Evidence map›Paper›PMID 26122896›Full record

SynthesisPsychonomic bulletin & review2016

Underpowered samples, false negatives, and unconscious learning.

Miguel A Vadillo, Emmanouil Konstantinidis, David R Shanks

Abstract readSystematic Review
PubMed Full text at PMC Publisher
In one paragraph

Synthesis in Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 102 papers, 4 of them syntheses that pooled it.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
102citing papers in PubMed, 4 pooled it
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

102 citing papers in PubMed, 4 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.

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  5. Review
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  7. Implicit learning of social information in contextual cueing.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2026
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42 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.

4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

3 authors.

Miguel A VadilloPrimary Care and Public Health Sciences, King's College London, Capital House, 42 Weston St., London, SE1 3QD, UK. miguel.vadillo@kcl.ac.uk.
Emmanouil KonstantinidisDepartment of Social and Decision Sciences, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA, BP 208, USA. ekonst@cmu.edu.
David R ShanksDivision of Psychology and Language Sciences, University College London, 26 Bedford Way, London, WC1H 0AH, UK. d.shanks@ucl.ac.uk.

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

The scientific community has witnessed growing concern about the high rate of false positives and unreliable results within the psychological literature, but the harmful impact of false negatives has been largely ignored. False negatives are particularly concerning in research areas where demonstrating the absence of an effect is crucial, such as studies of unconscious or implicit processing. Research on implicit processes seeks evidence of above-chance performance on some implicit behavioral measure at the same time as chance-level performance (that is, a null result) on an explicit measure of awareness. A systematic review of 73 studies of contextual cuing, a popular implicit learning paradigm, involving 181 statistical analyses of awareness tests, reveals how underpowered studies can lead to failure to reject a false null hypothesis. Among the studies that reported sufficient information, the meta-analytic effect size across awareness tests was d z = 0.31 (95 % CI 0.24-0.37), showing that participants' learning in these experiments was conscious. The unusually large number of positive results in this literature cannot be explained by selective publication. Instead, our analyses demonstrate that these tests are typically insensitive and underpowered to detect medium to small, but true, effects in awareness tests. These findings challenge a widespread and theoretically important claim about the extent of unconscious human cognition.

Indexed as

CuesData Interpretation, StatisticalMeta-Analysis as TopicUnconscious, PsychologyAdultAwarenessFemaleHumansLearningMaleContextual cuingFalse negativesImplicit learningNull hypothesis Significance testing· Statistical power

Identifiers

PMID26122896
PMCPMC4742512

What OpenQuestion holds

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Registered trials

None linked

Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.