It is no secret that the Annual Meeting of the Society for Computation in Psychology (SCiP) and the Psychonomic Society as well as Judgment and Decision Making (JDM) are conference highlights for the iscience team. This year, they were held in the heart of New York City and we were proud to present our current research in the form of several presentations as well as posters. 📊

The team got to (re)connect with fellow researchers from the field and find new opportunities for future collaborations. We enjoyed hearing about the cutting edge of current developments immensly and were impressed by many of the presented works.

This New York style conference lunch was attended by (from left) head of the iscience team Ulf-Dietrich Reips, G*Power creator and Wilhelm-Wundt medal winner Edgar Erdfelder, Maria Rosa Miccoli, Yury Shevchenko, Annika Tave Overlander (three members of isceince), Christopher R. Wolfe, SCiP Organizer Erin Buchanan and SCiP Keynote speaker James Pennebaker. We look forward to the next time!🧠

The semester is coming to an end and just in time for the lecture-free summer, the iScience group got to welcome Alvaro Chacon as a visiting researcher from Chile. Alvaro studies algorithm aversion and held an inspiring talk at the research colloquium of the group (“FoKo”).

Everyone at the talk felt hungry for more learning and good scientific conversations, so we continued with a post-FoKo at L’Osteria in Konstanz! 🍕
Gracias, Alvaro, for staying with us this week and inspiring the group with new ideas on algorithms and continuing to learn.

Dr. Tim Angelike from the Psychology Department at University of Düsseldorf held a very well attended research talk on May 17th in our iScience research colloquium. His research focuses on how humans generate random numbers and what biases they succumb to. You can find the abstract of his talk below.

Definitely not random: The inspiring conversation that the iscience group as well as the students got to have with Dr. Angelike (second from right) after the talk! ✨

Abstract: Several fields of psychological research have investigated the reasons why people have difficulty behaving randomly. This is often investigated with the so-called random number generation (RNG) task. In this task, participants are asked to generate a sequence of numbers that is as random as possible. The task is often used as a test of executive functioning in cognitive and clinical psychology. Previous studies have used various measures from psychological research, computer science, and mathematics to quantify the randomness of the generated sequences or the lack thereof. However, the use of a plethora of measures has been criticized by researchers for being subjective and not allowing for comparisons between studies. The first study presented here is the first comprehensive, comparative investigation of different methods for quantifying randomness. In a second investigation, a formal model of the systematic behaviors underlying the generation of random sequences in humans was modified and extended. This approach allows for the simultaneous estimation of different systematic biases that people show when trying to generate random sequences. This study showed that the newly proposed model is better able to describe human behavior than the original model. Finally, a simulation study is presented in which a new measure of randomness based on algorithmic complexity theory promising to detect any kind of regularity in a sequence is assessed regarding its usefulness for serving as a universal measure of randomness for the analysis of human-generated sequences.

👏🏻 Thanks to tutors Lisa Hafner, Anne-Sophie Landenberger, Maurin Schmidt and Marc Wiedmann this winter semester’s weekly lecture and exercise by Prof. Reips on Methods and History of Psychology sailed smoothly in fully returned to face-to-face teaching mode. Attendance was very high throughout the semester, as reflected in higher than average grades in the final exam.

After several years as tutors, Lisa and Marc will now move on, as they have finished their Master’s degrees. We are thankful for their diligent tutoring and heartfelt assistance. Good luck and may the methods force be with you!

Below a picture of the semester end meeting between Prof. Reips and the tutors, reflecting over coffee on the previous months. Thanks to the team for making iScience teaching a great learning and exchange experience. See you next winter semester again 😊