Julia Haaf

Psychonomic Society Fellows and Members, cast your votes for Governing Board before the end of August!

Are the scores the same between Fitbit and Garmin?

I have yet to read a single story about men adopting AI at work (without being told) at a higher rate than women that presents it as anything other than men being smart. Not one story about how it implies they're lazier and less ethical.
Because that's not the narrative that's being pushed about AI.

Today I taught my last class for this semester. Next time teaching is April 2026. 🥳🥳🥳 (Don't get me wrong, I like teaching. But time for research is exciting!)

I recently taught a course on minimizing mistakes in science. The most convincing argument to my masters students was that you never check mistakes that support the expected outcome, you only check if the outcome is unexpected. That's a hugely important bias!

1/5 For upcoming work I lately read some articles on handling mistakes in science. They share an important consensus I think everyone should know:

Mistakes are a failure of systems, not people. In a working system, making a mistake is normal, but inconsequential. 🧵

The 2025 WomWoM research fairy award Welcome, fellow working memory researchers! It's time to decide who should be this year's research fairy. If you are not yet aware of the story about this award or would like a refresher, please che...

#workingmemory researchers! It's time to nominate all of our brilliant and wonderful female colleagues for the 2025 #WomWoM research fairy award! 🧚‍♀️🪄 Please share widely -- deadline 2nd August! bit.ly/2025womwomfa...

The Effect of Cold Showering on Health and Work: A Randomized Controlled Trial Purpose The aim of this study was to determine the cumulative effect of a routine (hot-to-) cold shower on sickness, quality of life and work productivity. Methods Between January and March 2015, 30...

Excellent. I am always looking for good (bad) examples for my lectures. This is almost as good as the cold showers RCT
journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...

Sure that'll tell you if there is any information for these correlations from the data, not about model complexity compared between the two models. But I agree that BF estimation is probably not ideal in these models.

Yes, much more elegant this way!

Seems you are just sampling from the prior on these? If so, Bayes factor would pick up on the difference in complexity (a priori fixing to zero versus not). I would have also assumed that the posterior predictions from the models should be wider but perhaps not for data structured like yours?

You can use it to plan studies, to plan analyses for a preregistration, to develop new methodology, or to answer meta-analytical questions. You can also contribute by sending us your open data!

We hope people will use ⚡ACDC⚡ as an easy-access tool to work with existing data sets thanks to Sven's R package and Madlen's Shiny app to access the data in the database.

For participants, we think it's just that researchers trade off no. or trials and participants. In large studies, no. of trials is typically low. That's an additional problem for reliability in these tasks.

Plot showing the relationship between two different estimates of reliability and the number of trials and participants. For split-half reliability, there is a positive correlation with no. of trials and a negative correlation with no. of participants. For the signal-to-noise ratio, there are no correlations.

Our initial analysis of the data shows low reliability for most data sets (as expected), but also how the number of trials and number of participants are related to reliability estimates. For trials, this is expected as no. of trials directly affects the reliability coefficient.

Turns out that open data (for example on OSF) are often not in shape to be reused. My coauthor Madlen had to check each data set to ensure they understood the variables and that the data corresponded to what was in the paper (e.g., same number of trials per condition).

Happy to share the publication of the Attentional Control Data Collection (ACDC⚡) at Behavior Research Methods. We have collected 64 data sets on congruency effects in an SQLite database. The database will hopefully grow soon, but working with open data is actually pretty complicated. rdcu.be/ethPM

Please check out this work by @seymaertekin.bsky.social et al. where we studied key empirical benchmarks of working memory in a large-scale sample of elementary school students. This type of data is AWESOME because you can get a lot of clarity - as long as you don't go down any rabbit holes...

Nice. I was starting to think about writing a similar paper. So I should read this one carefully. :)

I mean, a German demon seems plausible.

Google suggestions to the prompt "is Julia Haaf" are "a German name" and "a demon".

Well...

Three grazing horses.

And, finally, HORSES. 🐎 Of course. Real crowd pleaser with my kid who asks me to stop for a few minutes every day to say hi to the horses.

Cycling path "Lindenallee"

Cycling path "Lindenallee". Looks like the first photo except there are fewer trees on the right and more fields.

Then there is this bike path through trees and fields that's a few kilometers long.

Who here has the best commute? (Spoiler: it's me. Try and convince me otherwise.)

Let me show you. Here is one of the THREE castles I am passing every day.

Perceptual decision-making task without conditions? Why would anyone run this? I know this one but I think all tasks have some experimental manipulation: psycnet.apa.org/buy/2017-433...

It's the best feeling when you see a deadline on the calendar for something you have already finished weeks ago. So cool!

I record my lectures and upload them without ever opening that video. Ever. Illegal is the right description.

Do you listen to No Such Thing As A Fish? Funny and intellectually engaging!

Ok. LOVE anti-acknowledgements! What a great idea to say no thanks! I think it would be cool to see anti-acknowledgements from other people (unofficial ones for PhD, career, etc). As awful as these experiences sound, I am sure they are not uncommon. I am thankful to Rachel for sharing. 👩‍🔬🧪

New preprint!

Individual differences in neurophysiological correlates of post-response adaptation: A model-based approach

osf.io/preprints/ps...

This work seeks to extract the effects of response monitoring on decision-making using model-based CogNeuro and methods to study individual differences.