Nicolas Fay

Biographic Data

ID4152247
NAMENicolas Fay
GIVEN NAMESNicolas
FAMILY NAMEFay
SIGNATUREFAY N
AFFILIATIONSThe University of Western Australia
ORCID0000-0001-9866-2800
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS10
TOTAL CITATIONS33
AUTHOR COUNT10
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR2010
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2025
H-INDEX2

  • Truth over falsehood

    Open AccessNicolas Fay, Keith Ransom et al.ARTICLEJournal of Personality and Social…2025

    The English poet John Milton portrayed truth as a powerful warrior capable of defeating falsehood in open combat. The spread of false information online suggests otherwise. Here, we test the persuasive power and transmission potential of true versus false messages in a controlled experimental setting, free from the effects of social media algorithms and bot amplification. Across four experiments (combined N = 4,607), we tested how perceived verac…

  • People Attribute a Range of Highly-Varied and Socially-Bound Meanings to Naturalistic Sad Facial Expressions

    Open AccessSarah de la Harpe, Romina Palermo et al.ARTICLEJournal of Nonverbal Behavior2024

    Depictions of sadness are commonplace, and here we aimed to discover and catalogue the complex and nuanced ways that people interpret sad facial expressions. We used a rigorous qualitative methodology to build a thematic framework from 3,243 open-ended responses from 41 people who participated in 2020 and described what they thought sad expressors in 80 images were thinking, feeling, and/or intending to do. Face images were sourced from a novel s…

  • A Cross-Sectional Test of Sign Creation by Children in the Gesture and Vocal Modalities

    Open AccessCasey J Lister, Tiarn Burtenshaw et al.ARTICLEChild Development2021

    Naturalistic studies show that children can create language-like communication systems in the absence of conventional language. However, experimental evidence is mixed. We address this discrepancy using an experimental paradigm that simulates naturalistic sign creation. Specifically, we tested if a sample of 6- to 12-year-old children (52 girls and 56 boys drawn from an urban, predominantly white population in Western Australia) can comprehend an…

  • Seeing synchrony

    Open AccessMargaret Catherine Macpherson, Nicolas Fay et al.ARTICLEActa Psychologica2020

  • Innovation and enculturation in child communication

    Open AccessCasey J Lister, Bradley Walker et al.ARTICLEEvolutionary Human Sciences2020Cited by: 2References: 4

  • Applying the cultural ratchet to a social artefact

    Open AccessNicolas Fay, T Mark Ellison et al.ARTICLEEvolution and Human Behavior2018

    Material artefacts evolve by cumulative cultural evolution (CCE), the accumulation of adaptive modifications over time. We present a large-scale experiment investigating the CCE of a social artefact in transmission chains, each containing 8 adult human participants (N = 408). The social artefact is what Wittgenstein calls a ‘language game’, the subset of language used to perform a particular activity; in the present study the language game is to …

  • The sky is falling

    Open AccessKeely Bebbington, Colin Macleod et al.ARTICLEEvolution and Human Behavior2016Cited by: 31References: 1

  • Iconicity

    Nicolas Fay, Mark Ellison et al.ARTICLEPragmatics & Cognition2014

    This paper explores the role of iconicity in spoken language and other human communication systems. First, we concentrate on graphical and gestural communication and show how semantically motivated iconic signs play an important role in creating such communication systems from scratch. We then consider how iconic signs tend to become simplified and symbolic as the communication system matures and argue that this process is driven by repeated inte…

  • Cultural transmission in the laboratory

    Open AccessRachael Tan, Nicolas FayARTICLEEvolution and Human Behavior2011

  • Listeners influence speakers’ perceived communication effectiveness

    Open AccessNicolas Fay, Andrew C Page et al.ARTICLEJournal of Experimental Social…2010References: 21