Awards for Distinguished Scientific Contributions: Edward Smith.

Discusses the contributions of Edward Smith, one of three recipients of the 1997 American Psychological Association (APA) Awards for Distinguished Scientific Contributions. Smith is recognized for his research in cognition, including word perception, semantic memory, concept use, and reasoning. A selected bibliography is appended. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Structural invariance and age-related performance differences in face cognition.

Perceiving and memorizing faces swiftly and correctly are important social competencies. The organization of these interpersonal abilities and how they change across the life span are still poorly understood. We investigated changes in the mean and covariance structure of face cognition abilities across the adult life span. A sample of 448 participants, with age ranging from 18 to 88 years, completed a battery of 15 face cognition tasks. After establishing a measurement model of face cognition that distinguishes between face perception, face memory, and the speed of face cognition, we used multiple group models and age-weighted measurement models to explore age-related changes. The modeling showed that the loadings and intercepts of all measures are age invariant. The factor means showed substantial decrements with increasing age. Age-related decrements in performance were strongest for the speed of face cognition but were also salient for face perception and face memory. The onset of age decrements is apparent in the 60s for face perception, in the late 40s for face memory, and in the early 30s for speed of face cognition. Implications of these findings on a theoretical and methodological level are discussed, and potential consequences for applied settings are considered. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Distinguished Scientific Contribution Awards: 1969: Citation for Herbert Alexander Simon.

Gives a citation to Herbert Alexander Simon, "For his leadership in the development of new theories of thinking and of its relation to perception, attention, memory, and language. By viewing man's rational and social efforts to adapt to his environment in terms of information-processing systems, he and his colleagues have been able to apply computer science and optimization theory fruitfully to a wide range of important and difficult problems of cognition, with results that have revitalized this ancient and central topic in the science of psychology." The citation is followed by a biography and a list of Simon's scientific publications. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology: Adam K. Anderson.

Adam K. Anderson, recipient of the Award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology, is cited for his outstanding contribution to understanding the representation of emotion and its influence on cognition. By combining psychological and neuroscience techniques with rigorous and creative experimental designs, Anderson has advanced affective science by introducing new and exciting research domains and answering important questions that were previously unexplored. He has extended our appreciation of the importance of facial expressions by demonstrating their role in perception. Along with the citation, a biography and selected bibliography of Anderson's work are presented. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Emotion responsivity, social cognition, and functional outcome in schizophrenia.

Social functioning deficits have long been a defining feature in schizophrenia, but relatively little research has examined how emotion responsivity influences functional outcome in this disorder. The goal of the current study was to begin to elucidate the relationships between emotion responsivity, social cognition, and functional outcome in schizophrenia. Participants were 40 outpatients diagnosed with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (4th ed.; American Psychiatric Association, 1994) and 40 controls. Each participant completed measures of emotion responsivity, social cognition (both emotion and social perception), and functional outcome. Individuals with schizophrenia demonstrated somewhat reduced emotion responsivity for positive and negative stimuli, as well as deficits in both social cognition and functional outcome, in comparison with controls. Additionally, results indicated that both social perception and emotion responsivity were positively correlated with functional outcome. Importantly, the relationship of emotion responsivity to functional outcome was not mediated by social perception and showed a significant relationship to functional outcome independent of social cognition. This finding suggests that emotion responsivity is an important factor in understanding functional outcome in schizophrenia. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Wendell Richard Garner (1921-2008).

Wendell Richard Garner was born on January 21, 1921, in Buffalo, New York, and died quietly on August 14, 2008, in Redding, Connecticut. He was an experimental psychologist who changed the way researchers study human perception and cognition. He provided new knowledge about how people process information and structure and about how to ask scientific questions. Three classes of his contributions are particularly noteworthy. His concept of converging operations, that outcomes of different studies converge on a common concept, paved the way to powerful analytic techniques, such as additive factors modeling. His information and structure ideas shaped research in perception and cognition and pattern recognition. His perceptual independence notions set the stage for hundreds of studies of dimensional independence and interaction, of perceptual integrality and separability, and of dimensional attention that are still actively pursued. Life for Tex was not all science and administration. He collaborated on Earnshaw Cook's Percentage Baseball (1964) and briefly consulted with the Baltimore Orioles baseball club. I asked why he did not similarly analyze football for the Baltimore Colts. He said it might spoil his love for that game. After his death, nonsolicited kudos circulating on the Internet included such comments as "I wish I had known him" and "I didn't know him, but I did know his elegant and insightful work." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Individual differences in perceiving and recognizing faces—One element of social cognition.

Recognizing faces swiftly and accurately is of paramount importance to humans as a social species. Individual differences in the ability to perform these tasks may therefore reflect important aspects of social or emotional intelligence. Although functional models of face cognition based on group and single case studies postulate multiple component processes, little is known about the ability structure underlying individual differences in face cognition. In 2 large individual differences experiments (N = 151 and N = 209), a broad variety of face-cognition tasks were tested and the component abilities of face cognition—face perception, face memory, and the speed of face cognition—were identified and then replicated. Experiment 2 also showed that the 3 face-cognition abilities are clearly distinct from immediate and delayed memory, mental speed, general cognitive ability, and object cognition. These results converge with functional and neuroanatomical models of face cognition by demonstrating the difference between face perception and face memory. The results also underline the importance of distinguishing between speed and accuracy of face cognition. Together our results provide a first step toward establishing face-processing abilities as an independent ability reflecting elements of social intelligence. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Distinguished Professional Contribution Award for 1978: Arthur L. Benton.

Arthur L. Benton was provided the Distinguished Professional Contribution Award because he is a scholar who has done much to stimulate interest in the history of thought about the brain and its role in perception and cognition, an investigator whose research over the past 40 years has helped to erect a new discipline, the neuropsychology of human cognition. Arthur L. Benton is a leader and one of the principal architects of neuropsychology, giving it direction, attracting students from many fields, setting standards of objectivity and experimental control where subjective methods previously prevailed, bringing scientific discipline and a sense of optimism to the now burgeoning field. His interests are uncommonly broad, and his writings and forceful discussion in many areas have had important influence on the thinking of neurologists, psychologists, and psychiatrists both in this country and in Europe, Japan, and Australia. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Obituary: William G. Chase (1940–1983).

Presents an obituary for William G. Chase, professor of psychology at Carnegie-Mellon University, where he spent the last 15 years of his life in research and teaching. Chase made important contributions to a range of areas in cognition and left behind seminal publications on sentence comprehension, perception and chess, and memory span. He was especially concerned with discovering methods that cast light on the mental representations people use in performing cognitive tasks, and particularly with the representation of spatial knowledge, a concern central to the areas of research in which he was interested. Chase died in 1983. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Philip S. Holzman (1922-2004).

Philip S. Holzman died of a stroke on June 1, 2004, in Boston, Massachusetts, at the age of 82. As a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, as one of the researchers who first probed the meaning of individual differences in perception and cognition, and as the founder of a field of research central to the pathophysiology and genetic vulnerability for schizophrenia, he was one of the most remarkably accomplished scientist-clinicians of our time. Holzman was the Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Harvard University, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and director of the Psychology Research Laboratory at McLean Hospital. This obituary discusses Holzman's life, his research, practice, teaching career, and his many achievements. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Music cognition and the cognitive psychology of film structure.

Early 20th century psychologists drew attention to similarities between mental processes elicited by film and by music. Contemporary film theorists have also noted analogous film and music structures, and contemporary psychologists have used musical metaphors in discussions of film perception and cognition. These psychological parallels have not been explored through experimental research, in part, because of scarce experimental psychological research on film in contrast to the vast amount on music. The present article proposes that music cognition research provides insight into the perception of formal structure in film, taking as support an analysis of the film The Red Violin. The analysis reveals similarities between film and music with respect to 3 kinds of musical structure: central reference (tonality), large-scale form (rondo), and small-scale form (motif). Experiments are proposed to reveal the similarity in the mental processes engaged by music and film for each of the three types of structure, respectively. The application of principles and methods of music cognition to film psychology supports the intuitions of early psychological film theorists. The approach also generalizes to other art forms. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Editorial.

This issue features an invited paper by Peter Dodwell, one of Canada's foremost experimental psychologists, who is internationally recognized for his research in visual perception. Dodwell has investigated issues related to spatial vision, motion perception, visual distortion and, recently, mechanisms of the well-known McCulloch Effect. In the article, Dodwell shows that, for all its diversity, his research program has been guided by a couple of central themes. The article reveals, in semi-autobiographical style, the influences that shaped his thinking and the special impact of W. C. Hoffman and his Lie Transformation Group Model of Neuropsychology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Misperceiving negotiation counterparts: When situationally determined bargaining behaviors are attributed to personality traits.

Several experiments provided evidence that negotiators make systematic errors in personality-trait attributions for the bargaining behaviors of their counterparts. Although basic negotiation behavior is highly determined by bargaining positions, negotiators primarily interpret their counterpart's behavior in terms of the counterpart's personality, such as his or her level of cooperativeness or agreeableness. Data support a model of 4 processes that contribute to misperceptions: (a) the primacy of situations in determining bargaining behavior, (b) the primacy of personality traits in attributions, (c) the lack of sufficient information about the other's situation to discount personality attributions, and (d) the potentially self-confirming consequences of personality attributions for subsequent interactions. The authors discuss implications for research areas such as social cognition in negotiation, accuracy in social perception, and dynamics of belief confirmation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Space perception and William James's metaphysical presuppositions.

William James's overtly philosophical work may be more continuous with his psychological work than is sometimes thought. His Essays in Radical Empiricism can be understood as an explicit statement of the absolute presupposition that formed the basis of Jamesian psychology: that direct experience is primary and has to be taken at face value. An examination of James's theory of space perception suggests that, even in his early work, he presupposed the primacy of direct experience, and that later changes in his account of space perception can be understood as making his view more consistent with this presupposition. In his earlier view of space perception, James argued that sensations were directly experienced as spatial, though he accepted that spatial relations between sensations may be constructed by higher order thought. In his later view, however, James argued that spatial relations were just as directly experienced as sensations. The work of T. H. Green may have prompted James to recognize the full consequence of his ideas and to realize that taking experience at face value required that spatial relations be thought of as intrinsic to experience rather than the result of intellectual construction. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Perceptual organization and intelligence: A further study.

This experiment was a replication of that of Krech and Calvin (Levels of perceptual organization and cognition. J. abnorm. soc. Psychol., 1953, 48, 394-400) using modified techniques. The correlation previously reported by Krech and Calvin between intelligence and perception, did not obtain upon replication. The data confirmed their finding that progression over trials was usually from low to high perceptual organization, but did not show a correlation between perception and stimulus-exposure time from 0.01 to 1.00 second. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Making up the mind: How the brain creates our mental world.

Reviews the book, Making up the mind: How the brain creates our mental world by Chris Frith (see record 2007-00531-000). This book directly addresses the fundamental question as to how the brain creates the inner world of humans from an empirical perspective. It provides an excellent introduction to some of the most exciting recent cognitive-neuroscience research along the way. To find an answer to his question, the author takes a broad stance and draws on advances in areas as diverse as action control, visual perception, language, emotion, social cognition, and schizophrenia. From this research, he derives several general principles that aim to capture the relationship between mind and brain in more abstract terms. These principles provide the thread that makes not only for a thought-provoking, unifying theoretical account, but also for an impressively cohesive narrative. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

New perspectives on the effects of action on perceptual and cognitive development.

This special section was motivated by a resurgence in the view that it is impossible to investigate perceptual and cognitive development without considering how it is affected by, and intertwined with, infants' and children's action in the world. This view has long been foundational to the field, yet contemporary investigations of the effects of acting on cognition and perception have been limited. The research showcased in this section indicates that this trend is changing as researchers consider anew the ways in which cognition derives structure from action. The work presented here illustrates the breadth of these potential effects across ages and domains of development, and it highlights the breadth of methods that can be recruited to investigate them. This new research focus provides insight for the mechanisms by which action affects perception and cognition and at the same time reveals that much remains to be learned. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Solomon E. Asch (1907–1996): Obituary.

Memorializes Solomon E. Asch, the Gestalt psychologist who left his imprint on midcentury academic psychology by combining the fundamental tenets of Gestalt psychology with his own belief in the basic rationality and decency of the social human being. Central to Asch's approach was the idea that social perception, like "ordinary" perception, is relational. This is illustrated most clearly in his classic studies on impression formation, and perhaps his most celebrated work, his studies of persuasion and social pressure. Most of his other work, also within the Gestalt tradition, concerned association, framing effects, thinking, memory, and metaphor. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

On the primacy of cognition.

Replies to an article by R. B. Zajonc (see record 1984-30610-001) in which Zajonc differed greatly from the present author in his conceptualization of emotion and its relations with cognition, as well as in his evaluation of the evidence. The boundaries of emotion as a phenomenon and whether sensory preferences can be regarded as emotions are discussed, and the evidence Zajonc regards as supporting his claims for the independence of cognition and emotion and the primacy of emotion are analyzed. Finally, the indeterminancy of the issue of cognitive vs emotional primacy is emphasized. (30 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Our developing knowledge of infant perception and cognition.

Comments that exciting advances in infant perception research have moved this field into the forefront of research in infant development. This paper identifies infant testing procedures and illustrates how their application has yielded a consistent picture of visual information processing in the first months of life. A recent advance is the recognition that the study of memory and cognition in infancy addresses identical issues raised in the study of cognition in older children and adults. The author provides examples of research, such as the study of infant concept acquisition, to illustrate this shared theoretical focus. Finally, the paper discusses contributions that infant perception research can make to the diagnosis and remediation of perceptual-cognitive deficits in high-risk infants. (35 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)