Research

This working group studies fundamental processes associated with health behaviour and behaviour change. Domains of interest include eating, drinking, stress, trichotillomania, social isolation, sustainable behaviour, and climate anxiety. Our work ranges from establishing the cognitive, affective, and behavioural processes that underlie health behaviour and behaviour change to developing assessment and intervention tools informed by both theory and empirical evidence. Themes central to our work include situated cognition, goal pursuit, and habitual behaviour. We develop digital tools related to assessment and intervention. We often work with partners in industry and the third sector, and also have a strong interdisciplinary orientation, working with collaborators in a variety of other disciplines, such as public health, nutrition, and computer science.

Leads: Dr Esther K. Papies and Prof. Lawrence W. Barsalou

This working group creates open learning materials and studies meta-scientific aspects of the research process. Core activities of the group are the PsyTeachR online book series for teaching reproducible research (co-led by the Pedagogy Centre) and the Coding Club for developing computational skills in a fun way. Members work with or advise a variety of partners, such as the UK Reproducibility Network, ORCiD, UKRIO, and the American Psychological Association.

Lead: Lisa DeBruine

This working group investigates novel hierarchical statistical models combining analytical work, simulation studies and applications to different domains of cognitive psychology and neuroscience (e.g., decision making, learning and memory, theory of mind). Examples are the development of Bayesian hierarchical models, hierarchical linear models with mixed effects and other model generalizations. The main goal is to establish new quantitative methods that bridge gaps between existing approaches or expand statistical models in terms of generalizability and robustness. A primary effort is to make these methods and tools open-access by documenting source code, packages and data on open-access repositories (e.g., OSF, GitHub).  

Leads: Martin Lages and Dale Barr

This working group is concerned with (primarily) basic research in the area of language comprehension and production, from word-level (lexical and phonological) processing to processing at the sentence and even discourse level. Research on language processing has spearheaded important methodological developments in both design and analysis of psychological experiments in general. For instance, psycholinguists were among the first to identify the problem of simultaneous generalization of findings to both the participant and the item populations that experiments typically draw from, leading to the wide adoption of generalized linear mixed effects modelling techniques in recent years, which increasingly find applications in other areas of psychology as well. The language methods group considers a wide variety of interdisciplinary methodological approaches to language research, ranging from machine learning techniques in computational linguistics to behavioural (e.g., priming, eye-tracking) and neuroscientific methods (e.g., EEG, fMRI, MEG).

Leads: Christoph Scheepers and Sara Sereno