Research as it Happens

In Research as it Happens, we go inside a large-scale psychology project, where labs around the world collaborate to study human memory. Each episode follows the process in real time—how ideas develop, experiments are designed, evidence is evaluated, and how researchers decide what to do next.

In this first episode of Research as it Happens, we go back to where the project began.

What starts as a simple question—how robust is a well-known finding?—quickly opens up a much larger set of issues about how research is done, how evidence is evaluated, and how scientific knowledge develops over time.

The project itself grew out of a conversation between Rolf Zwaan and Anita Eerland about a classic study in psychology: Loftus and Palmer (1974) The study showed that the way a question is phrased can influence what people remember about an event—a finding that has become a staple in psychology textbooks.

In this episode:

• Rolf talks with Anita Eerland (Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands) about how that initial conversation at the kitchen table developed into a large-scale, international research project that they are now leading.
• He also speaks with Massimo Grassi (University of Padua, Italy) about how he uses the Loftus study in his teaching, and what he expects from a project that revisits such a well-established finding.

Together, these conversations highlight how even familiar results can raise new questions when examined more closely—and how different researchers bring different perspectives to the same problem.

At the time of recording, the project is still in its early stages, with researchers joining from labs around the world and smaller teams forming to develop materials and plan the first studies.

This is where it starts.

Music written and played by Rolf Zwaan

Mentioned in the episode:

Target study:

Loftus, E. F., & Palmer, J. C. (1974). Reconstruction of Automobile Destruction: An Example of the Interaction between Language and Memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 13, 585-589.

Blog posts Rolf:

Memory, Misinformation, and the Need to Replicate https://rolfzwaan.substack.com/p/memory-misinformation-and-the-need

Memory, Misinformation, and Loftus and Palmer, Revisited https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-5371(74)80011-3 https://rolfzwaan.substack.com/p/memory-misinformation-and-loftus

Multilab studies by Massimo Grassi:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/25152459251379432

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-026-06654-0