Avoidance learning encompasses the acquisition of behaviours that enable individuals to evade or withdraw from potentially harmful stimuli, prior to their occurrence. Maladaptive avoidance is a crucial feature of anxiety and trauma-related disorders. In biological and clinical settings, avoidance behaviours usually involve uninstructed, idiosyncratic and complex motor actions...
The Deese/Roediger/McDermott (DRM) illusion is one of the most widely used methods for studying false memory. Early studies provided normed false recall and false recognition data for DRM lists, where recognition is preceded by prior recall tests, and reported regression analyses that revealed backward associative strength (BAS) as one of the strongest predictors of false memory...
When studying spontaneous or learned emotional responses to social stimuli, research has traditionally relied on simplified stimuli repeatedly presented on a computer screen in standardized laboratory environments. While these studies have provided important insights into social perception and cognition, their restricted ecological validity may impede the extrapolation of...
To examine how individual differences in language skills affect language processing, it is essential to have good-quality tests that can assess such individual differences accurately. This study introduces a dictation test and a vocabulary knowledge test in Chinese, which aim to measure lexical expertise in proficient Chinese language users like university students. The...
The relationship between sleep quality, circadian rhythms, and REM sleep has not been deliberately investigated in previous scientific reports. Here, we aim to examine the associations between these factors by specifically focusing on the temporal dynamics of REM sleep in all night records, as well as to provide a new, objective, EEG-derived chronotype indicator. To achieve those...
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a widely used tool in the field of clinical and cognitive neuroscience. To exploit its excellent temporal properties, TMS usually relies on triggerbox devices, which temporize the delivery of magnetic pulses according to the paradigm requirements. However, a main limitation of most of the widely used triggerbox devices is that they rely...
The Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) has become one of the most frequently employed laboratory stressors in human studies over the past decades. Several TSST adaptations for the presentation in virtual reality (VR) have been introduced and evaluated recently. Here, we describe a freely available version, the Open TSST-VR. In two independent studies, we evaluated subjective...
Mixture models for visual working memory tasks using continuous report recall are highly popular measurement models in visual working memory research. Yet, efficient and easy-to-implement hierarchical Bayesian estimation procedures that flexibly enable group or condition comparisons are scarce. Specifically, most software packages implementing mixture models have used maximum...
Norming studies on picture naming usually identify different correct names for each picture and provide more information on the dominant name (i.e., the most frequently produced name of a given picture) or weighted values based on all the names. The current study is among the first attempts to establish psycholinguistic norms for both the dominant and secondary names of pictures...
The human voice is remarkably versatile and can vary greatly in sound depending on how it is used. An increasing number of studies have addressed the differences and similarities between the singing and the speaking voice. However, finding adequate stimuli material that is at the same time controlled and ecologically valid is challenging, and most datasets lack variability in...
Traditional average-based metrics have long been considered the gold standard in behavioral and brain research. However, recent advances emphasize the importance of examining the dispersion around the mean to uncover the nuances of individual differences and challenge simplistic assumptions. Thus, the study of variability is becoming increasingly central across a wide range of...
Iconicity, understood as a resemblance relationship between meaning and form, is an important variable that has important psycholinguistic effects in lexical processing and language learning across modalities of language. With the growing interest in iconicity, clear operationalizations in terms of the different ways in which iconicity is construed and measured are critical for...
We present SingleMALD, a large-scale auditory lexical decision study in English with a fully crossed design. SingleMALD is freely available and includes over 2 million trials in which 40 native speakers of English responded to over 26,000 different words and over 9000 different pseudowords, each in 67 balanced sessions. SingleMALD features a large number of responses per stimulus...
To evaluate model fit in structural equation modeling, researchers commonly compare fit indices against fixed cutoff values (e.g., CFI ≥ .950). However, methodologists have cautioned against overgeneralizing cutoffs, highlighting that cutoffs permit valid judgments of model fit only in empirical settings similar to the simulation scenarios from which these cutoffs originate. This...
The Bayes factor is often proposed as a superior replacement to p values in testing null hypotheses for various reasons, with the availability of many user-friendly and easily accessible statistical software tools facilitating the use of Bayesian tests. Meanwhile, Bayes factor design analysis (BFDA), the counterpart of power analysis, is also proposed to ensure the maximum...
The ability to perceive others’ emotions and one’s own interoceptive states has been the subject of extensive research. Very little work, however, has investigated the ability to recognise others’ interoceptive states, such as whether an individual is feeling breathless, nauseated, or fatigued. This is likely owing to the dearth of stimuli available for use in research studies...
Visually observing a touch quickly reveals who is being touched, how it might feel, and the broader social or emotional context, shaping our interpretation of such interactions. Investigating these dimensions is essential for understanding how tactile experiences are processed individually and how we empathise with observed sensations in others. Here, we expand available...
Deep learning methods have significantly advanced the field of gaze estimation, yet the development of these algorithms is often hindered by a lack of appropriate publicly accessible training datasets. Moreover, models trained on the few available datasets often fail to generalize to new datasets due to both discrepancies in hardware and biological diversity among subjects. To...
Bayesian inference is becoming an increasingly popular framework for statistics in the behavioral sciences. However, its application is hampered by its computational intractability – almost all Bayesian analyses require a form of approximation. While some of these approximate inference algorithms, such as Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC), have become well known throughout the...
In computerized adaptive testing (CAT), item parameter estimates derived from calibration studies are considered to be known and are used as fixed values for adaptive item selection and ability estimation. This is not completely accurate because these item parameter estimates contain a certain degree of error. If this error is random, the typical CAT procedure leads to standard...
Intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) are a commonly used metric in test–retest reliability research to assess a measure’s ability to quantify systematic between-subject differences. However, estimates of between-subject differences are also influenced by factors including within-subject variability, random errors, and measurement bias. Here, we use data collected from a...
Social sciences of all kinds are interested in latent variables, their measurement, and how they differ between groups. The present study argues the importance of analyzing mean differences between groups using the latent variable approach. Using an open-access repository of widely applied personality questionnaires (N = 999,033), we evaluate the extent to which the commonly used...
The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve and its corresponding (partial) area under the curve (AUC) are frequently used statistical tools in psychological research to assess the discriminability of a test, method, intervention, or procedure. In this paper, we provide a tutorial on conducting simulation-based power analyses for ROC curve and (p)AUC analyses in R. We also...
Location-scale models in the field of meta-analysis allow researchers to simultaneously study the influence of moderator variables on the mean (location) and variance (scale) of the distribution of true effects. However, the increased complexity of such models can make model fitting challenging. Moreover, the statistical properties of the estimation and inference methods for such...