Iliana Samara
Assistant Professor · Cognitive Psychology
Cognitive Psychology Unit, Leiden University
I study how people infer interest, attraction, and intention under uncertainty, combining behavioral experiments with signal detection theory, multilevel modeling, and computational approaches.
Cognitive scientist of attraction, social inference & decision under uncertainty.
The problem I study
People rarely know what others feel, want, or intend, but they nonetheless act on those guesses.
A small demonstration
Someone smiles, holds eye contact a little longer than expected, and keeps the conversation going.
The point is not that one answer is correct. The same cue supports different judgments depending on context, prior expectations, and the threshold someone uses before acting. Read that line loosely for everyone and you get what the literature calls the sexual overperception bias; read it strictly and you miss real interest. Where people place that line is what I study. Curious how far this goes? Play with the interactive demos, including a two-minute game that measures your own criterion.
Research
My research asks how attraction shapes attention, interpretation, and social decisions when the signal is noisy and the stakes are personal. I work across sexual overperception, consent clarity, mimicry and synchrony, pair-bonding, and comparative social cognition.
Recent
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2026
New on the site
Interactive demos of the ideas behind my research: measure your own d′ and criterion in a two-minute game, then explore signal detection, error management, and Bayesian updating in the browser.
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2026
New paper
A practical tutorial on signal detection theory with multilevel models for dyadic judgments is out in Methods in Psychology, with an interactive app to go with it.
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2026
New paper
Estimating consent clarity requires sampling absence, refusal, and withdrawal appears in Archives of Sexual Behavior.
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2026
New project
Helping build a new consortium and research network on cybersecurity at the faculty.