Digital transformation affects research in almost every scientific discipline. We give a brief overview on how digital technologies have emerged into psychological science in the past and what the challenges and opportunities currently are. Providing two recent examples from our own research, we argue that interdisciplinary collaborations that make use of digital approaches without giving up a strong theoretical foundation will greatly enhance psychological research in the future.
A LONG HISTORY OF SUCCESSOne of the main principles of every scientific discipline is to find and to explain patterns in the subject of their research-for example, in the case of spatial coat textures in animals, 1 in cosmic-ray arrival directions, 2 or in spatial movements in a gardening task to detect mental burden. 3 In these examples of research, all published very recently, the authors make use of advanced computational methods in the context of, for instance, image processing, neural networks, or digital movement analysis. These approaches, that all build on recent advances in computational power and algorithm development, are one of the latest examples of how digitalization is shaping our scientific discipline.