ojacobs@psych.ubc.ca
Education
Oliver is a PhD candidate whose research bridges the intersections of human-computer interaction, mind perception, and eye tracking technologies. His thesis focuses on the causes and consequences of folk psychological attributions of mind toward nonhumans and AI, in particular. He also has a special interest in examining individual differences in anthropomorphism and its relation to self-perception. His work has been published in a variety of journals, including the International Journal of Social Robotics, Cognition, Evolutionary Psychological Science, PLoS ONE, and Visual Cognition.
Research Interests
Mind perception, artificial intelligence, eye tracking, virtual reality, art perception,
Publications
Edwards, S., Jenkins, R., Jacobs, O.L, & Kingstone, A. (2024). The medium modulates the medusa effect: Perceived mind in analogue and digital images. Cognition, 249, 105827.
Jacobs, O. L., Pazhoohi, F., & Kingstone, A. (2023). Self-discrepancies in mind perception for actual, ideal, and ought selves and partners. Plos one, 18(12), e0295515.
Jacobs, O.L, Pazhoohi, F., & Kingstone, A. (2023). Brief exposure increases mind perception to ChatGPT and is moderated by the individual propensity to anthropomorphize. PsyArXiv.
Jacobs, O. L., Pazhoohi, F., & Kingstone, A. (2023). Contrapposto posture captures visual attention: An online gaze tracking experiment. Visual Cognition, 31(2), 160-167.
Jacobs, O.L., Pazhoohi, F., & Kingstone, A. (2023). Viewing images with closed eyes diminishes implied social presence. Journal of Vision, 23(9), 5780-5780.
Jacobs, O. L., Gazzaz, K., & Kingstone, A. (2022). Mind the robot! Variation in attributions of mind to a wide set of real and fictional robots. International Journal of Social Robotics, 14(2), 529-537.
Pazhoohi, F., Jacobs, O. L., & Kingstone, A. (2022). Contrapposto pose influences perceptions of attractiveness, masculinity, and dynamicity of male statues from antiquity. Evolutionary Psychological Science, 8(1), 46-55.
Anderson, N. C., Jacobs, O.L., Bischof, W. F., & Kingstone, A. (2021). Scanpath Theory in Virtual Reality. PsyArXiv.
Jacobs, O. L. (2020). Into the unknown: Head-based selection is less dependent on peripheral information than gaze-based selection in 360 VR scenes (Master’s dissertation, University of British Columbia).
Notable honours
Killam Doctoral Fellowship
NSERC CGSM
Mitacs Accelerate