-
Preprints Are All You Need
(2025)
SIPS 2025, Budapest.
Summary
“Preprints”—scholarly manuscripts not yet captured by the publication industry—have greatly facilitated science communication speed and accessibility. Yet, the “intellectual perestroika” of online prepublications (Harnad, 1990) hasn’t been realized: Preprints continue to be treated as less authoritative versions of their “published” counterparts. Moreover, the services that underlie this gap in perceived authoritativeness—editorship, peer-review, publicizing, discovery, etc.—can be provided for preprints but commonly aren’t, and are provided by academics but incorrectly credited to the publishing industry. Why? To answer, we will conduct thematic discussions to identify and examine factors that hinder the appeal and adoption of preprints as the primary objects of scholarly communication. We will then develop methods for overcoming these obstacles. By doing so we hope to move towards Harnad’s (1998) vision of the “final state toward which the learned journal literature is evolving”: Preprints are all we need.
-
Transparent industry-academia collaborations for understanding life online and in virtual worlds
(2025)
Virtual Worlds and Well-being: Setting the Research Agenda, EU Joint Research Centre (online).
Summary
Reproducibility, transparency, and team science are key buzzwords guiding many research efforts. How can we best organize our workflows to reach these goals? Common roadblocks involve heterogeneous tools that undermine reproducibility; workflows that actively work against transparency and seamless sharing of materials; and version control practices that hinder sharing knowledge among team members. In this session, I outline a vision for remedying this state of confusion and suffering---a workflow that makes use of modern, widely applicable, and robust tools that seamlessly integrate with collaborators' filesystems. We will discuss how our current practices compare to this vision, what we can learn from them, and how we can best move toward a shared vision of workflows that provide value to researchers without unduly taxing their already limited resources.
-
Digital Durkheim: Open Scholarship for Social Sciences and Humanities, Tilburg University.
Summary
Reproducibility, transparency, and team science are key buzzwords guiding many research efforts. How can we best organize our workflows to reach these goals? Common roadblocks involve heterogeneous tools that undermine reproducibility; workflows that actively work against transparency and seamless sharing of materials; and version control practices that hinder sharing knowledge among team members. In this session, I outline a vision for remedying this state of confusion and suffering---a workflow that makes use of modern, widely applicable, and robust tools that seamlessly integrate with collaborators' filesystems. We will discuss how our current practices compare to this vision, what we can learn from them, and how we can best move toward a shared vision of workflows that provide value to researchers without unduly taxing their already limited resources.
-
Princeton University.
Summary
Science relies on software. Yet, we don't sufficiently make use of established tools for writing, collaborating on, and validating the software that underlies our empirical claims. Negative consequences of this blind spot manifest most saliently when data analyses go wrong, but also in severe inefficiencies in education, collaboration, knowledge sharing, and reproducibility. I outline ways in which our haphazard approach to software hinders the process of scientific discovery, and, perhaps more importantly, what we can do about it. A professional attitude, use of established tools for version control, collaboration, testing, and documenting, and an appreciation for software's importance to science is central in our quest for reliable, valid, and cumulative science.
-
Digital risks and harms: from social media to artificial intelligence
(2025)
Office for Product Safety and Standards, London, UK.
Summary
In this invited talk for the UK's Office for Product Safety and Standards I discussed some challenges (but also opportunities) in understanding the rapidly evolving digital technology landscape from a psychologist's perspective.
-
Understanding psychological heterogeneity with bayesian hierarchical models
(2025)
Tilburg, NL.
Summary
As psychologists' shift their focus from "the average person" to fundamental heterogeneity in psychological phenomena, much work remains to be done in developing effective models, descriptions, and reporting practices that maximize investigations' impact on theory development. Our goal is to contribute to that work. We describe and illustrate the use of numerical and graphical descriptions of heterogeneity that (1) Go beyond model parameters to describe heterogeneity in clear and actionable terms, and (2) Take uncertainty in model parameters into account.
-
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Remote).
Summary
Advances in experimental, data collection, and analysis methods have brought population variability in psychological phenomena to the fore. Yet, current practices for interpreting such heterogeneity do not appropriately treat the uncertainty inevitable in any statistical summary. Heterogeneity is best thought of as a distribution of features with a mean (average person's effect) and variance (between-person differences). This expected heterogeneity distribution can be further summarized e.g. as a heterogeneity interval (Bolger et al., 2019). However, because empirical studies estimate the underlying mean and variance parameters with uncertainty, the expected distribution and interval will underestimate the actual range of plausible effects in the population. Using Bayesian hierarchical models, and with the aid of empirical datasets from social and cognitive psychology, we provide a walk-through of effective heterogeneity reporting and display tools that appropriately convey measures of uncertainty. We cover interval, proportion, and ratio measures of heterogeneity and their estimation and interpretation. These tools can be a spur to theory building, allowing researchers to widen their focus from population averages to population heterogeneity in psychological phenomena.
-
StanCon, Oxford, UK.
Summary
We discuss computational and graphical probabilistic methods for assessing and communicating causal effect heterogeneity. The methods we discuss are especially timely as psychological research is placing increasing emphasis on variation among individuals' effects. Established practices in studying heterogeneity predominantly focus on point estimates and ignore uncertainties, and thereby substitute robust inferences with guesses based on expectations. We provide a walk-through of effective heterogeneity reporting and display tools that appropriately convey measures of uncertainty using Bayesian hierarchical models. We illustrate the concepts and computations behind four heterogeneity metrics based on the posterior distribution of the effects' heterogeneity distribution. These tools are enabled by (1) modern Bayesian methods that return random draws from models' multivariate posterior distributions, and (2) accessible interfaces (brms) to state of the art estimation algorithms (Stan). We discuss the benefits of both and illustrate their uses with example datasets from psychological research.
-
Investigating video game player behavior and well-being
(2024)
Tilburg, NL.
Summary
Workshop presentation on our open dataset on video game play behavior.
-
Video games and well-being
(2024)
Gaming Disorder Global Seminar, Seoul, SK.
Summary
In this presentation I review psychological research on video games and how they might affect players' well-being. Many studies have focused on how time spent playing video games predicts individuals' well-being and found that the associations are likely to be very small if they exist at all. Overall, people who play more report similar levels of well-being than individuals who play less. I discuss methodological issues that must be addressed before reliable and generalizable conclusions about video games' effects on well-being and health can be made. These include facilitating independent researchers' access to game play data from industry sources.
-
International Behavioural Public Policy Conference, Cambridge, UK.
Summary
NA
-
Internet technology and well-being
(2024)
Amsterdam, NL.
Summary
An invited presentation for the Department of Communication Science at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. I discussed my recent work on understanding potential broad shifts in psychological well-being associated with adoption of internet technologies.
-
The Missing Link, Tilburg, NL.
Summary
NA
-
Understanding the roles of digital technologies in psychological functioning
(2023)
Tilburg Experience Sampling Center, Tilburg, NL.
Summary
Video game play is an extremely popular form of leisure, yet the scientific understanding of games' relations to psychosocial functioning is at its infancy. To better understand games' roles in people's lives, we need not only more experimentation, but critically, more observation and description of play as it occurs naturally. We describe a data set of 10,000 players, from 39 countries, and 700,000 responses to psychological instruments within the video game PowerWash Simulator. These data were collected in collaboration with the game's developer FuturLab Inc., who published a modified version of the game. This research edition queried participants' well-being and motivational experiences during play six times each hour using an in-game messaging system, and along with the survey responses, logged detailed telemetry on player behavior, achievements, and other in-game events. The resulting combination of detailed play behavior and event data, and players' high temporal resolution responses to psychological instruments within the game itself is suitable for both detailed desciptive studies and in-depth statistical modelling of video game play and its relations to players' psychological states.
-
Intensive longitudinal dataset of video game play, well-being, and motivations: A case study of PowerWash Simulator
(2023)
International Convention of Psychological Science, Brussels.
Summary
NA
-
Time spent playing video games is unlikely to impact well-being
(2022)
International Communication Association, Paris.
Summary
NA
-
Within-subject mediation analysis for experimental data in cognitive psychology and neuroscience
(2018)
Columbia University.
Summary
NA
-
A meta-analytic review of agency cues
(2017)
European Society for Cognitive Psychology, Potsdam.
Summary
NA
-
Science of Consciousness, Tucson.
Summary
NA
-
Voluntary actions cause a temporal rate-shift in visual awareness: Evidence from visual illusions
(2016)
Science of Consciousness, Tucson.
Summary
NA
-
Voluntary action and time perception
(2015)
Toward a Science of Consciousness, Helsinki, Finland.
Summary
NA