WIKIMEDIA, GALLO SPERO LLPThe Office of Research Integrity (ORI) has this week (March 4) reprimanded Adam Savine, a former graduate student in psychology at Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL) for falsifying data in 3 published papers and 6 abstracts submitted to conferences, reported Retraction Watch.

Investigators found that Savine massaged data in a 2012 paper in Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience, which investigated the effects of motivational incentives on cognitive control, or the psychological and neural mechanisms by which people actively maintain information—such as goals, instructions, or prior events— and use it to guide their behavior. The paper is yet to be cited, according to ISI Web of Knowledge.

According to the report, he also tweaked figures in a 2012 study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, which has been cited 3 times. The figures pertain to individual differences in prospective memory monitoring, or the ability retrieve and execute future goals.

Finally, Savine was found guilty of mislabeling brain images in a 2010 Journal of Neuroscience paper to show that monetary bonuses are associated with the activation of reward-related brain regions and the subversion of cognitive control. The paper has been cited 31 times.

Savine, who had a spell at the University of Michigan before leaving last fall, has agreed that the senior authors on the papers will request their retraction or correction. He will be supervised for 3 years for any Public Health Service-funded research.