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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
