The relationship between music and exercise has been studied for over a century, with implications for our understanding of biomechanics, physiology, brain function, and psychology. Listening to music while exercising is associated with a wide range of benefits, from increasing motivation, to reducing perceived exertion, inhibiting awareness of negative bodily signals, boosting mood, and ultimately improving physical performance. But while these ergogenic benefits of music are well documented, much remains to be discovered about how music alters brain function during exercise. One reason for this gap in understanding is the technical difficulty in recording brain activity during realistic exercise, as neuroimaging methods such as fMRI, EEG or MEG are highly susceptible to movement-related artefacts.

 

In the current study, Guérin et al. (2026) used the optical brain imaging technique of functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to measure oxygenation of key brain areas during exercise. Unlike other neuroimaging methods, fNIRS has a high tolerance for motion artefacts, making it particularly well suited for the current investigation. The authors tested a series of hypotheses based on previous studies that observed a decrease in cerebral oxygenation during intense exercise, particularly within the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC). If, as suggested, the prefrontal cortex is important for regulation of cognition and emotion during exercise, then the benefits of listening to music might arise by delaying or reducing this drop in prefrontal oxygenation.

 

Using a within-subject design, Guérin et al. combined a constant-workload cycling protocol to volitional exhaustion (set at 5% above VT1) with three auditory conditions: asynchronous music (the active condition), listening to an audiobook (an auditory control) or silence (baseline control). Compared to the two control conditions, they predicted that music exposure would increase oxygenation in prefrontal and parietal regions and would also delay the drop in oxygenation associated with intense exercise (specifically within dlPFC and mPFC). To test whether any such changes are specific for prefrontal and parietal cortex, they also compared the haemodynamic responses of the occipital cortex between the auditory conditions, predicting no difference.

 

The results of the study were largely negative. Contrary to predictions, asynchronous music did not significantly delay the onset of cerebral oxygenation decline during exhaustive exercise, nor did it increase the amplitude of oxygenation in prefrontal or parietal regions relative to the audiobook or silence control conditions. Thus, the primary hypotheses concerning delayed deoxygenation and enhanced prefrontal or parietal activation were not supported. The negative control hypothesis was, however, confirmed: haemodynamic responses in the occipital cortex did not differ across auditory conditions, providing important validation of the specificity and integrity of the fNIRS measurements. Across behavioural and subjective measures - including perceived exertion, affect, enjoyment, and time to exhaustion - no statistically reliable effects of music were observed, although some nonsignificant trends were consistent with prior theoretical accounts. Taken together, these findings place meaningful constraints on existing models, highlighting boundary conditions for ergogenic and neurophysiological effects of music, and providing a high-quality empirical benchmark for future work using mobile neuroimaging during exercise.

 

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

 

URL to the preregistered Stage 1 protocol: https://osf.io/52aeb
 
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:
 

• Brain and Neuroscience Advances
• Communications in Kinesiology
• Cortex
• Imaging Neuroscience
• In&Vertebrates
• NeuroImage: Reports
• Peer Community Journal
• PeerJ
• Royal Society Open Science

 

References
 
1. Guérin, S. M. R., Karageorghis, C. I., Coeugnet, M. R., Bigliassi, M. & Delevoye-Turrell, Y. N. (2026). Effects of Auditory Stimuli During Submaximal Exercise on Cerebral Oxygenation [Stage 2]. Acceptance of Version 7 by Peer Community in Registered Reports. https://zenodo.org/records/18358837/files/motimus_stage-2_v2_manuscript_with_tracked_changes_260122.pdf

Conspiracy theories have attracted considerable scholarly and public attention in recent years. Research based on self-reports indicates that conspiracy beliefs are surprisingly widespread. However, endorsement of a conspiracy theory in a survey does not necessarily imply genuine belief. There are many reasons why a respondent may endorse a conspiracy theory in a survey without actually believing it. In the current study, Williams et al. (2025) focus on the possibility that some respondents may be deliberately insincere.

 

The authors examine (a) the prevalence of conspiracy beliefs in New Zealand among respondents classified as sincere versus insincere, (b) the effect of excluding insincere respondents on correlations among different conspiracy beliefs, and (c) whether sincere respondents endorse contradictory conspiracy theories less frequently than insincere respondents. In addition, they explore how accounting for insincere responding may alter associations between conspiracy beliefs and established predictors from the literature.

 

To identify insincere respondents, the authors use two criteria. First, they include a fictitious and deliberately implausible conspiracy theory stating that the Canadian Armed Forces are secretly developing an elite army of genetically engineered, super-intelligent giant raccoons to invade nearby countries. Second, they include a direct self-report item at the end of the survey asking respondents whether they answered insincerely at any point. Respondents are classified as insincere if they endorse the raccoon conspiracy as “probably true” or “definitely true,” if they admit to having responded insincerely at any point, or both.

 

This study will advance the conspiracy belief literature by systematically investigating whether indicators of insincerity affect both prevalence estimates and typically-observed relationships between conspiracy beliefs and other psychological variables. After two rounds of in-depth peer review, the recommender judged that the manuscript met the criteria for in-principle acceptance (IPA).

 

URL to the preregistered Stage 1 protocol: https://osf.io/zdcwn
 
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:
 

• Collabra: Psychology
• International Review of Social Psychology
• Peer Community Journal
• PeerJ
• Royal Society Open Science
• Social Psychological Bulletin
• Studia Psychologica
• Swiss Psychology Open

 

 

Williams, M., Marques, M. D., Ling, M., Hill, S. R., Kerr, J. R., Clarke, E. J. R., Martin, A. & Ross, R. M (2025). Do you really believe that? Examining the prevalence and predictors of belief in conspiracy theories when accounting for insincerity. In principle acceptance of Version 3 by Peer Community in Registered Reports. https://osf.io/zdcwn

What makes different types of moral judgment distinct? In this study, Barbosa (2026) proposes a pre-registered empirical test of a recent taxonomy of moral judgment. The central aim is to clarify how commonly used moral judgments (evaluations, norm judgments, moral wrongness, blame, character attributions, and punishment) differ from one another in their sensitivity to specific informational features, such as the type of transgression, temporal framing, intent, and social role.

 

The submission outlines four planned experiments, each manipulating a single between-subjects factor while measuring six moral judgment types (within-subjects factor). Study 1 is set up to evaluate the effect of transgression type (moral, prudential, or aesthetic) on different types of moral judgment. Study 2 manipulates action timing (prospective or retrospective) to test whether norm judgments are preferentially elevated in prospective contexts, and wrongness judgments are more elevated in retrospective contexts. Study 3 manipulates intent (intentional or accidental) to test whether wrongness and blame are most sensitive to intentionality. Study 4 manipulates the agent’s social role (responsibility-relevant or not) to test whether blame is influenced by role-based expectations.

 

The Stage 1 report preregisters mixed-model ANOVAs for interaction tests, planned contrasts with multiple-comparisons correction, and, where appropriate, equivalence testing to support interpretations of null effects. A planned total sample size of N=1,100 is proposed to account for the four planned studies. Participants will be recruited via convenience sampling in Colombian universities using both in-person and online methods. The submission also specifies exclusion criteria, manipulation checks, and a transparent plan to delay inferential analyses until the full sample is collected.

 

The Stage 1 manuscript was reviewed by three experts. 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.

 

 

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. 

 

 

 

 

Barbosa, S. (2026). What makes different types of moral judgment different? Pre-registered comparisons of evaluations, norms, wrongness, blame, character and punishment judgments. In principle acceptance of Version 5 by Peer Community in Registered Reports. https://osf.io/ckms5

 

There is abundant evidence that hippocampal theta oscillations (~4 Hz) mediate episodic memory encoding. Specifically, some phases of hippocampal theta are associated with the encoding of multisensory episodic memories, while opposing phases seem to be more associated with retrieval operations. The evidence from non-human animal models and computational modelling provides robust support for such a model (reviewed in Hasselmo, 2025), but the evidence from humans is limited and inconsistent. Clouter et al. (2017) provided one such piece of evidence by sinusoidally modulating the strength of audio-visual stimuli at theta frequency and presenting them to participants with different phase delays between the audio and visual modulations. They found that memory for audio-visual stimulus pairings was superior when the stimulus modulations were synchronous, rather than asynchronous, and occurred at a 4 Hz theta frequency (relative to 1.7 Hz delta and 10.5 Hz alpha frequencies). This result, termed the theta-induced memory enhancement (TIME) effect, is consistent with the inference that stimulus-related signals arriving at the hippocampus together are more likely to be successfully encoded into a combined episodic memory than signals arriving during different portions of the hippocampal theta cycle (see also, Wang et al., 2018). Subsequent studies, however, have failed to replicate this effect (Serin et al., 2024; Simeonov & Das, 2025).

 

In this study, Serin et al. (2026) seek to test the innovative proposal that the TIME effect may be subject to individual differences in the optimal audio-visual phase offset that make it difficult to replicate if only a small number of phase offsets are tested (e.g., synchronous versus asynchronous).  To do this, they will present participants with theta-modulated audiovisual stimuli, with the phase of the visual and auditory stimuli offset by one of sixteen different angles on each trial. They will then apply participant-level statistics to determine whether the TIME effect was present at any offset for each individual, and will examine the distribution of optimal phase offsets at the group level. Online data collection will be used to achieve the large sample of participants required to achieve adequate power in this study (N=384, as indicated using power simulation). This project grapples with the subtleties of the proposed neurophysiological basis of the TIME effect (e.g. individual differences in conduction delays for auditory-hippocampal and visual-hippocampal signalling). As such, it will offer fresh insights into the importance of theta-rhythmic processing in human episodic memory.

 

The Stage 1 manuscript was evaluated over two 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.

 

URL to the preregistered Stage 1 protocol: https://osf.io/qdvw9
 
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 *pending editorial consideration of disciplinary fit
• Royal Society Open Science
• Studia Psychologica
• Swiss Psychology Open

 

 

1. Clouter, A., Shapiro, K. L., & Hanslmayr, S. (2017). Theta phase synchronization is the glue that binds human associative memory. Current Biology, 27, 3143-3148. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2017.09.001

 

2. Hasselmo, M. E. (2025). Development of the SPEAR Model: Separate phases of encoding and retrieval are necessary for storing multiple overlapping associative memories. Hippocampus, 35, e23676. https://doi.org/10.1002/hipo.23676

 

3. Serin, F., Wang, D., Davis, M. H., & Henson, R. (2024). Does theta synchronicity of sensory information enhance associative memory? Replicating the theta-induced memory effect. Brain and Neuroscience Advances, 8, 23982128241255798. https://doi.org/10.1177/23982128241255798

 

4. Serin, F., Zoefel., B., Davis, M. H., & Henson, R. (2026). Personal rhythms of memory: Investigating individual effects of preferred theta phase lag between sensory inputs on associative memory. In principle acceptance of Version 5 by Peer Community in Registered Reports. https://osf.io/qdvw9

 

5. Simeonov, L. & Das, R. (2025). The rhythm of memory. Does theta frequency audio/visual flicker improve recall? Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 19, 1555081. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2025.1555081

 

6. Wang, D., Clouter, A., Chen, Q., Shapiro, K. L., & Hanslmayr, S. (2018). Single-trial phase entrainment of theta oscillations in sensory regions predicts human associative memory performance. Journal of Neuroscience, 38, 6299-6309. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0349-18.2018

Registered reports (RRs) are a publication format where peer review takes place in two parts, both before and after the analysis. Although RRs have been published for more than a decade by now (e.g., Chambers 2017), the empirical evidence is limited when it comes to the implications of using the RR format. In the present programmatic study, Ingvaldsen et al. (2026) utilise application data from an initiative by Foundation Dam in Norway to assess various differences, such as research plan quality, between RR and non-RR applications (Paper #1). Additionally, the authors interview principal investigators of RR applications to learn why they chose the RR track and what they think about RR publishing more generally (Paper #2). As such, the study has the potential to yield valuable quantitative as well as qualitative findings regarding the ongoing implementation of RR opportunities in the research process.
 
The Stage 1 plan was peer reviewed over four rounds with three RR experts, and the Managing Board was additionally consulted to maximise study quality. Based on the authors' careful revisions and responses to reviews, the recommender made a positive decision on in-principle acceptance.
 
URL to the preregistered Stage 1 protocol: https://osf.io/jq84x
 
Level of bias control achieved: Paper #1: 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. Paper #2: Level 2. At least some data/evidence that will be used to answer the research question has been accessed and partially observed by the authors, but the authors certify that they have not yet observed the key variables within the data that will be used to answer the research question.
 
List of eligible PCI-RR-friendly journals:

 

• Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science *pending editorial consideration of disciplinary fit
• In&Vertebrates
• Peer Community Journal
• PeerJ
• Royal Society Open Science

 

References
 
1. Chambers, C. D. (2017). The seven deadly sins of psychology: A manifesto for reforming the culture of scientific practice. Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400884940

 

2. Ingvaldsen, S. H., Svege, I., & Hesselberg, J.-O. (2026). Evaluation of a Funder-Driven Registered Report Initiative. In principle acceptance of Version 4 by Peer Community in Registered Reports. https://osf.io/jq84x