At the kick-off of this semester’s research colloquium (FoKo), the iscience team was happy to welcome esteemed speakers Dietmar Saupe (Prof. emeritus from University of Konstanz) and Lilly Roth (Ph.D. candidate from University of Tuebingen).

Prof. Saupe gave a thought-provoking talk on how humans use Likert Scales to rate different objects (e.g. images or videos) and how this type of scale might contain more information when the data is handled properly. 💪🏾He introduced an innovative model to show the information that could otherwise get lost between the lines – of whole numbers, that is. 📊

After that, Lilly Roth showed brand new data from an ongoing study investigating the SNARC effect, denominating the spatial-numerical association of response codes between the left and right. The SNARC effect occurs as humans typically respond to small numbers faster when they need to respond with their left and vice versa with large numbers on the right. However, it is not clear whether this effect is truely continuous (i.e. the larger the more right) or whether it may be more categorical depending on the task (i.e. humans have a subjective boundary between small and large numbers). 🤔 The data collection is ongoing and they will be published in a registered report in the future. Stay tuned! ✨

We greatly appreciate our speakers as well as everyone who joined the (post-)colloquium in person and online! 🍾