List of psychologists

Saul Sternberg investigated the timing of mental processes using controlled reaction time experiments. In a 1966 memory-scanning study, participants judged whether a test symbol belonged to a short memorized set. Mean reaction time increased with set length, motivating an account involving rapid internal comparisons.^[ref]

An illustrative decomposition is $T(n)=a+bn$, where $n$ is the number of stored symbols, $a$ summarizes size-independent time and $b$ summarizes additional time per item. If $a=300\mathrm{ms}$ and $b=35\mathrm{ms}$ per item, increasing $n$ from two to six increases predicted time from $370$ to $510\mathrm{ms}$. These are invented teaching values, not reported estimates.

The methodological insight is to turn a proposed mental process into a pattern of quantitative predictions. A linear trend by itself does not uniquely prove one internal architecture; competing processes and strategies must be compared. This distinction keeps the observed timing effect separate from the explanatory model.

Institutional profile: psychology.sas.upenn.edu/people/saul-sternberg .

George Sperling investigated the amount and duration of information available after a brief visual presentation. His 1960 experiments used partial report paradigms to separate limits on what observers could report from limits on the information initially available.^[ref]

The key intervention selected only part of a symbol display for report, including conditions with instructions after the display. If the selected subset can be reported better than an exhaustive response would suggest, whole-report performance alone has underestimated accessible information. Delaying the cue then adds a temporal question: what remains available by the time selection is requested?^[ref]

This connects perception, attention and sensory memory while giving them distinct experimental roles. A report is a behavioural output, and its limitations need not map one-to-one onto the observer's original visual experience. Sperling's methodological contribution was to make that ambiguity experimentally tractable rather than settle it by asking only for an introspective description.

Author-hosted research archive: sites.socsci.uci.edu/~whipl/staff/sperling/sperling.html .

Alan Welsh coauthored, with William D. Marslen-Wilson, a 1978 experimental study of spoken word recognition in continuous speech. The experiments compared a shadowing task, in which listeners repeated speech, with a mispronunciation detection task performed while following a written text.^[ref]

Where an altered pronunciation occurred within a word affected performance, while context influenced the tasks differently. Comparing tasks helped separate an effect of incoming sound from an effect of instructions or expectations. The work contributed to the cohort model, which treats recognition as progressive evaluation of word candidates rather than waiting for an entire utterance.^[ref]

William D. Marslen-Wilson investigated the time course of spoken word recognition. Work with Alan Welsh helped develop the cohort model: early sounds make several words plausible, and subsequent evidence constrains that lexical cohort.^[ref]

Their experiments manipulated pronunciation within continuous speech rather than presenting only isolated written words. This made the timing of incoming information part of the question. A model can explain a listener's eventual correct answer yet still fail to explain how context and partial speech influence the response while the word unfolds.^[ref]

Natalie Sebanz investigates the cognitive mechanisms that allow people to perform joint action. Her work examines how individuals anticipate a partner's actions and coordinate their own actions with them.^[ref]

In a 2003 experiment with Günther Knoblich and colleagues, two people divided the responses of a spatial stimulus-response compatibility task between them. Each person made one response. A compatibility effect appeared when the task was shared, resembling performance when a single person controlled both responses; it was absent when the one-response task was performed alone.^[ref]

The comparison made another person's role experimentally relevant while retaining the individual's response requirement. It supported the idea that a partner's available action can enter one's own task representation. This is a claim about measured performance under specified conditions; identifying its precise neural implementation requires additional evidence.

Günther Knoblich studies how people perceive actions and coordinate joint action. His experiments ask how the presence and possible actions of another person change an individual's own performance.^[ref]

In a 2003 experiment with Natalie Sebanz and colleagues, the two responses of a task were distributed between two people. Each participant made only one response. The same task was also performed alone, and compared with a condition where one person made both responses. A spatial stimulus-response compatibility effect appeared when the one-response task was shared with another participant, resembling the effect in the ordinary two-response task.^[ref]

This supplied evidence that another person's available action could enter the organization of one's own response. The comparison was informative because the required individual response could be held constant while the social arrangement changed. A behavioural compatibility effect supports a functional account of action representation; it does not by itself identify a particular neuron type or prove that every possible social context uses one mechanism.

Marc Grosjean has investigated the time course of cognition through measurements of action. In a 2005 study with colleagues, he analysed mouse tracking data to test how spoken word recognition unfolds while a listener is already moving toward a possible answer.^[ref]

Participants saw two pictured objects and heard the name of one. A target such as “candle” could appear beside “candy”, whose name shares its beginning, or beside a phonologically unrelated object. The investigators sampled the cursor's coordinates during the movement, rather than recording only its endpoint. Movements toward the correct object were drawn farther toward the competing object in the similar-name condition.^[ref]

The example makes a measurement distinction concrete. Two trials can end with the same correct click yet follow different paths, revealing phonological competition that accuracy alone would miss. The cursor is an observable motor response, so conclusions about internal representations still require an explicit model connecting movement with language processing.

Herbert A. Simon studied cognition through explicit models of information processing. His work with William G. Chase compared how chess players of different skill recalled positions and copied arrangements. Expert performance depended strongly on meaningful configurations, supporting an account in terms of learned patterns organized by chunking rather than an unrestricted increase in general short-term storage.^[ref]

A familiar arrangement can be encoded as one organized pattern where a novice sees many separate pieces. Destroying those relationships by random placement reduces the usefulness of such knowledge. The contrast makes expertise a testable property of representations and experience.

William G. Chase investigated how expertise changes perception and human memory. In experiments with Herbert A. Simon, chess players reconstructed briefly viewed positions and copied positions in view. Grouping and recall differed with skill and with the structure of the arrangement.^[ref]

The expert advantage was especially marked for meaningful chess positions. Random arrangements weakened the value of learned patterns, helping distinguish domain knowledge from a universal increase in immediate storage. The resulting chunking account explains how a player can retain relationships among pieces without encoding every piece as an unrelated item.

Jeff Spies co-founded the Center for Open Science with Brian Nosek in 2013. Their work connected research practice with shared infrastructure, including the Open Science Framework, for making study materials, data and analysis more inspectable.^[ref]

The scientific contribution concerns the conditions for checking a claim: an accessible analysis script lets another researcher inspect how observations became a reported result. Infrastructure can support computational reproducibility, while a fresh experiment remains a separate test of whether a finding recurs.^[ref]

Brian Nosek studies research practices and scientific reproducibility. He co-founded the Center for Open Science with Jeff Spies in 2013, linking infrastructure such as the Open Science Framework to efforts to make scientific work easier to inspect and repeat.^[ref]

His account of a prospective replication project describes an explicit question: must promising results weaken when tested again? Large samples, shared materials and preregistration helped separate proposed methodological causes from an inevitable decline. The broader contribution is to treat the reliability of scientific practice itself as an empirical research problem.^[ref]

Susan E. Brandon studies associative learning. Her experimental work examined how one conditioned stimulus modulates a discrete conditioned reflex in rabbits, while her theoretical work helped develop the SOP model. Separating the elicited reflex from a broader modulatory influence allows a learning model to make predictions about interactions between different trained cues. ^[ref]

David J. Sanderson studies animal learning and memory in animals. In mice lacking the GluA1 receptor subunit, his study compared short- and long-term spatial memory in animals using novelty preference. Impaired short-term performance together with preserved or enhanced longer-term performance supports distinguishing the processes sampled by different tasks, rather than treating every result as one general memory in animals score. ^[ref]

Robert C. Honey studies associative learning and the contribution of the hippocampus to behavior. His lesion experiment compared responses to audiovisual sequences that preserved familiar components while changing their trained relationship. Such a comparison separates detection of an unfamiliar item from detection of a mismatch between expected associates. ^[ref]

Yerco E. Uribe-Bahamonde contributed computational analyses of habituation using the SOP model. The work investigates whether one model of stimulus processing can reproduce several behavioral characteristics across training conditions. These simulations test consequences of the specified mathematical rules; agreement with behavior does not make the model’s internal states direct recordings of neuronal activity. ^[ref]

Anthony Dickinson studies associative learning and animal cognition. His work includes experiments on retrospective revaluation, in which later information changes judgments about an earlier cause, and the scrub jay cache-recovery study with Nicky Clayton. The former asks how associations alter causal judgments; the latter tests what, where and when information in a nonverbal task. ^[ref][ref]

A researcher who developed the SOP model of associative learning. The model uses different activation states of stimulus representations to explain how recent experience changes subsequent processing and association formation. It connects effects such as habituation with classical conditioning within a common account of memory in animals.^[ref]

Waka Fujisaki studied temporal recalibration between sight and sound. Exposure to an audiovisual timing relationship can be followed by tests of perceived simultaneity and transfer. Comparing these outcomes asks whether adaptation changes a shared timing estimate or only one task-specific response tendency. ^[ref]

Lyn Y. Abramson contributed an influential reformulation of learned helplessness in humans. The account distinguishes explanations that differ in internality, stability and generality, linking attributional style to predictions about self-esteem and persistence of difficulty. It is a theoretical explanation to be tested against observations, rather than a claim that all depression has one identical cause. ^[ref]

A researcher whose experiments helped establish learned helplessness. Work on escape learning compared animals with different histories of control over aversive events. The experiments made controllability, rather than exposure alone, central to interpreting later performance; extending this animal paradigm to human depression requires additional theory and evidence.^[ref]

Björn Rasch studies human memory and sleep-associated processing. His odor-cue experiment presented a learning-associated odor during slow-wave sleep and measured later performance on a declarative memory task. Manipulating the timing and association of a cue helps distinguish reactivation of learned material from a general benefit of any odor or any interruption during sleep. ^[ref]

A psychologist who coauthored the 1986 account of learning internal representations by backpropagation. The method adjusts connection weights in a multilayer artificial neural network using how those weights contribute to an output error. It explains how hidden units can acquire useful representations rather than requiring every intermediate feature to be specified by hand.^[ref]

Julia Simner studied synesthesia, including its population prevalence. Sampling participants and checking consistency of reported associations helps distinguish an estimate based on a broader sample from one based only on people who identify themselves as synesthetic. Consistency checks provide evidence about particular experiences rather than one universal diagnostic test. ^[ref]

Richard J. Stevenson studied learned contributions to flavor. Pairing an odor with a sweet or sour taste and later judging the odor alone tests whether experience changes its perceived taste-like properties. This separates a property of the odorant from a judgment shaped by its previous pairing history. ^[ref]

Paul Rozin studied food perception and how olfactory information contributes to flavor. Comparing external smelling with odor experienced during eating raises a source-attribution question: a contribution originating in smell can be experienced as part of taste. The sensory input and the reported location or category of experience are therefore distinguishable. ^[ref]

Richard M. Warren demonstrated phonemic restoration using interrupted speech. Comparing replacement by another sound with a silent gap tests whether perceived continuity can exceed the physically available speech signal. The experiment shows how context and competing sound affect what is heard rather than simply measuring detection of an omitted acoustic segment. ^[ref]

Jeremy M. Wolfe studied visual search, including how target prevalence affects misses. Rare-target experiments distinguish seeing a target from deciding when to stop searching, while guided search models specify how information directs selection. A high miss rate can therefore reflect a decision policy as well as sensory discriminability. ^[ref]

A psychologist associated with feature integration theory and experiments on illusory conjunctions.

N. Jeremy Hill developed statistical methods for fitting psychometric functions with a collaborator. Their work examines sampling, goodness of FIT and the behavior of parameter estimates. A fitted threshold is consequently an inference from a model and sampled responses, rather than a directly observed immutable boundary of perception. The author name follows the original paper. ^[ref]

Felix A. Wichmann studied psychophysics and estimation of psychometric functions. Work on fitting, sampling and model checking connects sensory thresholds to the uncertainty of the data used to estimate them. Comparing plausible FITs and their sampling behavior is important before attributing a small threshold difference to a change in perception. ^[ref]

Gabriele Jordan studied individual differences in color vision, including carriers of anomalous trichromacy. Behavioral matching, multidimensional analysis and genetic evidence address different levels of the question. Possessing candidate receptor diversity does not by itself establish behaviorally demonstrated tetrachromacy; discrimination measurements are needed to connect biology to perceptual performance. ^[ref]