Evie Vergauwe

@evievergauwe.bsky.social

Working Memory Researcher at U. of Geneva #workingmemory Cognition and Cognitive Development PI of the WomCogDevLab Steering board Swiss Reproducibility Network

Did you know that from tomorrow, Qualtrics is offering synthetic panels (AI-generated participants)? Follow me down a rabbit hole I'm calling "doing science is tough and I'm so busy, can't we just make up participants?"

Text reads: About synthetic panels
Recruiting the right participants for a study can be difficult. You may not get the exact demographics you need, and the shorter the deadline, the less sure you can be that everyone will answer on time. One possible solution can be to use synthetic panels.

Synthetic panels are powered by a first party proprietary AI model developed here at Qualtrics. Our synthetic panel is trained on thousands of responses from a variety of demographic backgrounds in order to more accurately predict how certain populations would respond to a survey.

Our synthetic panel is based on the United States General Population, and is only available in English. This panel comes with ready-made quotas and target breakouts in order to represent your chosen population and make it easy to launch your survey right away.Text reads:
Question-writing best practices
To get the most reliable and actionable results from synthetic audiences, consider these question-writing best practices:

Ask forward-looking and attitudinal questions.
Synthetic panels perform best with perceptions, preferences, and intent-based questions. For example, “How likely are you to try…?”
Synthetic panels are less applicable for studies on past behaviors, detailed recall, brand recall, or awareness questions. For example, “When did you last visit…?”Text reads:
Discussion
The current study aimed to conduct a meta-analysis of the TPB when applied to health behaviours which addressed the limitations of previous reviews by including only prospective tests of behaviour, applying RE meta-analytic procedures, correcting correlations for sampling and measurement error, and hierarchically analysing the effect of behaviour type and sample and methodological moderators. Some 237 tests were identified which examined relations amongst model components. Overall the analysis indicated that the TPB could explain 19.3% of the variance in behaviour and 44.3% of the variance in intention across studies. This level of prediction of behaviour is slightly lower than that of previous meta-analytic reviews which have found between 27% (Armitage & Conner, 2001; Hagger et al., 2002) and 36% (Trafimow et al., 2002)
of the variance in behaviour to be explained by intention and PBC.

New conspiracy theory just dropped: What if peer review, committee meetings, strategic plans, promotion & tenure processes, and letter-writing requests are all part of a secret plot to keep smart, creative, active minds from thinking and writing the big ideas that would *really* change the world?

Make sure to stop at Ceren Arslan‘s (@scannedfruits.bsky.social) poster at #ICON2025 today at 3:30! She‘s presenting some of our recent EEG work on audiovisual object storage in #WorkingMemory! 👇

Ceren Arslan@scannedfruits.bsky.social · 11mo ago

Tomorrow afternoon at #icon2025 I will present a poster on feature extraction costs in working memory in an audiovisual context using behavioral measures and EEG based decoding analysis. I will be at the main hall, 1st floor (P2.55). I’d be happy to discuss our results further with you.