Both psychological experimentation and (cognitive) models are established approaches to evaluate the safety, ergonomics, and usability of Human-machine-interactions in real-life scenarios. However, they often excel at different stages in the scientific process. While psychological experiments are, for example, often used to critically assess the influence of cognitive processes in real-life environments, (cognitive) models are best used to inform how said processes influence or interact with the task environment. In real-life scenarios, the interplay between models and experimentation can be especially helpful due to the challenges that arise when evaluating these models, for example, the individual differences between humans. In this symposium, we bring together research from both experimental psychologists as well as (cognitive) modelers to foster an integrated evaluation of applied research environments that combines these methods. In the first talk, Biebl & Bengler will present their work on modeling intersection-related collision due to impaired visual ability. The second talk by Russwinkel will discuss anticipatory models for real-life decisions. The third talk summarizes an evidence accumulation model of a driving task. The fourth talk by Baumann et al. showcases several examples in modeling cooperation in traffic while highlighting the potential difficulties that can arise in the process. The last talk by Held et al. presents an ACT-R model, which attempts to explain an often-observed behavior of decreased driving performance in mundane driving environments and why this effect can be reversed by a low-effort mental task. The symposium will end with a moderated discussion between the speakers and the audience.

In experimental psychology, researchers usually aim at controlling all aspects of the experimental situation. For some research questions, however, it is necessary to give up part of that control and to increase the degrees of freedom on the participant side. In this symposium, we present different research projects using a variety of free-choice paradigms that provide new insights from and about participants’ decisions.

The aging population is disproportionally affected by pain and its consequences. Aging is known to affect neurobiological aspects of pain perception and has been associated with a deterioration of descending pain inhibitory mechanisms. However, little is known about whether cognitive pain modulatory mechanisms are preserved in the older age. Here, we present a series of studies on cognitive and situational factors influencing pain processing and the efficacy of cognitive pain modulation on the behavioral and (neuro)physiological level, focusing on underlying neural mechanisms to gain insight in the changes of the aging brain associated with pain processing and pain modulation.
Ana María González Roldán will start presenting data from several electrophysiological studies examining how aging and chronic pain may mutually contribute to enhanced pain perception. Further expanding on chronic pain, Joukje Oosterman will present a study on the underlying neural mechanism of loss of control over pain in aging, a predictor for future chronic pain. She will focus on age-related changes in function and EEG-connectivity in brain circuits involved in pain processing in relation to top-down cognitive modulation of pain control. Turning to distraction from pain as a top-down inhibitory process, Marian van der Meulen will discuss the relationship between functional connectivity during resting state and the distraction effect size in younger and older healthy adults. The role of executive functions and age-related cognitive decline in distraction from pain is addressed by Angelika Dierolf, presenting results of an EEG study. Finally, Sven Philipsen will discuss the impact of acute stress on the efficacy of distraction from pain in young and older adults.

Everyone knows what spatial compatibility effects are. But how can we use them to understand human cognition? This symposium brings together different (spatial) compatibility tasks in order to highlight how they are used in ongoing research. Our goal is to reflect on past research and inspire new ones utilizing one of psychology’s most
cherished phenomena.

In the present symposium, we plan to bring together different perspectives of how language influences goal-directed performance in mostly language unrelated tasks. Language influences are present either because of instructions, automatic reliance on or because of individual preferences. The contributors to this symposium will present work investigating language(s) as an instructional tool, language as help for or hindrance of cognitive flexibility, language(s) as performance-regulating tool in single subject and co-agents’ settings and address measurement of inner speech and its impact on basic cognitive performance. Given the recently revoked interest in the connection
between language, cognition and performance, this symposium aims at bringing together different research endeavours and stipulate discussions and cooperations among involved researchers.

The demonstrations feature live presentations of research tools. They begin with the poster sessions and take about 30 to 45 minutes. For some demonstrations, you will need to bring a laptop if you want to actively try out the tools. All demonstrations are repeated each day of the conference.
 

Demo PreReg: Preregistration in Psychology (Room B21)

Instructor: Lisa Spitzer, Leibniz Institute for Psychology (ZPID)

Website: https://prereg-psych.org/

Preregistering studies is an effective open science technique because it documents which (analytical) decisions were made prior to knowing the data. However, preregistration involves additional effort. ZPID, the Leibniz Institute for Psychology, fosters open science practices in psychology and related disciplines by providing researchers with tools and services at each stage of the scientific process. The Pre-Registration in Psychology platform (https://prereg-psych.org) provides information on preregistration, templates for creating your own preregistration, and the possibility to easily submit and publish to a repository. The platform is introduced in this demonstration.

Requirements: Bring a laptop, if you want to click along but just watching is fine.

 

Demo DataWiz: Research Data Documentation in Psychology Made Easy (Room B22)

Instructor: Katarina Blask, Leibniz Institute for Psychology (ZPID)

Website: https://datawiz2.dev.zpid.de/

In recent years, it became obvious that Open Science practices, like sharing research data in a (re)usable way means additional effort.  In particular, the quality-assured and sustainable provision of research data requires at least a minimum of data documentation. For optimal (re)use, typically three levels of data documentation or metadata are needed: (1) The basic resource description for collection management and resource discovery (Dublin Core); (2) the study-level documentation for research context and methods; and (3) the data-level documentation (codebooks or data dictionaries). 

In order to facilitate the laborious task of data documentation in psychology, a web-based tool - named DataWiz - was developed. The primary goal of the development project funded by the German Research Foundation was to lower the hurdle to do data documentation and to make it an integral part of common research practices in psychology. This demo aims to introduce the documentation module of DataWiz, which allows researchers to create a research data object containing the data and metadata in a non-proprietary format that can be uploaded to research data repositories.

Requirements: Bring a laptop, if you want to click along but just watching is fine.
 

Demo emoTouch Web: A Web-Based System for Continuous Response Studies and Audience Feedback in Live-, Lab- and Online Settings (Room A8)

Instructors: Christoph Louven, Carolin Scholle, Fabian Gehrs, Osnabrück University, Germany

Website: https://www.emoTouch.de

emoTouch Web is a new web-based system for designing, conducting, and evaluating continuous response real-time studies. It is based on web and network technologies and turns any modern smartphone, tablet, laptop and desktop computer into a flexible and reliable research and audience feedback tool in laboratory, online, and live settings. 

The interface of emoTouch studies is completely configurable and may contain an unlimited number of interface elements like one-dimensional sliders, 2D rating areas, category scales, checkboxes, buttons, images and text elements. Any audio or video files can also be integrated and will play from the participant's devices. The interface will dynamically adapt to the various screen sizes and ratios.  

Once a study is designed and started, it can be accessed just by scanning the study's QR Code. Subjects can even participate with the smartphones they carry in their pockets anyway ('Bring-Your-Own-Device', BYOD). This easily enables e.g. audience studies and feedback situations with hundreds of participants at the same time.

For the evaluation of the collected real-time data, emoTouch also contains coordinated tools for the graphical and numerical display and analysis of the data in longitudinal and cross-section.

emoTouch Web can be useful in all disciplines that deal with time-bound phenomena, such as music, theatre, dance, film, commercials, lectures, speeches or sport events. The system was developed at the musicology department of Osnabrück University (Germany) and is available free of charge for scientific purposes at https://www.emotouch.de.

The demonstration shows the possibilities of the system as well as the flow of a typical research process with emoTouch Web.

Requirements: For an active participation in a demo study, you will need a reliable wifi connection, a smartphone, tablet, or laptop. To actively try the system's researcher interface, you will need a laptop.
 

Demo PsychNotebook: Create, share, and export your code projects / teach coding (Room A6)

Instructor: Lars Braun, Leibniz Institute for Psychology (ZPID)

Website: https://www.psychnotebook.org/

PsychNotebook is a platform that offers statistical software such as RStudio and JupyterLab in an online environment. It is a tool to promote open science, in particular transparent and reproducible analyses, with a focus on teaching and collaboration.  

PsychNotebook supports teaching (and learning) code-based analyses by removing the hassle of installing or setting up software. In PsychNotebook you can create projects that contain scripts, data, instructions and more. You can share your projects with your students (copy access) or your collaborators (edit access) so that recipients work with exactly the same files in exactly the same software environment. Problems caused by working on different versions or in different directories are thus eliminated. Likewise projects can be easily archived and then imported again, resulting in the same scripts running in the same software environment as before. In this demonstration, I will introduce the features of PsychNotebook described above.

Requirements: None, maybe laptop, if you want to click along.
 

Demo PsychArchives: The disciplinary Repository for Psychological Science (Room A7)

Instructors: Yi-Hsiu Chen & Lea Gerhards, Leibniz Institute for Psychology (ZPID)

Website: https://psycharchives.org/

This demo will introduce PsychArchives, the disciplinary repository for psychological science. Recent years have seen the gradual but sustained growth in practices collectively known as ‘Open Science’. Part of this ongoing cultural change, which is well underway in Psychology, has been a growing advocacy for transparency and access to research output from across the entire research cycle. PsychArchives, which is maintained by the Leibniz Institute for Psychology (ZPID), provides the necessary sustainable infrastructure to achieve these goals. In PsychArchives, a variety of digital research objects, including articles, preprints, research data, code, supplements, preregistrations and tests, are safely stored and made accessible for the long term.

Requirements: None.

Can we detect regularities in our environment and adapt behavior accordingly in the absence of awareness? The demonstration of unconscious (implicit) cognition hinges on participants’ unawareness of stimuli, processes, or products involved in a task. The gold standard is to establish an indirect-without-direct effect, that is, an uninstructed effect of a stimulus on behavior under conditions that preclude any effect of the stimulus on a response according to explicit instructions. This symposium will bring together researchers working on new methods tailored to investigate the possibility of indirect-without-direct effects. The first two talks will present novel indirect and direct
measures for well-known experimental paradigms. Sascha Meyen will demonstrate a new test of reaction-time differences, which offers an improved indirect measure and provides evidence against unconscious processing in contextual cueing. In the area of priming, Thomas Schmidt will talk about a new theory of visibility focusing on the critical stimulus feature that generates the indirect effect and must be assessed in the direct measure. The final three talks will present new analyses for data that presumably show an indirect-without-direct pattern. These data often suffer from regression to the mean (RttM), defined as the statistical phenomenon that makes natural variation in repeated data look like real change. When direct measures are contaminated with measurement error, low awareness scores will tend to be followed by awareness scores closer to the mean. Itay Yaron will outline a solution to the RttM problem that uses a widely applicable bootstrapping algorithm based only on a small set of assumptions. Simone Malejka will present a method of true-score estimation based on the Bayesian principle of shrinkage, which corrects noisy data and can solve RttM and related measurement biases. Lastly, Zoltan Dienes will demonstrate how Bayes factors can provide evidence for (or against) one’s theory in the presence of measurement error by testing an interval null hypothesis of zero awareness in post-hoc trial selection.

In experimental psychology, researchers usually aim at controlling all aspects of the experimental situation. For some research questions, however, it is necessary to give up part of that control and to increase the degrees of freedom on the participant side. In this symposium, we present different research projects using a variety of free-choice paradigms that provide new insights from and about participants’ decisions.

The term sound symbolism refers to the phenomenon that word form (e.g., the phonemes of which a word consists) and word meaning are non-arbitrarily related. For example, specific vowels have been shown to be associated with size, so that participants typically choose the word MIL (vs. MAL) to denote a small (vs. large) object (e.g., Sapir, 1929). Sound-symbolism has been shown across many of the world’s major spoken languages as well as many sign languages. The present symposium will comprise talks that span several research areas in sound symbolism, comparing different semantic dimensions, different languages, and different psychological processes. First, cross-linguistic similarities in the association between phonemes and valence (Talk 1, Körner) as well as cross-linguistic differences in sound symbolic associations for size (Talk 2, Ćwiek) will be discussed. Additionally, the contribution of articulatory compared to acoustic properties of phonemes are examined by showing that valence sound symbolism partially relies on articulation (Talk 1, Körner), while frequently, both articulatory and acoustic features interact (Talk 3, Winter). Lastly, different methods for examining sound symbolism in the lab are discussed with an emphasis on unrestricted tasks, such as asking participants to generate pseudo-words to prevent (Talk 4, Rummer). Together with the talks, the integrative discussion will facilitate a deeper understanding of how word form and meaning are related and which psychological processes drive sound symbolism. Ultimately, words reflect psychological functions and research on sound symbolism can reveal how the human mind uses ecological and psychological associations to represent meaning.

Core capacities of the mind like reasoning and decision making are exercised as responses to specific information-processing tasks. It is often assumed that these responses are strategic, taking into account resource limitations and trade-offs between the costs and quality of information-processing mechanisms. Yet, when the input information is missing, search must become part of the mind’s strategic response. This symposium features two tasks, inductive inferences and decisions under uncertainty, to highlight the strategic nature of information search (sampling). Marlene Hecht shows that if people consult their social network to make uncertain inferences, their search through the network is best described as sequential, limited, and less impactful for online contacts. Kevin Tiede presents work indicating that people increase their sampling effort to alleviate informational imbalances between described and experienced choice options. Linus Hof and Mikhail Spektor expand the symposium’s view on decisions from experience, demonstrating, for example, how sampling and integration strategies can interact to produce distinct choice patterns and psychoeconomic profiles. Doron Cohen concludes by presenting a simplified drift diffusion model. He uses the model to reconsider basic assumptions of sequential sampling approaches, which treat
information search as an evidence accumulation process. As a whole, the collection of talks suggests that our explanations of cognitive capacities and the phenomena they produce can be improved by postulating how these capacities implement a strategic information search.

Everyone knows what spatial compatibility effects are. But how can we use them to understand human cognition? This symposium brings together different (spatial) compatibility tasks in order to highlight how they are used in ongoing research. Our goal is to reflect on past research and inspire new ones utilizing one of psychology’s most cherished phenomena.