cited studies · View sources, limits, and history