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: