Psychoblog

Dear All,

We invite you to our next Leibniz ScienceCampus Colloquium on Thursday, Dec. 6^th, at 4.15 p.m. in room 1.134 at the GEMI, Goßlerstraße 14:

Improving Social Perception Research Through Open Science Initiatives
Benedict C Jones (University of Glasgow)

Psychological science suffers from many of the same problems as other biological sciences. For example, low power, together with publication bias, means that a high proportion of published results are likely to be false positives. Additionally, a lack of diversity in both study populations and researchers limits the generalizability of published effects. My talk will highlight these issues in relation to research on social perception of faces. More importantly, I will also describe our lab’s recent work that has used open science initiatives to address these challenges. These initiatives include large-scale, world-wide multi-lab collaborations, registered reports, and the use of data-driven, rather than theory-driven, approaches to understanding how we evaluate faces.

If you are interested in meeting Benedict during his visit, please contact Tanja Gerlach (gerlach@uni-goettingen.de).

The colloquium dinner will be on Thursday at 6.30 p.m. in the restaurant Fellini, Groner-Tor-Straße 28. To join the dinner, please send me an email until Monday, Dec 3^rd.

With best regards

Christian Schloegl

Dear all,

this is a quick reminder that András Zsidó will give a talk at the ANaP lab colloquium tonight at 6 pm, room 1.110 at the Gemi.  The talk is about “The effects of threatening stimuli on visual search performance” (Abstract below).

We are looking forward to seeing you there.

Best regards,
Ronja Demel

Abstract: A large body of research suggests that threatening stimuli with evolutionary history have an advantage in visual processing. However, recent evidence indicates that modern threatening stimuli can have the same effect. Nonetheless, the results are often mixed. I will argue that previous studies exploring the highlighted processing of threatening cues tended to neglect an important factor, namely the arousal level of the emotionally charged stimuli. Furthermore, the classical visual search task used in the aforementioned studies had been met with criticism. I will present some of our experiments and two new visual search tasks that could serve as appropriate tools for future research. With the help of these, we will try to entangle the confounding results to arrive at a plausible explanation regarding the basics of threat detection.