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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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Why people believe in conspiracy theories
Salon: We’ve written before about the historical and social aspects of conspiracy theories, but wanted to learn more about the psychology of people who believe, for instance, that the Boston Marathon bombing was a government “false flag” operation. Psychological forces like motivated reasoning have long been associated with conspiracy thinking, but scientists are learning more every year. For instance, a British study published last year found that people who believe one conspiracy theory are prone to believe many, even ones that are completely contradictory.
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Why using a mobile phone can be contagious
The Telegraph: Researchers concluded that a person was twice as likely to talk on a mobile, or check for messages, if a companion did the same. The University of Michigan study discovered that checking a phone created an “alternative outlet” for a person's attention. It also found that females were more likely to use their mobile than men because it was more “integrated into the daily lives of women”. Scientists suggested the study’s findings, published in the Human Ethology Bulletin journal, could be linked to “social exclusion”, in which a human feels the need not be left feeling “out of the loop”.
