Cognitive impairment is commonly reported after treatment for breast cancer. The causes are not known, though inflammation, disrupted neuroplasticity or altered brain structure could be involved. Chédeville and Horstmann propose a complex and demanding study to evaluate the effectiveness of a 6-week home-based tDCS intervention on cognitive function in breast cancer survivors. The rationale is that tDCS may modulate neuroplasticity and/or reduce neuroinflammation. The stimulation will focus on the left prefrontal dorso-lateral cortex, a site previously shown to be relevant for the memory and executive functions that are typically impaired in cancer-related cognitive impairment. 

 

This is a relatively novel approach to intervention in this field, and the authors make the case that a well-conducted RCT is needed. Use of home-based intervention should facilitate recruitment, and if this can be demonstrated effective, then could improve the feasibility of use of tDCS in clinical contexts. 

 

As noted by a reviewer, one limitation of the study is that it is not set up to distinguish between anti-inflammatory vs neuroplasticitiy accounts of mechanism.  My judgement, however, is that this distinction would be worth addressing if and when a beneficial effect of tDCS has been demonstrated. This study, if successfully completed, should be able to answer this important primary question. 

 

The Stage 1 manuscript was evaluated over two rounds of in-depth review. Based on ​detailed responses to the reviewers’ and the recommender’s comments, the recommender judged that the manuscript met the Stage 1 criteria and therefore awarded in-principle acceptance.​​​

 

URL to the preregistered Stage 1 protocol: https://osf.io/zhcg7 (under temporary private embargo)
 
Level of bias control achieved: Level 4. At least some of the data that will be used to answer the research question already exists and is accessible in principle to the authors, but the authors certify that they have not yet accessed any part of the data.
 
List of eligible PCI-RR-friendly journals:

 

 

Chédeville, M. & Horstmann, A. (2026). Evaluating the Efficacy of Home-Based tDCS for Cancer-Related Cognitive Impairment: A Double-Blind Randomized Controlled Trial. In principle acceptance of Version 3 by Peer Community in Registered Reports. https://osf.io/zhcg7

The “face-name matching” effect refers to the phenomenon where people are significantly better at matching a person's face to their name than would be expected by chance alone (Zwebner et al., 2017). Put differently: the effect appears to reveal that we look like our names. The effect only shows when the depicted persons and the observers come from the same culture, which further suggests that the effect is based on the shared knowledge of name and face stereotypes.

 

In the current study, Van den Berckt, & Heyman (2024) conducted a conceptual replication of the “face-name matching” effect with tightly controlled stimulus material. Participants (N=80) were presented with pictures of unfamiliar faces, and had to select these targets’ first names among two alternatives. Whereas earlier demonstrations of the effect used more diverse stimuli, this study controlled for ethnicity, age, and name length. As an extension to the original study, half of the trials constituted “sibling trials”, in which a face was accompanied by the name of the same-sex sibling of the shown person and a filler name. 

 

The results provide no conclusive evidence for a face-name matching effect, nor for an extension of this effect to sibling names. Both Bayesian and frequentist analyses reveal that participants’ performance remained close to chance across conditions. The lack of robust effects in the present data therefore suggests limits to the generalizability of face-name matching. One possible explanation is that the homogeneity of the stimulus set reduced the availability of cues that might otherwise inform name judgments. Overall, these findings highlight the need for further work to clarify the boundary conditions under which the face-name matching effect does or does not emerge.

 

The Stage 2 manuscript was evaluated over two rounds of in-depth review, the first round by two reviewers, and the second round by one reviewer. Based on the detailed responses to the reviewers' comments, the recommender judged that the manuscript met the Stage 2 criteria and therefore awarded a positive recommendation.

 

URL to the preregistered Stage 1 protocol: https://osf.io/nygpu
 
Level of bias control achieved: Level 6. No part of the data or evidence that was used to answer the research question was generated until after IPA.

 

List of eligible PCI RR-friendly journals:
 

• Advances in Cognitive Psychology
• Collabra: Psychology
• Experimental Psychology
• International Review of Social Psychology
• Journal of Cognition
• Meta-Psychology
• Peer Community Journal
• PeerJ
• Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice
• Replication Research
• Royal Society Open Science
• Social Psychological Bulletin
• Studia Psychologica
• Swiss Psychology Open 

 

1. Verheyen, S., Van den Berckt, J., & Heyman, T. (2025) Do we look like our siblings’ names? A socio-onomastic perspective on the face-name matching effect. [Stage 2]. Acceptance of Version 3 by Peer Community in Registered Reports. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/78ezw_v5

 

2. Zwebner, Y., Sellier, A.-L., Rosenfeld, N., Goldenberg, J., & Mayo, R. (2017). We look like our names: The manifestation of name stereotypes in facial appearance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 112, 527–554. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000076

 

Intellectual disability (ID) affects 1-3% of the global population and is characterised by early-onset impairments in cognitive functioning, adaptive behaviours, and the capacity to perform everyday activities. While much has been discovered about the causes and consequences of ID, research in this field is hampered by a range of methodological issues, including small sample sizes (often due to the low prevalence of specific conditions that lead to ID), high heterogeneity within ID populations, and diagnostic inconsistencies across cultures and languages. These barriers limit replicability, generalisability, and the ability to explore complex associations, often tilting the field toward simpler group comparisons over more advanced analyses. To address these concerns, large-scale team science offers a promising solution by pooling resources for larger and more diverse datasets while maintaining rigorous, harmonised protocols. This enhances scientific reliability, accelerates progress, and promises to better capture the functional heterogeneity associated with diverse aetiologies of ID, including genetic, environmental, and co-occurring conditions like autism and ADHD.

 

In this programmatic Stage 1 submission, Topor et al. (2025) lead an international consortium of researchers called the CO-IND collaboration in proposing a comprehensive study of executive functions (EF) - with a particular focus on inhibition and working memory - and adaptive behaviours in children and adolescents with ID. Drawing on a large, diverse sample from multiple countries with expected sizes ranging from 150 to over 700 participants aged 7–21, the programme outlines four interconnected papers based on a shared core protocol, with two papers including targeted extensions. The first examines developmental trajectories of EF and adaptive behaviours using a cross-sectional design. The second adopts a transdiagnostic approach with data-driven clustering to identify common profiles of individual differences. The third, as an extension study, investigates how cognitive and behavioural factors influence participation in everyday activities among adolescents, applying cross-sectional developmental modelling to participation measures. The fourth, also an extension, explores the unique contributions of general fluid intelligence and EF to phonological awareness, a key precursor to literacy. Outputs will include four Stage 2 manuscripts, advancing understanding of ID while demonstrating the value of open, collaborative science for underrepresented populations.

 

The Stage 1 manuscript was evaluated over two rounds of in-depth review. Based on ​detailed responses to the reviewers’ and the recommender’s comments, the recommender judged that the manuscript met the Stage 1 criteria and therefore awarded in-principle acceptance.​​​
 
URL to the preregistered Stage 1 protocol: https://osf.io/9g2w8

 
Level of bias control achieved: Level 6. No part of the data or evidence that will be used to answer the research question yet exists and no part will be generated until after IPA.
 
List of eligible PCI-RR-friendly journals: 

 

• Advances in Cognitive Psychology
• Collabra: Psychology
• Cortex
• Experimental Psychology *pending editorial consideration of disciplinary fit
• Journal of Cognition
• Peer Community Journal
• PeerJ
• Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice
• Royal Society Open Science
• Studia Psychologica
• Swiss Psychology Open

 

 

Topor, M., Danielsson, H, & the CO-IND Collaboration Advisory Board (2025). Cognition and Intellectual Disability (CO-IND) Collaboration Project Registered Report. In principle acceptance of Version 3 by Peer Community in Registered Reports. https://osf.io/9g2w8

A growing body of evidence suggests that repeatedly inhibiting motor responses – for instance during a go/no-go training task – can induce cue devaluation in which stimuli that usually elicit approach tendencies (so-called appetitive cues) are reduced in perceived value. Such findings open potential avenues for training people to overcome automatic approach tendencies toward unhealthy foods or drinks and therefore encourage healthier eating habits.

 

One interesting – and open – question is the extent to which the magnitude of such devaluation effects might be related to individual differences in the way people respond to cue-reward associations in a Pavlovian learning context. Previous studies of Pavlovian learning have indicated that people differ in their tendency to direct behaviour toward a conditioned stimulus that predicts a reward (sign-tracking), rather than the location or action associated with the reward itself (goal-tracking). In other words, sign-trackers focus on and attribute motivational value to reward-predictive cues, whereas goal-trackers focus on the relationship between the cue and its associated outcome.

 

In the current study, Najberg et al. (2025) will use an existing but unobserved dataset to test whether individual differences in sign-tracking bias predict behavioural and electrophysiological measures of how participants process appetitive food cues, during and after training in a go/no-go task. The authors measure sign-tracking bias using eye-tracking in a Pavlovian conditioning task, and then focus on the P1, N2 and P3 event-related potential components linked to appetitive cues (variously associated with attention, emotion and conflict resolution) as well as reaction times and commission error rates during a food-related go/no-go training task. The findings should offer fresh insights into the relationship between these learning processes and may imply who stands to benefit most from go-no/go training and why.

 

The Stage 1 manuscript was evaluated over three rounds of in-depth review. Based on detailed responses to the reviewers' comments, the recommender judged that the manuscript met the Stage 1 criteria and therefore awarded in-principle acceptance (IPA).
 
URL to the preregistered Stage 1 protocol: https://osf.io/4agcy

 

Level of bias control achieved: Level 4. At least some of the data/evidence that will be used to answer the research question already exists and is accessible in principle to the authors, but the authors certify that they have not yet accessed any part of that data/evidence.

 
List of eligible PCI RR-friendly journals:

 

 

Najberg, H., Tapparel, M., & Spierer, L. (2025). Sign-tracking bias predicts neurocognitive responses to appetitive cue devaluation by response training. In principle acceptance of Version 3 by Peer Community in Registered Reports. https://osf.io/4agcy

 

Why are some people more susceptible to visual illusions than others? Bayesian predictive coding frameworks offer one potential explanation – that variation in illusion sensitivity is driven, at least in part, by the strength and precision of an individual’s perceptual priors. When sensory input is noisy or ambiguous, as in most classical illusions, a highly precise or strong prior dominates the inference. The expected rule is then heavily applied so the illusory percept wins and the person misjudges the true stimulus (such as perceiving Müller-Lyer lines as different in length). On the other hand, when priors are weaker or imprecise, less trust is placed in the prior and the neurocognitive system may rely more on the actual sensory evidence. Consequently, even when an illusion is strong, the perceptual distortion can be smaller, leading to fewer errors and smaller interference effects.

 

Previous studies have uncovered individual differences in illusion sensitivity potentially tied to psychopathology, including lower sensitivity in schizophrenia and autism due to weakened top-down priors, as well as correlations with personality traits in non-clinical populations. However, the sources of this variability are not fully understood, prompting the question of whether it arises from low-level perceptual mechanisms or higher-level cognitive processes such as phenomenological control – the capacity to modify subjective experience to align with suggestions or task requirements. In the current study, Makowski and Neves (2025) aim to replicate and extend a previous study by Lush et al. (2022) that reported no link between phenomenological control and Müller-Lyer illusion sensitivity, implying that illusions are cognitively impenetrable and rooted in isolated low-level processes.

 

In their proposed online study, the authors will recruit approximately 500 English-speaking adults via Prolific and administer the Phenomenological Control Scale to gauge trait phenomenological control via subjective ratings of imaginative suggestions, paired with an adapted Illusion Game to evaluate the behavioural effects of visual illusions on perceptual judgments. The tasks will feature three illusion variants presented in a counterbalanced order: Ebbinghaus, Müller-Lyer, and Vertical-Horizontal, with orthogonal manipulations of illusion strength and task difficulty. Illusion sensitivity will be quantified by error rates and inverse efficiency scores in incongruent trials, supplemented by the PID-5 to assess psychoticism as a proxy for schizophrenia-related traits. The authors predict (1) that Bayesian analysis will provide evidence of no correlation between phenomenological control and illusion sensitivity across types (consistent with Lush et al. and supporting cognitive impenetrability) and (2) a negative correlation between psychoticism (a proposed proxy for weaker priors) and illusion sensitivity, suggesting a key role for low-level perceptual factors.

 

The Stage 1 manuscript was evaluated over two rounds of in-depth review. Based on ​detailed responses to reviewers’ and the recommender’s comments, the recommender judged that the manuscript met the Stage 1 criteria and therefore awarded in-principle acceptance.​​​
 
URL to the preregistered Stage 1 protocol: https://osf.io/kvjnm

 
Level of bias control achieved: Level 6. No part of the data or evidence that will be used to answer the research question yet exists and no part will be generated until after IPA.
 
List of eligible PCI-RR-friendly journals:
 

• Advances in Cognitive Psychology
• Collabra: Psychology
• Experimental Psychology *pending editorial consideration of disciplinary fit
• Journal of Cognition
• Peer Community Journal
• PeerJ
• Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice
• Royal Society Open Science
• Studia Psychologica
• Swiss Psychology Open

 

1. Lush, P., Seth, A., Dienes, Z., & Scott, R. B. (2022). Trait phenomenological control in top-down and bottom-up effects: ASMR, visually evoked auditory response and the Müller-Lyer illusion. http://dx.doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/hw4y9 

 

2. Makowski, D. & Neves, A. (2025). Testing the Relationship between Phenomenological Control related to Illusion Sensitivity. In principle acceptance of Version 4 by Peer Community in Registered Reports. https://osf.io/kvjnm