Dr. Justin Sulik

Personal information

Justin completed a PhD at the University of Edinburgh, studying how people infer the meaning of novel signals, as in a game of Charades or Pictionary. After graduating, he moved to the University of Wisconsin-Madison for a postdoc project on how people leverage world knowledge to generate and evaluate explanations, or to take other people's perspectives in interactive tasks.

He spent a year researching communicative interaction at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, and then moved to Royal Holloway, University of London, where he explored the cognitive biases that drive misbelief in the face of disconfirmatory evidence, as in the case of climate change denial. He recently moved to CVBE at LMU to work on a project studying how diversity of opinion affects collective problem solving.
He likes to do high-powered online experiments, creating custom, interactive experimental interfaces to boost participant engagement and comprehension.

Research interests

• Psychology of science
• Science denial
• Cognitive bias
• Social learning
• Collective problem solving
• Theory of mind
• Hypothesis generation

Selected publications

• Furl, N., Begum, F., Sulik, J., Farrarese, F. P., Janes, S. Woolley, C. (2020). Face space representations of movement. NeuroImage 212, 116676.
• Motamedi, Y., Little, H., Nielsen, A. & Sulik, J. (2019). The iconicity toolbox: empirical approaches to measuring iconicity. Language and Cognition 11(2), 188-207.
• Sulik J. & Lupyan G. (2018). Perspective taking in a novel signaling task: effects of world knowledge and contextual constraint. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 147(11), 1619-1640.
• Sulik J. (2018). Cognitive mechanisms for inferring the meaning of novel signals during symbolisation. PLoS ONE 13(1), e0189540.