Research

Shawn T. Schwartz, Whitney L. E. Tsai, Elizabeth A. Karan, Mark S. Juhn, Allison J. Shultz, John E. McCormack, Thomas B. Smith, Michael E. Alfaro

Methods in Ecology and Evolution

Introduces charisma, an R package for high-throughput pixel-level colour classification of biological images, validated against expert assessments and applied to tanager colour evolution, enabling standardized and reproducible large-scale colour analysis workflows.

Balazs Aczel, Barnabas Szaszi, + 455 reanalysts (incl. Shawn T. Schwartz)

Nature

A large-scale crowd initiative in which 457 independent reanalysts examined 100 published social and behavioural science studies, finding that only 34% of reanalyses matched the original result within a ±0.05 Cohen's d tolerance, raising concerns about single-path analytical practices.

Kristine Zheng, Erik Brockbank, Shawn T. Schwartz, David S. Yeager, Christopher Bryan, Carol Dweck, Judith E. Fan

Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

An observational study and intervention trial across 11 institutions showing that students' initial psychological orientation—including math anxiety and stress expectations—predicts performance in introductory data science courses and that targeted interventions can shift stress-learning beliefs.

Shawn T. Schwartz, Haopei Yang, Alice M. Xue, Anthony D. Wagner

Current Directions in Psychological Science

This article reviews recent advances in understanding how attention mechanisms shape episodic memory, examining neural substrates, oscillatory rhythms, age-related precision changes, and closed-loop experimental approaches to establish causal attention-memory relationships.

Dillon H. Murphy, Shawn T. Schwartz, Alan D. Castel

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition

Across six experiments, demonstrates that divided attention during encoding—but not retrieval—impairs value-directed remembering, while value-mediated retrieval initiation (starting recall with high-value words) resists attentional constraints at both encoding and retrieval stages.

Dillon H. Murphy, Shawn T. Schwartz, Kylie O. Alberts, Alexander L. M. Siegel, Brandon J. Carone, Alan D. Castel, Aimee Drolet

Applied Cognitive Psychology

Investigates memory accuracy for scientific efficacy claims in product advertisements, finding that both younger and older adults show poor memory and systematically misremember ambiguous 'clinically studied' claims as the stronger 'clinically proven,' suggesting schematic knowledge fills memory gaps.

Mary C. Whatley, Shawn T. Schwartz, Jessica B. Block, Alan D. Castel

Applied Cognitive Psychology

Shows that incidental exposure to an altered Apple logo disrupts subsequent recognition of the correct logo, demonstrating that attentional saturation from frequent exposure leaves us vulnerable to misinformation effects even for highly familiar everyday objects.

Lauren L. Richmond, Julia Kearley, Shawn T. Schwartz, Mary B. Hargis

Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications

Examines offloading choice and memory benefit for health-related information across three experiments, finding that partial offloading outperforms internal memory alone and that full offloading provides the greatest performance benefit for medication interaction details.

Shawn T. Schwartz, Alexander L. M. Siegel, Teal S. Eich, Alan D. Castel

Psychology and Aging

Demonstrates that both young and older adults show value-based memory selectivity only when goal-directed instructions about item importance are given before encoding, not after, highlighting the critical role of pre-encoding knowledge for strategic prioritization.

Dillon H. Murphy, Shawn T. Schwartz, Alan D. Castel

Cognition

Shows that learners habitually engage in serial (left-to-right reading order) remembering by default, but switch to value-guided strategic retrieval when words carry point values—though some serial processing persists even in the strategic condition.

Dillon H. Murphy, Katie M. Silaj, Shawn T. Schwartz, Matthew G. Rhodes, Alan D. Castel

Memory

Extends the own-race bias beyond facial recognition to associative memory, showing that White participants better categorised and recalled information paired with same-race faces across three experiments using criminal/victim labels and biographical details.

Katie M. Silaj, Shawn T. Schwartz, Alan D. Castel, Ian M. McDonough

Gerontology & Geriatric Medicine

Develops and validates the Bright or Bleak Scale (BOBS), a new instrument measuring societal and personal outlooks on the past and future across the adult lifespan, finding that brighter future outlooks were associated with longer future time perspectives.

Shawn T. Schwartz, Michael E. Alfaro

Methods in Ecology and Evolution

Presents Sashimi, a user-friendly command line toolkit using a Mask R-CNN deep learning model to automate high-throughput image segmentation of digitized organisms, removing a key bottleneck in biodiversity image analysis workflows.

Celine E. Snedden, Sara K. Makanani, Shawn T. Schwartz, Amandine Gamble, Rachel V. Blakey, Benny Borremans, Sarah K. Helman, Luisa Espericueta, Alondra Valencia, Andrew Endo, Michael E. Alfaro, James O. Lloyd-Smith

Trends in Microbiology

Highlights five conceptual domains from ecology and evolution—invasion, consumer-resource interactions, spatial ecology, diversity, and adaptation—that illuminate the emergence and spread of SARS-CoV-2 across biological scales from within-host to multispecies communities.

Alexander L. M. Siegel, Shawn T. Schwartz, Alan D. Castel

Memory & Cognition

Demonstrates that cognitive control over value-based selective encoding is impaired only when secondary tasks draw on overlapping processing resources, with an intra-modal visual-spatial distractor task—but not cross-modal auditory tasks—eliminating sensitivity to item value during study.

Katie M. Silaj, Shawn T. Schwartz, Alexander L. M. Siegel, Alan D. Castel

Educational Psychology Review

Examines how assessment weight and frequency affect the impact of test anxiety on academic performance and metacognitive accuracy across two real-world classroom settings, finding that trait anxiety differentially predicts performance versus metacognitive accuracy depending on assessment stakes.

Mary C. Whatley, Alexander L. M. Siegel, Shawn T. Schwartz, Katie M. Silaj, Alan D. Castel

Gerontology & Geriatric Medicine

A longitudinal and cross-sectional study of mood and expectations regarding aging before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, finding that older adults' outlook remained stable and that younger adults showed lower mood despite older adults expressing greater COVID-19 concern.

Shawn T. Schwartz, Alexander L. M. Siegel, Alan D. Castel

Memory & Cognition

Examines how people selectively remember positive vs. negative value-location associations in a visuospatial task, finding that participants deliberately chose to study positive items more, suggesting a top-down overt points-gained strategy rather than loss aversion.

Michael E. Alfaro, Elizabeth A. Karan, Shawn T. Schwartz, Allison J. Shultz

Integrative and Comparative Biology

A comparative phylogenetic analysis of color pattern evolution in butterflyfishes using machine learning and color pattern geometry tools, finding that most diversity was not predicted by ecological variables and that rapid evolution has decoupled color pattern from ecology.

Johnny Dang, Brian Lin, Julia Yuan, Shawn T. Schwartz, Rishabh M. Shah, Neil K. Garg

Nature Reviews Chemistry

QR Chem is a free resource that uses QR code technology to link students and researchers directly to three-dimensional molecular visualizations, piloted in a UCLA undergraduate organic chemistry course.