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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.
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Allan R. Wagner
Yale University William James Fellow Award Allan Wagner has been a major innovator of powerful concepts that have revolutionized theories of habituation, classical conditioning, and instrumental conditioning. His proposals, in collaboration with University of Pennsylvania psychology professor Robert Rescorla, of the fundamental laws of conditioning provided significant hypotheses that have dominated and reshaped the understanding of associative processes. The Rescorla-Wagner Model of Pavlovian conditioning assumes that learning is determined by the discrepancy between what is expected to happen and what actually happens.
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John R. Weisz
Harvard University James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award John Weisz has committed his scientific career to improving the lives of children and adolescents who have serious emotional and behavioral problems. His research focuses on promoting youth mental health through evidence-based intervention. Through his deployment-focused model and his own research, he has promoted the idea that both interventions and intervention science are enhanced when treatment development and testing are carried out in the clinical care contexts for which the interventions are ultimately intended.
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Douglas L. Medin
Northwestern University William James Fellow Award Best known for his research on concepts and categorization, Doug Medin studies how our ideas of the natural world develop, examining biological thought from a cross-cultural perspective He also investigates the role of culture and moral values in the decision-making process. Through a collaboration with researchers on the Menominee Reservation in Wisconsin and the American Indian Center in Chicago, Medin has explored the scientific reasoning orientations of children across cultures, as well as across urban versus rural populations.
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Janellen Huttenlocher
University of Chicago (retired) William James Fellow Award In a remarkable career, Janellen Huttenlocher has published on a range of research topics, including language, spatial coding in adults and children, quantitative development, and memory. She is a major figure, both within these subfields and in psychology at large. Huttenlocher has been particularly interested in the role of the child’s environment in the development of cognitive skills. One of her most famous findings is that the verbal behavior of parents and teachers not only determined children’s vocabulary growth, but also their grammatical learning.
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Marilynn Brewer
Ohio State University (Professor Emerita) University of New South Wales William James Fellow Award APS Past President Marilynn Brewer is internationally recognized for her contributions to research in social cognition, especially social identify and intergroup relations. Her work has focused on social identity, collective decision making, prejudice, and intergroup relations. Her exceptionally rich and rigorous career has spanned several decades and several continents.
