Structured imagination refers to reliance upon prior knowledge when generating novel examples of a provided category. Yet studies supporting this tenet use experimental designs where the stimuli themselves cue exemplars based on culturally relevant items. The present study combined exemplar generation with abstract stimuli as a means of attenuating instructional bias. Participants were shown a group of abstract shapes identified as a single category and instructed to generate another member of this category. We additionally examined whether the introduction of a cognitive conflict (by including an anomalous category member) and self-explanation during generation affected the level of imaginative responses. Contrary to expectations, the presentation of a conflicting category member did not result in more imaginative responses when compared to more homogenous stimuli sets. However, a significantly greater degree of imaginative responses was observed from participants who were required to explain their thinking prior to and whilst constructing their exemplars.

The distinction between integral and separable dimensions isof central importance to understanding how humans integrateinformation from multiple stimulus sources. One approach tocharacterizing stimulus integrality is through a set of speededcategorization tasks most closely associated with the work ofWendell Garner. These tasks demonstrate that integral dimen-sions result in marked speed up or slow down in respondingwhen there is correlated or irrelevant variation, respectively,compared with a baseline task. Little, Wang & Nosofsky(2016) recently found that the slow down or interference canbe largely explained by a reduction in the number of direct rep-etitions in a modified Garner filtering task. In this paper, weexamine a large sample of subjects tested on either separable orintegral dimensions to determine the extent of and individualdifferences in the overall and sequential effects in the standardGarner tasks.

Many cultures share common constellations and common narratives about the stars in the night sky. Previous research has shown that this overlap in asterisms, minimal star groupings inside constellations, is clearly present across 22 distinct culture groups and can be explained in part by properties of individual stars (brightness) and properties of pairs of stars (proximity) (Kemp, Hamacher, Little and Cropper, 2022). The same work, however, found no evidence that properties of triples (angle) and quadruples (good continuation) predicted constellation formation. We developed a behavioural experiment to explore how individuals form constellations under conditions that reduce cultural learning. We found that participants independently selected and connected similar stars, and that their responses were predicted by two properties of triples (angle and even spacing) in addition to the properties of brightness and proximity supported by previous work. Our findings lend further evidence to the theory that commonality of constellations across cultures is not a result of shared human history but rather stems from shared human nature.

We describe and demonstrate an empirical strategy useful for discovering and replicating empirical effects in psychological science. The method involves the design of a metastudy, in which many independent experimental variables-that may be moderators of an empirical effect-are indiscriminately randomized. Radical randomization yields rich datasets that can be used to test the robustness of an empirical claim to some of the vagaries and idiosyncrasies of experimental protocols and enhances the generalizability of these claims. The strategy is made feasible by advances in hierarchical Bayesian modeling that allow for the pooling of information across unlike experiments and designs and is proposed here as a gold standard for replication research and exploratory research. The practical feasibility of the strategy is demonstrated with a replication of a study on subliminal priming.