Lisa Unger

I completed both my bachelor’s and master’s degree in psychology at the Georg-Elias-Müller-Institute of Psychology in Göttingen. The aim of my bachelor’s thesis ’Investigating the validity of gamified visual psychophysics for motion discrimination’ that I wrote at the German Primate Center in Göttingen was to introduce basic game-like elements to a psychophysical experiment in order to improve the subjective experience of the participants while preserving the quality of the collected data. In my master’s thesis ‘A systematic review of culturally adapted CBT-based interventions for depressive symptoms including a classic and a network meta-analysis’, I investigated the effectiveness of psychological interventions tailored to the needs of non-Western populations in comparison to evidence-based and highly effective standard Western interventions.

I will join the RTG 2906 Curiosity team as a PhD researcher in project A4 ‚To know or not to know: emotional, motivational and person-related factors of seeking or avoiding information‘ by Prof. Dr. Anne Schacht and Leon Behle. My PhD project will focus on the investigation of emotional factors and information characteristics influencing information seeking and avoidance in adults and their interplay. To this end, I intend to collect behavioral data in different experiments and additionally include psychophysiological measures like EEG, eye-tracking and electrodermal activity data to gain further insight into the underlying processing in this context.

Curiosity is crucial to learning and therefore essential to processes that underlie our understanding of our environment and our capability to adapt to it. In other words, the tendency to seek or avoid certain types of information in our environment can have a tremendous impact on the way we perceive our environment, form opinions, make decisions and ultimately how we act in a given situation.This applies not only to information that is present in our physical environment

Nowadays, in this digital age, the internet represents an incredibly rich and almost unlimited source of information, enabling us more than ever before to decide for ourselves what information to seek and what to ignore. Curiosity therefore should play a key role in exploring this diverse digital environment. Given the fact that the importance of the internet is steadily increasing and digital information is finding its way into our society by shaping personal opinions and ultimately affecting public debates and social cohesion, investigating curiosity in this context is of great social relevance. Since the internet provides us with information of different types and quality, I am indeed very interested in gaining a better understanding of the factors that influence individual information seeking and avoidance in this context.

Besides, I have always been very curious about the connection between psychology and biology and would therefore like to apply methods like EEG and eye-tracking to further study psychophysiological processes related to curiosity.: