The main purpose of this blog is to showcase current research that has appeared in the journals of the Psychonomic Society. Anyone who publishes in a Psychonomic Society journal is invited, in the acceptance letter, to contact the Digital Content Editor to nominate their article for a blogpost. This is the principal process by which we select articles for posting. All those posts are written by our digital team.

But there is more to this blog.

We have just added a new feature, which we call Resources for Research, that joins two of our other special sections, Digital Events, and Learning Groups.

Let’s review those special components of our blog and introduce our latest Features.

Digital events

Digital events are groups of posts, usually published back-to-back in a week, that discuss a particular topic or article of interest to the Psychonomic community. These posts are written by guest contributors with a special interest or expertise in the topic. Topics are selected by the Digital Content Editor in coordination with Springer, based on the publication of special issues or special sections of Psychonomics journals.

To date, we have had 10 digital events, and we have another one scheduled for the week of 3 December 2018 on “canine cognition.”

Learning groups

Learning groups consist of a customized selection of posts that are linked to a common landing page. Each landing page has a unique link and can be customized by instructors who want to use Psychonomics Featured Content material in their teaching. This feature has been received with some enthusiasm by students, as we explained here and here.

The ”learning groups” service is open to anyone teaching cognitive psychology. Contact the digital team if you wish to set up a landing page for your course.

Resources for research

Which brings us to our latest feature: Resources for research. This new section went live at the beginning of the week. The resources for research section provides brief summaries of selected resources for research that have been published in journals of the Psychonomic Society, typically Behavior Research Methods.

These resources may consist of linguistic norms, visual stimuli, or novel analysis techniques and software, and the like. Behavior Research Methods publishes many technically sophisticated articles that are not suitable for a blog post.

It is very difficult to turn the Manhattan phone book into a novel, and most people would resist reading a phone book for entertainment—although some people beg to differ! But that does not diminish the importance of phone books (even if they are now in electronic form): they just serve a different purpose from novels. Similarly, English word association norms for over 12,000 cue words do not readily lend themselves to a blog post, but they are nonetheless important for researchers.

The new Resources for research section acknowledges the importance of norms and other such resources for researchers, but instead of full-length blogposts it contains brief paragraphs that point researchers to the original article.

We just created this new section so its content is still limited. But if you think one of your articles in Behavior Research Methods is worthy of inclusion, contact the Digital Content Editor. The team will be delighted to link to your Quaddles or whatever else you have on offer.