Research

In short, our research concerns affect (feeling) and cognition (thinking) in children and adults. The human mind is incredibly complex, and its development during childhood even more so. Psychological scientists often divide the mind up into building blocks like “attention” and “short-term memory”. This allows us to dig deeply into one specific topic, and to develop models of how it works. While this is incredibly important for our understanding of the mind, it is also important to occasionally zoom out to investigate how all the different building blocks interact with each other.

We like to constantly zoom in and out of topics. Our main interest is how children develop cognitive and affective traits, and how these impact each other. On the cognitive end, we investigate how people organise their search (examples: Benjamins* & Dalmaijer* et al., 2019; Dalmaijer* & Li* et al., 2018; and Dalmaijer et al., 2015), and how short-term memories come to be encoded (e.g. Edwin’s PhD thesis). On the affective end, we use eye movement recordings to research how humans process threatening (Armstrong et al., 2022; Mulckhuse & Dalmaijer, 2015) or disgusting information (Dalmaijer et al., 2021; Nord* & Dalmaijer* et al., 2021). While this may seems a bit disjointed, no single psychological trait can be understood in isolation. Hence, we build on our basic work with research on how constellations of traits come to be, how they shape each other, and how they are impacted by the environment (Dalmaijer et al., 2021).

To support our own research and that of the wider scientific community, we do quite a bit of methodological work. For example, we developed software for cognitive assessments (Bignardi et al., 2020 and Dalmaijer et al., 2015), easy eye tracking in Python (Dalmaijer et al., 2014), and attention tracking in web-based experiments (Anwyl-Irvine et al., 2021). We have also written on timing in online experiments (Anwyl-Irvine et al., 2021), statistical power in cluster analyses (Dalmaijer et al., 2022), and a on using magnetoencephalography (MEG) in children (Dalmaijer et al., 2021). Finally, we published a textbook on Python programming for experimental psychologists (Dalmaijer, 2015).

The above is just a general description with a few examples. Below, you can find links to more specific topics, a list of all our scientific publications, and blog posts on our work.

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Publications

You can find a list of peer-reviewed work on our publications page.

Blog posts on our work

Because scientific articles are a bit dense, we try to write more easily digestible summaries on our blog. Please find a sampling below:

Thomas Hawkins, an MSc by Research student in the lab, gave a talk at the 1st Dutch Pupillometry Symposium today.
This is a quick guide for students who are unsure about how to email at uni. (Or you might have
Recently, Edwin spoke at the Bristol Neuroscience Showcase. The talk focussed on disgust: how it works, how it doesn't habituate,
A new paper claims that APOE ε4 carriers, a group previously described as having poorer long-term memory, actually have better
We just published an article in Current Psychology on the direct and indirect relations between socioeconomic status and various developmental
A clash between two major figures in cognitive neuroscience came to a head yesterday, and it got a bit ugly.
Via Twitter, Dennis Hernaus (@hernaus_tweets) contacted me about my MPy150 library for BioPac's MP150 system (read this older blog post
Testing children is less easy than testing adults, primarily because they lack the social inhibition to tell psychological researchers to
In cognitive neuroscience, we're interested in what guides human attention. We distinguish between influences from high-level cognition (e.g. current goals),
Tobii is a major player in the eye-tracking world, selling devices to customers in business and science. Today, Tobii has

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