news | Louis Schiekiera

Feb 03, 2026	Excited to share a new preprint asking how much of a system’s internal semantic structure can be recovered from behavior alone. Across eight LLMs and 17.5M+ trials, we compare free association and forced-choice tasks and find that forced choice recovers hidden-state semantic geometry far better. Preprint: arXiv:2602.00628 (PDF).
Dec 20, 2025	I was interviewed by the Association for Psychological Science Observer about our work on publication bias and the overvaluation of statistical significance in psychology. You can read the piece here: Are Psychological Scientists Overvaluing Significance?.
Dec 15, 2025	Our poster “Transparent, Transferable, and Sustainable Foundation for Psycholinguistic Reading Studies in German, the TRUST Guidelines, and the German Lexicon Project (GLP)” has been accepted for presentation at the 16. Tagung der Österreichischen Gesellschaft für Psychologie (ÖGP) (Salzburg, Austria; 9–11 April 2026). More info: ÖGP Tagung 2026.
Nov 01, 2025	Our conference abstract “Climate Change and Health Sector Planning: A Mixed-Methods Analysis of National Health Strategies” has been published in the European Journal of Public Health (Vol. 35, Suppl. 4). DOI: 10.1093/eurpub/ckaf161.1440. The work was part of the 18th European Public Health Conference (EPH 2025) in Helsinki.
Sep 25, 2025	Our paper “Publication Bias in Academic Decision Making in Clinical Psychology” has been published in Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science. You can find the paper here.
Sep 05, 2025	I had the chance to present a poster at ESCOP 2025: Modeling Lexical Competition in Language Production: A Computational Approach to the Swinging Lexical Network. In this work, we implement the Swinging Lexical Network as a computational spreading-activation model to explore semantic priming and lexical competition in picture–word interference data. You can view the poster here and find the code here. Thanks to the organizers for a well-run conference and to everyone who stopped by to chat about the project.
Jul 24, 2025	The paper “Publication Bias in Academic Decision Making in Clinical Psychology,” on which I’m first author, has been accepted in Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science.
May 12, 2025	Our study “Does Scientific Productivity Increase the Publication of Positive Results?” has been published in Collabra: Psychology. Link to the paper: https://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.137035
Apr 08, 2025	I was delighted to have the opportunity to give a talk at the 4th German Psychotherapy Congress in Berlin last week. My talk was about a meta-scientific study on publication bias in psychology - with a focus on the frequency of positive results and the scientific productivity of research groups. The slides can be found here. Many thanks to the organizers for the platform and to everyone who listened and thought along.
Mar 24, 2025	Our paper “Political bias in historiography - an experimental investigation of preferences for publication as a function of political orientation” has been published in F1000Research. Link to the paper: https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.160170.1
Jan 17, 2025	Our poster “Transparent, Transferable, and Sustainable Foundation for Psycholinguistic Reading Studies in German, the TRUST Guidelines, and the German Lexicon Project (GLP)” has been accepted for presentation (interactive paper/poster) at the SSSR 2026 Annual Conference in Rotterdam, Netherlands (16–18 July 2026). Details: SSSR 2026 submissions & programme.
Oct 01, 2024	I am pleased to share that I have joined the Computational Modelling Lab in the Department of Psychology at Humboldt University of Berlin as a research associate, starting October 1, 2024 for three years. Our project, funded by the DFG, focuses on developing a computational implementation of the Swinging Lexical Network model for language production. This model will integrate distributional semantic models (word embeddings) with spreading activation dynamics in networks to address conceptual-semantic processing during speech planning.
Jul 04, 2024	Today Helen Niemeyer, and I (first author) submitted a new preprint entitled “Meta-Research: Does Scientific Productivity Increase the Publication of Positive Results? Examining Research Groups’ Scientific Productivity and Positive Results in a German Clinical Psychology Sample” to PsyArXiv. The preprint is available here.
Jul 02, 2024	The article “Classifying Positive Results in Clinical Psychology Using Natural Language Processing” was today published in Zeitschrift für Psychologie for the special issue “Natural Language Processing in Psychology”.
May 31, 2024	We’re excited to share that our latest book chapter, How Inclusive and Equitable is Research in Clinical Psychology that Focuses on the Global South?, has been published in A Better How: Notes on Developmental Meta-Research, edited by Patrick S. Forscher and Mario Schmidt. The pdf is available here.
Mar 15, 2024	Our paper “Classifying Positive Results in Clinical Psychology Using Natural Language Processing” by Jonathan Diederichs, Helen Niemeyer, and myself (first author) has been accepted for publication in Zeitschrift für Psychologie for the special issue “Natural Language Processing in Psychology”.
Jan 09, 2024	Preprint available!
Nov 01, 2023	Started as a research assistant at the Division of Clinical Psychological Intervention, FU Berlin.
Oct 13, 2023	Succesfully defended MSc thesis!
Sep 21, 2023	Our Stage 1 pre-data registered report “Publication Bias in Academic Decision Making in Clinical Psychology” by Kristina Eichel, Jacqueline Sachse, Sophie Müller, Felicitas Hesselmann, Helen Niemeyer, and myself (first author) has provisionally been accepted for publication in Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science .