This year we got to hold our annual Symposium on Internet-based methods at the meeting of the Society for Computation in Psychology (SCiP) in Denver, Colorado. Friends and colleagues joined us in our session to share their insights on data collection, study creation and general methodology.🛠️
Erin Buchanan (top left), Chris Wolfe (top right), Anni Tave Overlander (middle left), Yury Shevchenko (bottom left) and Ulf-Dietrich Reips (foreground) were speakers at the symposium. Prof. emeritus Gary McClelland added a brilliant and witty discussion of all talks at the end to tie everything together.
We are happy and grateful to have been able to attend the satellite conference SCiP as well as the lagrer Meeting of the Psychonomic Society. #psynom25 We got to attend many thought-provoking talks and spoke to inspiring researchers. ✨
Apart from the conferences, we had to do some extra-curriculars as well, of course. Yury and Anni got to see a wrestling show at the Ball Arena and the whole team was invited to a lovely soirée in a downtown Denver loft. 🍷
The annual conferences typically take place in the week leading up to Thanksgiving, so we’d like to take this opportunity to give thanks to everyone who is involved in our research and extra-curriculars. We had a great time at SCiP, Psychonomics and also SJDM (Society for Judgement and Decision Making) and very much look forward to seeing known and new faces at next year’s events! 🍾⛵
The Konstanz biannual Summer School on Internet-based Data Collection has now succesfully completed its 6th iteration! 😍 Our team was happy to welcome about fourty students from Bachelor to postdoctoral levels from Konstanz and many other universities as well as different countries from inside and outside of Europe. Two participants came from as far as California!
Like in the previous years, our instructors gave their all to provide participants with essentials, lessons and updates on ever-changing trends from 30 years of iScience and cutting-edge insights from current research. Our orga team made sure that everything ran smoothly behind the scences. We wish to thank Michael Birnbaum (California) and Mario Callegaro (UK) for coming in as international instructors and experts. 💐 From Konstanz, Ulf-Dietrich Reips and Yury Shevchenko shared their experience and expertise in online and mobile research with a cameo session from Anni Tave Overlander. 💻📱The international office’s director Johannes Dingler gave a wonderful introduction about the university.
We also greatly appreciate our secretary Silke Bengel for her organizational efforts and our student assistants Anne Landenberger, Bruce Putz, Deniz Ertan, and Lea Spajic for making sure people knew where to go, how to go there, and always had a coffee to do it! They say it takes a village – in this case it takes a great team. 🫰🏾
Lastly, a huge thanks goes to our participants for all their enthusiasm, great questions and thirst for knowledge. We had a great time last week and we hope everyone else did, too! You can find more impressions on Instagram @isciencegroup , Facebook etc. and below here as well!
Maria Rosa Miccoli started her Ph.D. with the iscience group in 2020 and has been a valued member of the team ever since. We are therefore incredibly proud to call her Dr. Miccoli as of July 2025!
When she finished the final presentation of her thesis entitled “Investigating time as a behavioral resource via Internet-based research”, she was greeted with a hat that was still not tall enough to hold all her research ideas.
We wish Dr. Miccoli all the best for her future endeavors and a great start into her advanced scientific career!💪🏾
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 – co-supervised by Prof. Reips).
Lilly Roth during her talk, Dietmar Saupe on the right
Prof. Saupe gave a thought-provoking talk on computational models of how humans use Likert scales to rate visual objects (e.g. images or videos) and how the information from this type of scale might optimally be used. 💪🏾 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 new data from an ongoing experiment 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 paper was published in a registered report, now data collection is ongoing. Stay tuned! ✨
We greatly appreciate our speakers as well as everyone who joined the (post-)colloquium in person and online! 🍾
