Aphantasia
Laura Speed will use the grant to further her research on aphantasia. Speed: “When asked to imagine an apple, most people “see” a visual image in their mind’s eye. Yet, for a proportion of the population, this is impossible. They have a condition called aphantasia: they cannot experience visual imagery.”
Speed previously researched the effects of aphantasia on reading enjoyment. Now she will develop a test to detect aphantasia. “Aphantasia is usually tested using a subjective questionnaire. Unfortunately, the only objective tests of aphantasia require in-person lab testing. To solve this limitation, I will develop and validate a test of aphantasia that can be used online. By increasing access to and detection of aphantasia, this project paves the way for ground-breaking research on the importance of visual imagery in human cognition.”
Insemination fraud
Adriejan van Veen will research the history of insemination fraud by fertility doctors in the Netherlands. In recent years, many cases of insemination fraud have been revealed internationally and in the Netherlands - think, for example, of ‘The Man With 1000 Kids’ aka Dutch donor Jonathan Meijer. Van Veen: “At least 10 fertility doctors went wrong in the 1980s and 1990s. They used their own or donor semen instead of the spouses’, used semen from individual donors on a mass scale, or committed other malpractices.”
This project investigates for the first time how this systematic insemination fraud was possible in the Netherlands between 1945 and 2004. “I will examine the public debate on artificial donor insemination (AID), the medical practice and supervision thereof, and the political debate on AID. The central question is how these created the space within which insemination fraud could take place.”
Fear smells
Ilja Croijmans will conduct psycholinguist research into fear-related body odours. “Imagine walking into a room and, without realizing it, sensing fear through smell. This could change how you communicate with others. While it is known that we rely on body language and facial expressions to understand others, smell might also play a role.”
Previous lab-based research has shown that people can detect fear in body odours. By combining psycholinguistic experiments and virtual reality interactions during exposure to fear-related smells, this project takes the next step to uncover how smells affect language processing in interactions. Further investigating how smells interact with real-world communication will yield useful information for social practices. “This holds promises for therapy, education and virtual environments.”
SGW Open Competitie XS
NWO's Open Competition XS grant Domain SGW aims to encourage curiosity-driven and daring research within the social sciences and humanities, so that promising ideas can be explored quickly. As many as 60 researchers from various Dutch universities were awarded grants of up to €50,000 this round.