Since the fastest qualifiers get the middle lanes, even if there was no advantage of being there, one would expect the runners in those lanes to perform significantly better than runners in the outer lanes, just because the runners being put in the middle are faster to begin with.
For a meaningful study, you would need to compare races run with the fastest qualifiers in the middle, against races run with qualifiers put in random lanes. Even then, it wouldn’t prove or disprove a psychological effect, since there could be a real physical reason that one lane was better than the other (sharper turns or worn out surface in the first lane, for example).