Many beds: evaluating reproducibility of auditory targeted memory reactivation

• Applicant: Privatdozent Dr. Gordon Feld
• Subject Area: Biological Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 522620846

In this project, the replicability of auditory targeted memory reactivation is studied. It is known that memory contents are reactivated and thereby strengthened during sleep. Two seminal studies from 2007 and 2009 could show that this process may be enhanced by odours and tones. For this, for example tones are played during learning that are associated to the learning material (picture of a cat and tone of a meow). During subsequent sleep, some of the tones are presented again without awakening the sleeper. The person can then recall the learning contents better that was reactivated by the tones during sleep. Many subsequent studies seem to support this effect; however, they all only tested a small amount of people. In psychology, one has realized that of the many small studies that are conducted often only the significant ones are reported. This biased publication may lead opposing findings to be suppressed. Therefore, it is important to conduct large independent studies to support the original findings and confirm the existence of important effects. As targeted memory reactivation is currently being studied to enhance treatment in psychiatric disorders, it is important to know whether and how well it works. Especially in biological psychology and cognitive neuroscience there exist few of these large replication studies to date. This is where our project comes in. We will investigate the above mentioned effect in a much larger sample (25 time larger) to find out, if it really exists. Beyond this, the data will be used to find out if specific factors contribute to overestimating some effects in biological psychology and cognitive neuroscience. For this, not only the participants will be investigated, but also procedures of the participating scientists, who are collecting and analyzing the data. We hope to find out how the above mentioned biases can be avoided and science can be made more effective. It is the specific goal of this project to enhance the trust set into science by investigating how the scientific method can be optimized.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants