Volkswagen Foundation promotes innovative psychology research with AI!
Volkswagen Foundation promotes innovative psychology research with AI!
The Volkswagen Foundation promotes the innovative research of Professor Daniel Heck at the Philipps University Marburg with a sum of around 930,000 euros over a period of four years. This funding, which takes place as part of the "Momentum" funding line, aims to put basic psychological research on a solid mathematical basis and to develop new methods for analyzing human language.
Professor Heck and his nine-headed team use modern AI language models, so-called “Large Language Models” (LLMS). The aim is to translate psychological constructs into quantitative forms and to optimize the planning and evaluation of psychological experiments. In the project, open source software is used to ensure the safety of sensitive data instead of using commercial software such as Chatgpt.
new territory in psychological research
With the application of these technologies, Heck enters new scientific territory, since its focus was previously in modeling and statistics. He would like to put psychology on a solid mathematical basis and develop new tools for methodology. In the future, blurred verbal descriptions will be combined with exact mathematical models, which could significantly strengthen the scientific quality, as the university Vice President Professor Professor Gert Bange emphasizes.
A third of the psychology studies deals with methodology and the new research approach from Heck could enable significant progress in this area. The development of precise theoretical assumptions in psychology is also a central goal of the project.
methodical innovation approaches
In his experiments, Heck will use standard formulations of complex explanations, as already from previous research focuses such as the quantitative data analysis, psychometric and cognitive modeling. This should provide more differentiated results in psychological measurements. Subjects will evaluate statements on a scale of 1 to 9, which promises improved accuracy of the predictions.In addition, the success of the methods based on AI will be checked by comparing human reviews in empirical studies. The promotion of the Volkswagen Foundation also flows into the creation of two postdoc positions as well as the scientific networking and the necessary technical resources.
Heck's work has already been recognized when he recently received the Wilhelm-Wundt-Gesellschaft e.V. His research could therefore revolutionize not only psychology, but also the methodology within the discipline.
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