The Journal of Perceptual Imaging publishes papers on topics such as cognitive effects, perception, and imaging. From time to time it also publishes special issues. In a special issue on Remote Research in the Perceptional and Cognitive Sciences an article on the influence of facial cues in avatars was published by iscience team member Yury Shevchenko and Ulf-Dietrich Reips, along with their former Master student Jakob Heisenstein, whose Master thesis was the basis for the piece. More recently, in February 2025, Maria Rosa Miccoli and Ulf-Dietrich Reips published an article on exact versus conceptual replication in the same journal!

You can find the articles below – we highly reccommend you check them out!

Shevchenko, Y., Heisenstein, J., & Reips, U.-D. (2024). How do avatars make a positive impression: The effect of facial cues on avatar evaluation. Journal of Perceptual Imaging, 7, 1–16. https://doi.org/10.2352/j.percept.imaging.2024.7.000406

Miccoli, M. R., & Reips, U.-D. (2025). Exact versus conceptual replication: Internet-based research investigating the replicability of cognitive effects. Journal of Perceptual Imaging, 7. https://doi.org/10.2352/j.percept.imaging.2025.7.000408

The PANDOTA Ph.D. grant from University of Constance is targetted towards first-year Ph.D. candidates from natural science disciplines. The aim is to help students to get started in their academic carreers and get settled in the scientific community. It is quite competitive as it is only awarded to up to 12 candidates each year.

We are happy to announce that this year’s psychology grant was awarded to iscience team member Anni – congratulations! The great challenge now will be to figure out how to spend the money and make the most of it.

After going through a preregistration and review process with the new and convincing peer community in (PCI), two new articles are in press in JEP:LMC and Royal Society Open Science!

Congratulations to doctoral students Lilly Roth and Annika Tave Overlander as well as former Bachelor and Master student John Caffier in getting these articles from our eSNARC project published along with their mentors, supervisors, and collaborators!

The two articles are:

Roth, L., Caffier, J., Reips, U.-D., Cipora, K., Braun, A., & Nuerk, H.-C. (in press). True colors SNARCing: Semantic number processing is highly automatic. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.
More information can be found here: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/aeyn8.

Roth, L., Caffier, J., Reips, U.-D., Nuerk, H.-C., Overlander, A. T., & Cipora, K. (2025). One and only SNARC? Spatial-Numerical Associations are not fully flexible and depend on both relative and absolute number magnitude. Royal Society Open Science. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.241585.
More information can be found here: https://osf.io/ajqpk.

We are thrilled to welcome Tim Angelike to the iScience team! We first crossed paths at the 2023 Psychonomic Society meeting, affiliated with SCIP, in San Francisco, where we had some fascinating discussions on shared research interests—particularly around randomness. The synergy between his work and our team’s focus was clear from the start. The inspiring nature of these conversations was further highlighted during his talk about randomness in human-generated numbers at our university.

As an avid user of internet-based research methods (just like us! ), Dr. Angelike brings valuable expertise to the table, and we’re excited to collaborate and learn from each other. We’re sure he will continue to hone those skills here and push the boundaries of online data collection.

Here’s to many exciting projects and breakthroughs ahead!