A new study carried out in collaboration with our partners at the Unievrsity of Bournemouth (UK) shows that the presentation of unexpected sounds disrupt eye movements through their transient inhibition. This work is part of Fabrice Parmentier’s current nationally-funded project and follows up on the solid collaboration established with Prof. Julie Kirkby and Dr. Martin Vasilev. Reference: Vasilev, M. R., Lowmann, M., Bills, K., Parmentier, F. B. R., & Kirkby, J. A. (2023). Unexpected sounds inhibit the movement of the eyes during reading and letter scanning. Psychophysiology, 023;00:e143 ..read more

Antonia’s Twitter thread explaining her doctoral thesis will represent the University of the Balearic Islands in the national competition. Antònua Siquier Perelló Congratulations Anònia! PhD student Antònia Siquier Perelló, supervised by Prof. Pilar Andrés, is the winner of the local phase of the #HiloTesis2023 competition, a competition in which participants must disseminate their doctoral thesis in a thread of, at most, 20 tweets, taking into account the limitations and possibilities offered by the social network Twitter. The series of messages about her doctoral thesis has focused on a ne ..read more

Fabrice Parmentier has been invited to present part of the upcoming workshop organized by the University Utrecht. the workshop, entitled “An introduction to experiment building with OpenSesame” will introduce research students to the use of Open Sesame and its OSWeb component to run psychology and socal science experiments in the lab and online. the workshop will take place on May 24-26 ..read more

Our latest study, in press in Psychophysiology, was led by Annekathrin Weise (Paris Lodron University of Salzburg, Austria, and Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany) and reports magnetoencephalographic and behaviral data indicating that the distraction yielded by unexpected sounds involves a shift of spatial attention. Topoplot of the alpha power distribution in the 0.2 - 0.6 s time window following deviant onset. Stars indicate channels on which there was a prominent statistical effect. Reference: Weise, A., Hartmann, T., Parmentier, F. B. R., Weisz, N., & Ruhnau, P. (2023). Inv ..read more

Congratulations to Antonia and Pilar for their latest publication on facial emotional recognition in patients with Parkinson’s disease. the study will be published in Neuropsychology. The study compared patients with Parkinson’s Disease (PD) and control participants in a task measuring the ability to recognize emotions from facial expressions. The results suggests that patients with PD present with a relative deficit in the recognition of emotions from facial expressions and that this deficit is related to an alteration of inhibitory functions. Reference: Siquier, A., & Andrés, P. (2022 ..read more

The talk presented at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society (November, 2021) is noW available to watch on YouTube. Reference: Parmentier, F. B. R., & Gallego, L. (2021). Is Deviance Distraction Immune to the Prior Sequential Learning of Stimuli and Responses? Talk presented at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, 4-7 November. Abstract: Unexpected auditory stimuli presented in the context of an otherwise repeated standard sound capture participants’ attention away from a focal task and yield distraction. While making such sounds predictable reduces distraction ..read more

After many years programming experiments in E-Prime, we are starting to develop tasks using Open Sesame and its browser-oriented version OSWeb. E-Prime is a great tool and has been Fabrice Parmentier’s go-to experiment programming software for several years. It will most likely remain a feature of the Cognitive Psychology Lab, but it is expected that Open Sesame, a free and open program, will progressively become our main software for experimental studies (online and lab-based) in the future. Fabrice began exploring Open Sesame and its suitability for online experiments back in March 2021, le ..read more

JATOS ready for duty! Our group now counts with its own server and the JATOS service capable of running online studies programmed in jsPsych, lab.js, OSWeb/OpenSesame, PsyToolkit or any HTML/Javascript/CSS code. This service supports experiments on mobile devices, desktops and lab computers that run a browser. Fabrice Parmentier is managing JATOS for the group ..read more

The research project, approved for funding by the Agencia Estatal de Investigación (State Research Agency), will study auditory distraction. The project will be led by Fabrice Parmentier with the participation and support of a number of distinguished collaborators: János Horváth (Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychology, Research Centre for Natural Sciences, Budapest, Hungary), Martin Vasilev and Julie Kirkby (Bournemouth University, UK), and Alicia Leiva (University of the Balearic Islands). The project, entitled “Extending our knowledge of distraction by unexpected sounds” will of ..read more

Dr Alicia Leiva Our latest paper on aging and deviance distraction has been accepted for publication in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience and WILL come out shortly. This study by Leiva, Andrés and Parmentier uses Bayesian statistics and Bayesian estimation methods to revisit the results of five past studies and shows that aging increases distraction by unexpected sounds in cross-modal but not in uni-modal oddball tasks, even when controlling for age-related variations in baseline response speed. Bayesian estimation provides credible estimate of the size of the aging effect, showing that this di ..read more