Low‐cost devices have widened the use of multimodal data in experiments providing a more complete picture of behavioural effects. However, the accurate collection and combination of multimodal and behavioural data in a manner that enables reproducibility is challenging and often requires researchers to refine their approaches. This paper presents a direct replication of a multimodal wordlist experiment. Specifically, we use a low‐cost Emotiv EPOC® to acquire electrophysiological measures of brain activity to investigate whether retrieval during learning facilitates the encoding of subsequent learning as measured by performance on recall tests and reflected by changes in alpha wave oscillations. Behavioural results of the wordlist experiment were replicated, but physiological results were not. We conclude the paper by highlighting the challenges faced in terms of replicating the previous work and in attempting to facilitate the reproducibility of our own experiment.

This work has been partially supported by RecerCaixa (CoT project) and the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under MDM‐2015‐0502, TIN2014‐53199‐C3‐3‐R, TIN2017‐85179‐C3‐3‐R.