Randall W. Engle

Georgia Institute of Technology

Randall Engle is responsible for developing the concept of working memory into its modern form. A professor of psychology at the Georgia Institute of Technology, he was one of the first scientists to unite experimental cognitive psychology with psychometric testing and individual differences. Engle and his students reported that individual differences in working-memory capacity predicted performance on a huge number of cognitive tasks, including reading and listening comprehension, writing ability, learning complex materials, and problem solving. He developed a number of tasks to assess working memory span and gave these tasks away, putting them on his website and writing articles with his students that provided a user’s manual. Government agencies and corporations have tapped Engle’s work in employee selection because the measures, which are strongly related to assessments of fluid intelligence, show no gender or race biases. Engle also served for a decade as editor of Current Directions in Psychological Science. Through all of this generous work, Engle integrated findings from various psychological fields to understand emotion, physical and mental health, work productivity, and social relationships. 

Arie Kruglanski

University of Maryland College Park

Arie Kruglanski’s work on lay epistemics, goal systems, and significant quest theories present among the most general and elegant theoretical frameworks in social psychology. A distinguished professor at the University of Maryland College Park, he has made a major contribution to the understanding that human reasoning is a motivated social-psychological phenomenon and that motivation is a cognitive activity. Kruglanski’s theories have inspired empirical research in various domains of psychology and have led to the development of scales that measure the need for cognitive closure and significance quest. Kruglanski has tested the applicability of his theories to a wide variety of major psychological phenomena, including persuasion, hypothesis testing, decision making, and categorization. His lab explores violent extremism, political activism, love, aggression, coping with uncertainty, and closed mindedness. His innovative research uses a variety of methods, including lab experiments, neuroscience techniques, computer modeling, text analyses, and surveys. Kruglanski’s scholarship has forever altered the landscape of motivational science.