Bridging Research and Editorial Vision: A Conversation With Arturo Hernandez

How do the roles of researcher and editor inform each other? What can this intersection tell us about the future of psychological science? 

In this episode of Under the Cortex, Arturo Hernandez, Professor of Psychology at the University of Houston and editor for Perspectives on Psychological Science, joins host Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum to reflect on the dynamic relationship between scientific discovery and scientific communication. Drawing from his research on bilingualism and brain plasticity, Hernandez shares how his experiences in the lab and at the editor’s desk have shaped his views on innovation, interdisciplinarity, and the evolving needs of the field. 

Send us your thoughts and questions at [email protected].

Unedited transcript

[00:00:09.650] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

What is it like to guide a major journal at the intersection of multiple disciplines? And how do the roles of researcher and editor inform and challenge each other? This is Under the Cortex. I am Özge Gürcanli Fisher Baum with the Association for Psychological Science. Today, I’m speaking with Dr. Arturo Hernández, Professor of Psychology at the University of Houston, an internationally recognized expert on bilingualism, brain plasticity, and cognitive development. In addition to his successful scholarly endeavors, Dr. Hernández has served as an editor for perspectives on psychological science, helping to shape conversations across the broader field. Today, we will talk about his journey as both a researcher and an editor, and what he has learned about the future of psychological science along the way. Arturo, welcome to Under the Cortex. 

[00:01:05.070] – Arturo Hernández 

Thank you for having me. I’m so happy to be here. 

[00:01:07.890] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

Let’s start with the big picture. What first pulled you towards studying bilingualism, and how has your view of language and cognition changed over time? 

[00:01:18.630] – Arturo Hernández 

I grew up simultaneous bilingual, Spanish and English. Actually, what really got me on this road was when I went to Brazil in college, and I I found that I was having these language loss effects from learning a third language. And when I came back, I took a class in cognitive neuropsychology. That’s when I began to realize that there was a thing called bilingual aphasia, where people who speak two languages have a brain insult and they lose language ability. And it felt like, when I read those cases, it felt like what I went through. And then a light bulb went off, and I said, Wow, I didn’t have brain damage. Why did I feel like I was losing a language? And I wanted to know the answer to Yeah. 

[00:02:00.970] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

In your research, you developed neurocomputational emergentist to capture how the brain reorganizes itself. Can you explain that a little bit to our listeners, what that theory is and why you wanted to study how the brain reorganizes itself? 

[00:02:21.750] – Arturo Hernández 

Yeah. Essentially, at the beginning, it was a experiential reorganization. When I had my two languages and I learned a third language, it’s like everything changed. It’s not just that I learned Portuguese, my Spanish changed, my English changed. The whole system had to reorganize itself to handle three languages as opposed to two. Then I decided, when I was in my 30s, that I had gone to Germany a lot, and I embarked on this journey to try to learn German, which is harder than trying to learn Portuguese, or especially for me. And so there I felt the same thing that I wasn’t Just learning German, it was like my Portuguese was changing, my Spanish was changing. Everything was reorganizing itself. I think this is a metaphor for what we feel. And in the brain, I’m sure if I could image myself, my brain would be adjusting itself and readjusting itself every time something new came in. It seems to be pervasive in cognition, but in my particular case, I experienced it in language. 

[00:03:27.840] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

Yeah. You had You have been doing research in this field. You have been also doing other things, like writing for broader audiences. I know that you have a book. How do you think about balancing depth with accessibility when you communicate science? 

[00:03:46.000] – Arturo Hernández 

I’ll take a big sigh here. I think it’s very difficult. When I wrote my first book, The Bilingual Brain, that was one journey. Then in mastery, how learning transforms our brains, minds, and bodies, I really took it that I wanted to write this for the lay reader, so someone who’s not an expert to be able to understand technical, complex things. What I landed on was basically a lot of physical analogies. So I play tennis. One example might be something like, actually, my advisor used to use this, Liz Bates. She used to say things like, if you have a brain area that’s damaged, you can’t say that that brain area is the function. Just like if you play tennis and your elbow is damaged, You don’t say that all knowledge of tennis is in your elbow. The elbow is just a really important, crucial part. And if it’s damaged, you can’t play tennis. So she would use these embodied metaphors. And in a way, the book, Mastery, the way I think about the world is I try to embody the metaphor so that people can understand it more viscerally. And then we can get to the technical part, which is, okay, how do we describe that using math, using images, using scientific writing? 

[00:05:00.050] – Arturo Hernández 

But in the end, we always fall back on an embodied metaphor. 

[00:05:03.880] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

Yeah, that’s like teaching in a way, right? How we teach science to most undergrads. You mentioned this in passing, but you are, in fact, a global researcher. You had a lot of international experiences. You have worked in places like Lipsig and San Sebastian. How have those cultural experiences shaped your approach to both research and publishing? 

[00:05:29.050] – Arturo Hernández 

I I think probably the most interesting one for me was in Lipsig because Leipzig at the time when I first went, it was 2001. So it’s actually before 1911. And the Berlin Wall had not been down that long. So when I got to Leipzig, people actually in the community, not scientific community, but in the actual physical community, did not speak English. They all spoke Russian. So that was a very eye-opening experience. You’re in this institute that’s brand new. Germany built these new institutes. I was at the Max Planck visiting. Everybody there spoke English. But then as soon as you left that bubble, everybody spoke Russian or German, and it was a very different culture. I think one thing that that taught me is how, interestingly, the scientific mission of a particular country is embedded in their history, their culture, their language. Whatever the particulars of their geography are can really influence how people do science, what kinds of questions they ask. I think in San Sebastián, it’s a similar thing. It’s the Basque country. That’s a minority language that was brought back to life, essentially. They have this institute where they’re studying Basque. So again, the geography where the Basque country is, the history of it informs the research they do. 

[00:06:53.110] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

Yeah. And I have to say, I think all your journeys For me, makes sense. It is like one step after another, and now you are the editor of perspectives, and you get to interact with researchers from around the world. I want to go back to science communication a little bit. You have experimented with new formats like audio summaries. Where do you see the real opportunities and the risks of making publishing more multimodal? 

[00:07:27.860] – Arturo Hernández 

I think we can’t replace the written The written word, for sure. The written word is here to stay. I think journal articles have to… I mean, there’s so much information. They have to be in written form. Otherwise, it would be 5,000 hours of video, 5,000 hours of audio to explain something in 20 pages or even 10. So I think that we have to have the written word. It’s just too efficient. What I do think we could do more of is try to leverage some of the other types of communication that are used now to make our findings a little bit more accessible. I know that there’s a lot of discussion about dissemination, about what scientists do, about what the relevance is. And I think having this podcast, I think it’s really important for people to realize that a scientist who studies a particular topic has a particular history, a particular life they’ve led. And I think if we try to humanize things, which I think the alternate media could do, that would really help our science communication. But I don’t think it should replace it. But I think we could augment it. 

[00:08:32.590] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

Yeah. Also, I want to especially thank you for giving a shout out to our podcast. Yes, this is exactly what we are trying to do. This is an opportunity for our listeners to hear directly from the authors who publish in our journals. You are right, it’s that personal touch. Researchers are humans, and they have their own reasons for starting their research program like yourself. You experience some language loss and you are curious about it. Here we are. I want to go back to English dominance in science. It is a current situation. I don’t want to call it an issue. What steps do you think the field and journals could take toward greater linguistic inclusivity? 

[00:09:21.510] – Arturo Hernández 

I think in the past, I remember reading sometimes journals that had the abstract in another language alongside the one in English. I think one tricky question really is, okay, which languages? So I have a colleague who’s Hungarian, and he says, Oh, I wonder. He even wrote in a comment when I wrote something somewhere about different languages. And he says, Oh, I wonder which languages those are going to be. It’s not going to be Hungarian. So of course, we have that issue as well. They’re widely spoken languages. What I would say is, of course, we can’t do it in all languages, but I do think that linguistic diversity does play a role. I think that it’s important for some researchers to feel that at least they have the ability to communicate in another language. And I think it’s important also to realize that the English language is a very particular language with a very particular type of history and structure that does alter the way we think about the world. Of course, having spoken four languages, I can get that pretty clearly in spoken English since I’m in my native speaker, so I understanding this perfectly well. 

[00:10:31.230] – Arturo Hernández 

But I also realize that there are things that are lost, not just from a person’s point of view at a personal level or their own cultural level, but also at a communication level. I think that there are limitations to that, and we should try to find ways. And I think perhaps now with technology, it may become easier to communicate in several languages. Automatic translation is not perfect, but it’s becoming much better. We could at least provide links for people to read this material in other languages. 

[00:11:06.980] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

I would like to meet your friend because I’m a Turkish speaker, and I always have that question, too. Who is making those decisions and how the parameters are chosen is always of interest to the rest of us. For example, Turkish is one of the most spoken languages in the world. It is not only spoken in Turkey, it is spoken in Europe, Europe, Turkish post-Soviet countries and all that. But yeah, I would like to see Turkish, too, in the list of those languages. 

[00:11:39.010] – Arturo Hernández 

I think, as I said, automatic translation is not perfect, but I think we have the technology now to be able to provide several languages to people to read if they would like at relatively low cost. I think there’s not much work on our part to do that, and I think it increases inclusivity. But I also think that it may change and help people see things in a different light. I think if you speak a certain language, again, I don’t know Turkish that well. I took a class from Dan Sloban, who was a very well-known developmental psycholinguist, and he talked about Turkish all the time and all the complexity of it. And I do feel languages like Turkish, again, I don’t want to make a broad generalization, but Turkish, Hungarian, I see it in German as well, that they’re resonant with science in a way that’s very different than English because of the way they’re structured. I think that sensitivity to that possibility of expressing something in a different language can help our science. It’s not just to make people comfortable. It’s because scientists themselves may see their science differently when they express it in another language, especially if they’re very proficient speakers of it. 

[00:12:54.880] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

I’m so glad you mentioned Dan Sloven. I just want to give a shout to him. He’s the advisor of the scientific grandmother of language studies and acquisition studies in Turkey, Ayhan Khoj. And Turkish is a cool language. I would agree with that. All right, let’s go back to Perspectives, APS’s journal. I’m thinking about your editorial vision for Perspectives, and I’m curious, what kinds of submissions or conversations are you most excited to encourage? 

[00:13:29.790] – Arturo Hernández 

I really have what I call the Bruno Mars theory of science, right? And what I say by Bruno Mars, and everyone says, What do I mean by that? I mean, you want to sound old but be new. So you go back in time, you take something that’s been done, and this is not unusual in music, right? And then you reformat it and you modernize it. And this has happened in art and literature, and it happens in science. What I’ve noticed, at least for me, is that when white Y2K came, right? When we turned to the 21st century, it’s almost like the 20th century was left behind. It was like that’s some other time, and now everything is new. And I feel that there’s a lot of really interesting work done in the 20th century, even in the late 19th century, late 1800s, that is really relevant for today. And I think for me, I have a really soft spot for things that were done a while back that have been brought back to light and what what those old things can tell us about the new things and shed light on questions we have today. 

[00:14:36.540] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

Bringing up Bruno Mars is a great example of another concrete example, something that we talked about in the beginning of our conversation. Great. What are your thoughts about journals growing with their communities? What engagement are you hoping to see from readers, reviewers, and early career researchers? 

[00:15:00.490] – Arturo Hernández 

I think we have a series of questions about psychological science that are really crucial. Probably we’ve been here before, but how we interact with technology, how we interact with each other. Those types of questions are really fundamentally important. Going back to my idea of old and new, we also know that people used to work on farms. Now, nobody works on a farm anymore. We know people used to work in manufacturing. There’s a future, perhaps, where nobody works in manufacturing. So we know that technology changes people, situations change. And I think it’s important for our reviewers, our readers, and our submitters, people who submit to the journal, to really think about what are the crucial things that we’re facing right now that are important questions, questions around technology and mental health. Is it really the case that technology causes people to have more mental health issues, or Or are we just more sensitive to mental health issues than we were before? Does technology improve intelligence, which is one of the theories of this Flynn effect? Or is it just that our measurements of intelligence matched technology in the 20th century, and they don’t match it today, that somehow our brain is adapting to a different environment, and the old paper and pencil tests don’t match. 

[00:16:23.740] – Arturo Hernández 

So I think they’re really crucial fundamental questions that we can get at both sides to discuss them. And I really welcome people who submit to hit these more crucial, important questions that are controversial and fall on one side, defend their point of view, knowing that somebody might fall on the other side, and that’s okay. 

[00:16:43.360] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

Yeah. I mean, that is the What is the nature of perspectives, right? What is the sometimes counterintuitive ideas about this particular topic that we take for granted? That’s why it’s a strong journal. I have been thinking about your journey as an editor and I was wondering, knowing your research, what is one belief you held early on that your research and editorial work has shifted? Because you have been doing them together for a while. Did they change each other? Just like Portuguese, changing what you knew about Spanish and English? 

[00:17:20.960] – Arturo Hernández 

That’s a good analogy. I like that. Yeah, I would say, in particular, there was a paper we’ve been working on that I thought, Oh, maybe we should go to a really high Maybe this is something that… There are people who do that. So they start at the highest impact journal and they work their way down, metrically. And that particular paper, after being a prospectus for a couple of months, I said, You know what? This one’s not going to make a high impact journal. They’re just some that are too specialized, they’re too niche, and it’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s perfectly fine. I think that’s the one thing that I’ve really started to realize is what’s a readership? So I began I’ve begun to understand exactly what the readership is. And every journal has a readership, just like when you publish a book, they ask you who your market is. Who is it for? Is it for academics? Is it for lay people? Is it for someone who wants to cook? That’s another market. So I think the similar type of idea I’ve realized in editing journals is that every journal has its target audience. 

[00:18:27.800] – Arturo Hernández 

And so as a scholar, I now realize that it’s okay if this journal didn’t match your audience or the submission did not match the target’s audience, that’s not a failure on anybody’s part. It’s just part of what happens in publishing is that you have to be at the right target audience. And of course, they use the word gatekeepers. That seems to be a word that pops up nowadays, right? But there are people who are there, and their sensibilities is going to influence what gets published. I mean, that’s just It’s impossible not to be that way. 

[00:19:04.900] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

Multidisciplinarity is also giving you these perspectives because it is also about who your audience is. For interdisciplinary research, this very same product can be perceived very differently from different set of scholars. In your research and academic journey, you have mentored across many disciplines. But What lessons from mentoring do you think will influence your approach as an editor? 

[00:19:36.070] – Arturo Hernández 

One thing that I will make a shout out for Reviewer Zero. Reviewer Zero is really good. This is Goldrick, who’s doing work on trying to train editors and reviewers on how to review, and of course, also people who submit on what to do when you get a review. But I think one suggestion he had, which was really good, is to You always write something encouraging for the author, right? Something to let them know that you’ve read and what path they might take or what advice you would give them to keep going forward, as opposed to just having either a rejection, especially in the case of rejection. I think that’s really important to say, this is a really interesting article. I really read it, and I think people would read it, but not in this journal, because I have to be faithful to the readership of this journal. But it’s okay as a person to let them know you can find a home. And I think if you find the right readership, this will really have an impact. And there are cases where I’ve done that more than I would have in the past. And I’ve gotten thank you emails for rejections, which is nice to do. 

[00:20:47.780] – Arturo Hernández 

But just because you say no and you close the door doesn’t mean that you can’t let them know some piece of advice that can help them to go forward. And I think sometimes we underestimate that when we’re in this work. Work, that there’s a human at the other side and that any words you give them can encourage them to keep going. 

[00:21:06.390] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

Yeah, I’m so glad you mentioned Reviewer Zero. For our listeners, I want to say we hosted them at our professional development series, so they can go to a APS’s website and find that professional development webinar. They will learn a lot. Also, Reviewer Zero is tying me to our next question. Collectives like Reviewer Zero is important because the field is becoming more reflective about equity and representation. There are gatekeepers or do different people feel differently when they have a rejection? How do they respond? All that. How are you thinking about bringing equity into not just who gets published, but who shapes the editorial process? 

[00:21:54.360] – Arturo Hernández 

We had to choose our associate editors for perspectives, and I very bent on doing an open call. Everybody that has come in are people that I didn’t know previously. I never had any contact with them before. I think it’s important for people to do that when they are in these positions, to be able to do an open call, to allow other voices to come through, international voices, also people from minoritized populations, and then non-minority voices, too. We represent the world. We represent the United States in different ways and as much as we can. I think that that’s important to have that as our guiding principle, knowing that it’s never going to be perfect. We don’t have 500 associate editors or 5,000 or 20,000 to cover every single instance of variability in human experience. But at least we should try to have ourselves open. And we’re always going to use our biases to choose But the point is, try to widen those. So for example, we have one editor from Poland, an associate editor. I would have never thought of finding an associate editor from Poland. That just would not be something that I… It’s not that I would exclude Poland, but I haven’t been to Poland. 

[00:23:19.040] – Arturo Hernández 

I would not have thought that I don’t know anybody there. And we have one because she’d look great, and she applied quickly, and she’s been great. So again, I I think it’s important to carry that as a way of thinking. Open calls, allowing things to come in without cutting them off immediately. 

[00:23:40.660] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

Yeah, you’re right. We all have our biases because we are also just humans, right? But being open to things is important. Definitely, open calls in situations like this prevent us from staying in echo chambers. Our Our field is evolving into an exciting direction, I feel like. As it tackles replication, open science, and interdisciplinarity, where do you think perspectives can make the biggest difference? 

[00:24:15.600] – Arturo Hernández 

I think what perspectives can do, and I hope that we will get that, is competing submissions on separate sides. They sometimes call friendly or rival collaborations where people have different hypotheses They actually try to agree on what the experiment would be, what the outcome would be that would support one side or the other side. I think you can do this theoretically, too, where people have different points of view, and they express each one of their points of view. I think that’s really important to do. I think sometimes it’s important to read what you think are two really good arguments, and you can’t tell the difference, like why one might be right or wrong. They both seem really, really convincing. I think dealing with that ambiguity is really important and being able to realize that science is hard and that people can make really good arguments for both sides, opposing sides, and you can’t tell which one you like better. You believe both of them. 

[00:25:21.480] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

You partially answered my last question, but I will ask it anyway. If you could leave listeners with one hope for the future of psychological science, what would it be? 

[00:25:34.180] – Arturo Hernández 

I think we are in a period of, at a lot of different levels, trying to figure out who we are as humans. I think we’ve always been doing that, but we have now a set of tools. We can track our fitness, we can track our sleep, we can track so many things about ourselves. We can understand ourselves in ways that we could not with the level of detail and information we could not in the past. I think psychological science is going to play a fundamental role as a hub science, as a bridge between science and humanities and social sciences, in trying to figure out who we are and how we move forward in the world. 

[00:26:21.910] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

That wraps up our conversation for today. Arturo, thank you so much for joining us. 

[00:26:27.190] – Arturo Hernández 

Oh, thank you. 

[00:26:29.360] – APS’s Özge Gürcanlı Fischer Baum 

A special thank you to Dr. Hernández for offering a rare glimpse into how the roles of researcher and editor complement and challenge each other, and for sharing his reflections on the evolving landscape of psychological science. If you enjoyed this conversation, visit psychologicalscience.org and make sure to follow Under the Cortex for more conversations with the scientists shaping the future of the field. Would you like to reach us? Send us your thoughts and questions at [email protected].