Registered Report: A Replication Examining Occupational Experience and Performance on the Water-Level Task

Abstract

This is a registered report to directly replicate the primary finding in Hecht and Proffitt (1995). Hecht and Proffitt found that those with occupational experience handling liquid in containers performed worse at solving a water-level problem than those in occupations that did not require handling liquids. Shortly after, Vasta et al. (1997) found the opposite: Experience was associated with superior performance on the task. The conflicting findings and the small sample sizes in each study leave the relationship between experience and water-level-task performance uncertain. We addressed these concerns with a high-powered direct replication of Hecht and Proffitt with adults in Germany (N = 407). We failed to replicate Hecht and Proffitt’s results, finding that their study had less than 33% power to detect the small, nonsignificant difference that we observed between groups.