stoet portrait

Professor
Faculty of Science and Health
Essex University, UK
g.stoet@essex.ac.uk





Background

poster prize

I have a background in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. After graduating from the Ludwig Maximilians University (Munich) and working at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, I worked many years in the USA at Washington University Medical School. After that, I came to the UK, where I have worked both in England and Scotland.

My current work focuses on a variety of topics in the fields of health- , personality- , cognitive- , and educational-psychology.

For example, I am interested in gender differences how boys and girls learn and achieve, and how gender differences are expressed in adults. I have written quite a few articles about this topic.

With a team of colleagues, we are also doing research on health-psychological factors in regard to diabetes. We are starting an ESRC funded project in October 2023 with Ms. Megan Thornhill. We also have created a strong partnership with local health care providers.

Apart from that, I am also the creator of PsyToolkit, a popular online research and online learning toolkit (mainly for cognitive psychology and individual differences research). My article about PsyToolkit is the most cited article in Teaching of Psycholgy.

Much of my past and present research has been funded with grants from the ESRC, NIH, German Science Foundation (DFG), Max-Planck-Society, James S. McDonnell Foundation, British Academy, and Nuffield Foundation. In the publication section, you can find a variety of articles that resulted from these grants.

One of the previous projects I worked on was related to sustained attention (cognition) in school children. Our PhD student JingJing Yang (杨晶晶) was awarded the best poster prize for her work on this project at the annual conference of the British Psychological Society Psychology of Education Section in Oxford (see picture).

medal

I was awarded the Otto Hahn Medal for my research by the German Max Planck Society.






Publications cited more than 100 times

The citation count is based on my Google Scholar profile.

  • Stoet, G. & Geary, D.C. (2018). The Gender-Equality Paradox in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education. Psychological Science, 29(4), 581-593. Open access link.

This paper has been covered widely in the press, for example in The Atlantic and BBC television and score 3418 on Altmetric and was on the most cited list of Psychological Science.

  • Stoet, G. (2017). PsyToolkit: A novel web-based method for running online questionnaires and reaction-time experiments. Teaching of Psychology, 44(1), 24-31. Open access link

This paper shows the capabilities of online data collection via PsyToolkit, and how this can be used in effective teaching.
This is the most cited article in Teaching of Psychology.

  • Stoet, G. Bailey, D.H., Moore, A.M., & D.C. Geary (2016). Countries with Higher Levels of Gender Equality Show Larger National Sex Differences in Mathematics Anxiety and Relatively Lower Parental Mathematics Valuation for Girls. Plos One, 11(4), e0153857. Open access link

  • Stoet, G. & Geary, D.C. (2015). Sex differences in academic achievement are not related to political, economic, or social equality. Intelligence, 48, 137-151. Open access link.

This was widely covered in the news, including the New York Times and the BBC.

  • Stoet, G. & Geary, D.C. (2013). Sex differences in mathematics and reading achievement are inversely related: Within- and across-nation assessment of 10 years of PISA data. PLoS ONE 8(3): e57988. Open access link.

Watch a 11-minute video explaining the basics of this study

  • Stoet, G., O’Connor, D.B., Conner, M., and Laws, K. R. (2013). Are women better than men at multitasking? BMC Psychology, 1:18, (2013). Open access link

This paper looked into a popular belief about women and multitasking and was widely covered, for example on the BBC. It is important to point out that now we know that there are different studies on this topic, and it seems that the specific type of task being used plays a role; others have not found the effect using different a different task.

  • Stoet, G. & Geary, D.C. (2012). Can stereotype threat explain the gender gap in mathematics performance and achievement? Review of General Psychology, 16, 93-102. Journal link. PDF

watch video about this paper. I also spoke about this study on BBC Radio 4, The Today Programme (the national morning news programme) on 19/Jan/2012: Listen here. This article was also discussed in various magazines and newspapers, for example in an article in Scientific American in June 2013, in href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/20/women-maths-stereotype-threat[an article in The Guardian] and in an article in The Telegraph. And Dutch NRC Handelsblad interviewed me and professor Claude Steele about this paper which appeared in the NRC science section on 9/Feb/2013.

  • Stoet, G. (2010). PsyToolkit - A software package for programming psychological experiments using Linux. Behavior Research Methods, 42(4), 1096-1104. Open access link

  • Stoet, G. & Snyder, L.H. (2004). Single neurons in posterior parietal cortex (PPC) of monkeys encode cognitive set. Neuron, 42, 1003-1012. Open access link

This is the first study that shows that monkeys, who can perform a cognitive task-switching paradigm really well after lots of training, have specific neurons that encode which current task they can do. This article was the result of years of work on trainig monkeys and recording from neurons in lab settings. One of the hardest studies I have ever done, but the insights were a real novelty and were written about by others.

  • Stoet, G. & Snyder, L.H. (2003). Executive control and task-switching in monkeys. Neuropsychologia, 41, 1357-1364. Download PDF

  • Stoet, G. & Hommel, B. (2002). Interaction between feature binding in perception and action. In W.Prinz & B.Hommel (Eds.). Common mechanisms in perception and action: Attention and Performance, Vol. XIX (pp. 538-552). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Download PDF

  • Stoet, G. & Hommel, B. (1999). Action planning and the temporal binding of response codes. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 25, 1625-1640. Download pdf

This was the first big article about the ABBA paradigm I developed as part of my PhD thesis at the Max-Planck Institute in Munich. For this work, I was also later awarded the German Otto-Hahn Medal.

Publications

  • Stoet, G. & Holt, R.I.G. (2023). Characteristics of People with Optimally-Managed Type 1 Diabetes. Diabetes Epidemiology and Management. Open access link

  • Ceolini, E., Kock, R. Band, P.H., Stoet, G., Ghosh, A. (2022). Temporal clusters of age-related behavioral alterations captured in smartphone touchscreen interactions. iScience (Cell Press) Read for free here (open access)

  • Stoet, G. & Geary, D.C. (2022). Sex Differences in Adolescents’ Occupational Aspirations: Variations Across Time and Place. PLOS ONE. Read for free here (open access)

  • Shirdel Haver, E.S. & Stoet, G. (2022). Discrimination and psychopathology in gender dysphoria: a hormone therapy. Journal of Sexual Health Psychology, 1(2), 1-9. Open Access

  • Tsegaye, A., Guo, C., Stoet, G., Cserjési, R., Kökönyei, G., & Logemann, H.N.A. (2022). The relationship between reward context and inhibitory control, does it depend on BMI, maladaptive eating, and negative affect? BMC Psychology Read for free here (open access)

  • Li, B., Li. X., Stoet, G., & Lages, M. (2022). Processing Speed Predicts Mean Performance in Task-Switching but Not Task-Switching Cost. Psychological Reports, Online First Link to article online

  • Doebel, S., Stucke, N., Stoet, G. (2022). Why is Children’s Time in Less-Structured Activities Associated with Executive Function? A Study of Children at Home During the COVID-19 Pandemic. Developmental Science, online first Open access

  • Tsegaye, A., Guo, C., Cserjési, R., Kenemans, L., Stoet, G., Kökönyei, G., & Logemann, H.N.A. (2021). Inhibitory Performance in Smokers Relative to Nonsmokers When Exposed to Neutral, Smoking-and Money-Related Pictures. Behavioral Sciences, 11(10), 128.

  • Stoet, G. & Geary, D.C. (2020). Gender differences in the pathways to higher education. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 117(25), 14073-14076. Open access link

  • Stoet, G. & Geary, D.C. (2020). Sex-specific academic ability and attitude patterns in students across developed countries. Intelligence, 81, 101453. Open access link

  • Stoet, G. & Geary, D.C. (2020). The gender equality paradox is part of a bigger phenomenon. Psychological Science, 31, 342-344.

  • Li, X., Li, B., Liu, X., Lages, M., & Stoet, G. Task-switching costs disappear if non-Chinese participants respond to Chinese characters. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2019, 45(11), 2051-2071. Link

  • Yun, Y. & Stoet, G. (2019). Encountering Non-Christian Chinese International Students: Cross-Cultural Adaptive Practices of Local Christian Organisations in the UK. Journal of Beliefs & Values, 41(3), 305-321. Link

  • Li, B., Li, X., Stoet, G. and Lages, M. (2019). Target-Response Associations Can Produce Response-Congruency Effects Without Task-Switching Costs. Acta Psychologica, 193, 80-95. Open access link

  • Li, B., Li, X., Liu, X., Lages, M., Stoet, G. Target-Response Associations Can Produce Response-Congruency Effects Without Task-Switching Costs. Frontiers in Psychology (2019). Open access link

  • Stoet.G (2019). The Challenges for Boys and Men in Twenty-First-Century Education. J.A. Barry et al. (Eds). The Palgrave Handbook of Male Psychology and Mental Health.

  • Stoet, G. & Geary, D.C. (2019). A simplified approach to measuring national gender inequality. PLoS ONE 14(1): e0205349. Open access link

  • A systematic review and meta-analysis of the executive function-health behaviour relationship. Gray, K., Taylor, N., O’Connor, D., Sutherland, E., Stoet, G., and Conner, M. (2019). Health Psychology and Behavioral Medicine, 7(1), 253-268 Open access link

  • Stoet, G. & Geary, D.C. (2018). The Gender-Equality Paradox in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education. Psychological Science, 29(4), 581-593. Open access link.

This paper has been covered widely in the press, for example in The Atlantic and BBC television and score 3418 on Altmetric and was on the most cited list of Psychological Science.

  • Stoet, G. (2017). PsyToolkit: A novel web-based method for running online questionnaires and reaction-time experiments. Teaching of Psychology, 44(1), 24-31. Open access link

  • Alharbi, A.A. & Stoet, G. (2017). Achievement flourishes in larger classes: Secondary school students in most countries achieved better in literacy in larger classes. International Education Journal: Comparative Perspectives, volume 16(2), 16-32. Open access link

  • Stoet, G. & Geary, D.C. (2017). Students in countries with higher levels of religiosity perform lower in science and mathematics. Intelligence, 62, 71-78. Open access link

  • Li, X., Li, B., Lages, M., & Stoet, G. (2017). Task-Switching in Pigeons: Associative Learning or Executive Control?. Frontiers in Psychology.

  • Stoet, G. (2017). Sex differences in the Simon task help to interpret sex differences in selective attention. Psychological Research, 81(3), 571-581. Open access link

  • Stoet, G. Bailey, D.H., Moore, A.M., & D.C. Geary (2016). Countries with Higher Levels of Gender Equality Show Larger National Sex Differences in Mathematics Anxiety and Relatively Lower Parental Mathematics Valuation for Girls. _Plos One, 11(4), e0153857. Open access link

  • Stoet, G. & Geary, D.C. (2016). Challenges for determining the causal effects between social behavior and testosteron. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 5, E499. Open access link

  • Stoet, G. & Geary, D.C. (2015). Sex differences in academic achievement are not related to political, economic, or social equality. Intelligence, 48, 137-151. Open access link.

  • Stoet, G. (2015). British male students continue to fall behind in secondary school achievement. New Male Studies, 4, 23-49. Download PDF

  • Stoet, G., O’Connor, D.B., Conner, M., and Laws, K. R. (2013). Are women better than men at multitasking? BMC Psychology, 1:18, (2013). Open access link

  • Stoet, G. & Geary, D.C. (2013). Sex differences in mathematics and reading achievement are inversely related: Within- and across-nation assessment of 10 years of PISA data. PLoS ONE 8(3): e57988. Open access link.

Watch a 11-minute video explaining the basics of this study

  • Mushtaq, F., Stoet. G, Bland, A.R., & Schaefer, A (2013). Relative changes from prior reward contingencies can constrain brain correlates of outcome monitoring. PLoS ONE 8(6): e66350. Open access link

  • Stoet, G. & Snyder, L.H. (2012). Neural correlates of cognitive flexibility in monkeys. European Neuropsychopharmacology, 22, S137.

  • Stoet, G. & López, B. (2013). Development of task-switching skills. Chapter 4 (pp.85-101) in B. R. Kar. (Ed.). Cognition and Brain development: Converging Evidence From Various Methodologies. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Download PDF

  • Why are there fewer women working in science and technology? Stoet, G. & Geary, D.C. (2012). Skeptic Magazine, 24 (1), 28-30.

  • Stoet, G. & Snyder, L.H. (2012). The role of executive control in tool use. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 35, 240-241.

  • Stoet, G. & Geary, D.C. (2012). Can stereotype threat explain the gender gap in mathematics performance and achievement? Review of General Psychology, 16, 93-102. Download PDF

watch video about this paper. I also spoke about this study on BBC Radio 4, The Today Programme (the national morning news programme) on 19/Jan/2012: Listen here. This article was also discussed in various magazines and newspapers, for example in an article in Scientific American in June 2013, in an article in The Guardian and in an article in The Telegraph. And Dutch NRC Handelsblad interviewed me and professor Claude Steele about this paper: in the NRC science section on 9/Feb/2013.

  • Stoet, G. (2011). Sex differences in search and gathering skills. Evolution and Human Behavior, 32, 416-422. Download PDF

  • Stoet, G. & López, B. (2011). Task switching abilities in children with autism spectrum disorder. European Journal of Developmental Psychology, 8, 244-260. Download PDF.

  • Stoet, G. (2010). PsyToolkit - A software package for programming psychological experiments using Linux. Behavior Research Methods, 42(4), 1096-1104. Open access link

  • Stoet, G. (2010). Sex differences in the processing of flankers. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 63 (4), 633-638. Download PDF

  • Stoet, G. & Snyder, L.H. (2009). Neural correlates of executive control functions in the monkey. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13, 228-234. Download PDF

  • Stoet, G., Ruge, H., & Snyder, L.H. (2008). Modification of response time variability in a decision-making task. Neuroreport, 19, 1321-1324. Download PDF

  • Stoet, G., Markey, H., & López, B. (2007). Dyslexia and attentional shifting. Neuroscience Letters, 427, 61-65. Download PDF

  • Stoet, G. & Snyder, L.H. (2007). Task-switching in human and non-human primates: Understanding rule encoding and control from behavior to single neurons. In S.A. Bunge and J.D. Wallis (Eds.), pp. 227-254. The Neuroscience of Rule-Guided Behavior. Oxford University Press.

  • Stoet, G. & Snyder, L.H. (2007). Extensive practice does not eliminate human switch costs. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 7(3), 192-197. Download PDF

  • Stoet, G. & Snyder, L.H. (2007). Correlates of stimulus-response congruence in posterior parietal cortex (PPC). Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 19, 194-203. [see journal cover about this article at the top of publications] Download PDF

  • Stoet, G. & Snyder, L.H. (2006). Effects of the NMDA antagonist ketamine on task-switching performance: evidence for specific impairments of executive control. Neuropsychopharmacology, 31, 1675-1681. Download PDF

  • Ruge, H., Stoet, G., & Naumann E. (2006). Attentional set mixing: effects on target selection and selective response activation. Psychophysiology, 43, 413-421. Download PDF

  • Stoet, G. & Snyder, L.H. (2004). Single neurons in posterior parietal cortex (PPC) of monkeys encode cognitive set. Neuron, 42, 1003-1012. Open access link

This paper has been cited more than a 100 times and the researcher David J. Freedman wrote an introductory article about our article in the same issue of Neuron (Download PDF).

  • Stoet, G. & Snyder, L.H. (2003). Executive control and task-switching in monkeys. Neuropsychologia, 41, 1357-1364. Download PDF

  • Stoet, G. & Snyder, L.H. (2003). Task preparation in macaque monkeys (Macaca mulatta). Animal Cognition, 6, 121-130. Download PDF

  • Stoet, G. & Hommel, B. (2002). Interaction between feature binding in perception and action. In W.Prinz & B.Hommel (Eds.). Common mechanisms in perception and action: Attention and Performance, Vol. XIX (pp. 538-552). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Download PDF

  • Stoet, G. & Hommel, B. (1999). Action planning and the temporal binding of response codes. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 25, 1625-1640. Download PDF

  • Stoet, G. (1998). The role of feature integration in action. Dissertation written at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich (in English known as the University of Munich). Munich, Germany.

  • Strohner, H. & Stoet, G. (1999). Cognitive Compositionality: An Activation and Evaluation Hypothesis. In M.K. Hiraga, C. Sinha & S.Wilcox (Eds.), Cultural, Psychological and Typological Issues in Cognitive Linguistics (pp. 195-209). Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co.

  • Strohner, H. & Stoet, G. (1996). Interferenzprozesse bei Adjektiv-Nomen-Kompositionen. Sind geschälte Äpfel eher weiß als rund? In C.Habel, S.Kanngießer & G.Rickheit (Eds.), Perspektiven der Kognitiven Linguistik:Modelle und Methoden (pp. 233-255). Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag.

  • Strohner, H. & Stoet, G. (1994). Kognitive Modellierung semantischer Kompositionalität. Sprache und Datenverarbeitung, 18, 45-64.

Software

psytoolkit

PsyToolkit is an online platform for running cognitive psychological experiments and/or online surveys. On the right, you see the PsyToolkit logo.

PsyToolkit runs in a browser. PsyToolkit can do everything other software of this type can do, but it is free to use for non-profit researchers and students. It is ideal for presenting both survey questions and cognitive reaction time experiments. It has its own domain-specific scripting language and comes with lots of demonstration experiments and psychometric scales.

It received funding from, among others, the UK ESRC research council. Click here to find out more.

  • Stoet, G. (2017). PsyToolkit: A novel web-based method for running online questionnaires and reaction-time experiments. Teaching of Psychology, 44(1), 24-31. Open access link

  • Stoet, G. (2010). PsyToolkit - A software package for programming psychological experiments using Linux. Behavior Research Methods, 42(4), 1096-1104. Open access link

Contact details


Gijsbert Stoet
Faculty of Science and Health
University of Essex
Colchester, CO4 3SQ
United Kingdom


email: g.stoet@essex.ac.uk
Twitter: @PsyToolkit
YouTube: PsyToolkit via YouTube