-
Larry Jacoby
Washington University in St. Louis William James Fellow Award Larry Jacoby is one of the world’s foremost researchers on memory — specifically on the distinction between consciously controlled and automatic processes. The distinction is useful for better understanding of age-related differences in memory performance, and for improved diagnosis and treatment of memory deficits. Under Jacoby’s leadership, the Aging, Memory & Cognitive Control Lab in Washington University’s psychology department has centered on questions related to cognitive control and to subjective experience. Other research extends the consciously controlled/automatic distinction to the domain of social psychology.
-
John Swets
BBN Technologies (retired) William James Fellow Award John Swets is the intellectual father of signal detection theory (SDT) — an idea he borrowed from World War II radar experts and adapted for the study of human decision making. He has played a key role in adapting SDT as a central tool in the study of perception, and ultimately in the field of medical diagnostics. Both radar and the human mind have trouble detecting the few meaningful signals amid random noise. The tool that Swets and his colleagues developed — the so-called receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve — points the way to the best decision threshold for each unique problem.
-
Ellen M. Markman
Stanford University William James Fellow Award Ellen Markman’s work has covered a range of issues in cognitive development. She conducted some of the pioneering research on the development of comprehension monitoring in children. Much of her work has addressed questions about the relationship between language and thought in children focusing especially on categorization and inductive reasoning and on how infants and young children figure out the meanings of words. In particular, Markman addressed the question of how young children solve the inductive problem that word learning poses.
-
Ed Diener
University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign William James Fellow Award Nicknamed “Dr. Happiness,” Ed Diener is one of the leading pioneers in scientific research on happiness. He developed the Satisfaction with Life Scale and many other research protocols currently used by psychologists; he is chiefly responsible for coining and conceptualizing the term “Subjective Well-Being (SWB)” — how people experience the quality of their lives. According to Diener’s research, there is a positive level of SWB throughout the world, with the possible exception of extremely poor countries.
-
Wide-Eyed Fear Expressions May Help Us – and Others – to Locate Threats
Wide-eyed expressions that typically signal fear may enlarge our visual field and mutually enhance others’ ability to locate threats, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The research, conducted by psychology graduate student Daniel Lee of the University of Toronto with advisor Adam Anderson, suggests that wide-eyed expressions of fear are functional in ways that directly benefit both the person who makes the expression and the person who observes it. The findings show that widened eyes provide a wider visual field, which can help us to locate potential threats in our environment.
-
Uta Frith
University College London and University of Aarhus William James Fellow Award An internationally renowned developmental psychologist, Uta Frith has pioneered much of the current research into the cognitive neuroscience of autism and dyslexia. In fact, she is regarded as one of the first scientists to recognize autism as a condition of the brain rather than the outcome of detached parenting, a conclusion she argued for persuasively in her seminal 1989 book Autism: Explaining the Enigma.
