The annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society will commence a week from today. The Society is looking forward to welcoming you to New Orleans. The program has been posted and the mobile app is available for download.

The Society is urging everyone who is planning to attend to register online rather than onsite. (My best guess is that you have already done that if you plan to attend.)

There are a few events that deserve to be highlighted:

Keynote Address

Building a More Replicable Experimental Psychology: Key Challenges

Thursday, November 15   |   8:00 p.m.-9:30 p.m.

Hal Pashler, University of California, San Diego, USA

Hal Pashler is the Distinguished Professor of Psychology at University of California, San Diego. An experimental psychologist and cognitive scientist, Pashler is best known for his studies of human attentional limitations (his analysis of the psychological refractory period effect concluded that the brain has discrete “processing bottlenecks” associated with specific types of cognitive operations) and for his work on visual attention. He has also developed and tested new methods for enhancing learning and reducing forgetting, focusing on the temporal spacing of learning and retrieval practice. More

Abstract: Over the past seven years or so, the “Replication Crisis” has revealed that a disturbing number of well-known findings in many areas of psychology are difficult or impossible to reproduce. Public confidence in the veracity of behavioral research has been seriously undermined. I will discuss some of the key intellectual challenges that the Replicability Crisis poses for behavioral science in general and “psychonomics researchers” in particular. I will contend that the lack of reproducibility that plagues certain areas of psychology is not likely to be attributable to “ubiquitous moderator effects” as some have argued. As to the core fields of cognition, attention, and perception, I will argue that due to the statistical power of within-subject designs, relatively few well-known effects in these fields are likely to be illusory. On the other hand, I will suggest that more critical attention to the discriminating power of data for choosing amongst theories, and greater focus on measurement issues (especially with respect to interactions) could promote not only empirical solidity but also deeper theoretical understanding.

Symposia

This year’s Annual Meeting includes five symposia. See below for summaries from the abstracts:

Generalization in Language and Memory

Friday, November 16, 10:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m. | Celestin E

Co-chairs: Jelena Mirkovic, York St John University, United Kingdom, and University of York, United Kingdom, and M. Gareth Gaskell, University of York, United Kingdom

Domain-general memory processes play a key role in language learning and use. For example, sleep-related memory consolidation has been shown to influence vocabulary learning, the learning of speech sounds and phonotactic regularities, and grammar learning, and both in adults and in children. In this symposium, we will examine the contribution of memory consolidation mechanisms to the process of generalization. Generalization is central to linguistic processing, from generalizing speech sounds from native to non-native speakers, to generalizing the knowledge of syntactic structures to every new sentence we read or hear. Despite this centrality, attempts to understand the nature of generalization across these domains have been rare. The symposium talks will assemble empirical findings across a range of domains (the learning of sounds, grammar, semantic representations, morphology, print-to-sound mappings), and allow us to explore how they link to the computational and neurobehavioral models of memory systems.

Should Statistics Determine the Practice of Science, or Science Determine the Practice of Statistics?

Friday, November 16, 1:30 p.m.-3:30 p.m. | Celestin E

Chair: Richard M. Shiffrin, Indiana University Bloomington, USA

The so-called ‘reproducibility crisis’ has raised questions about the intersection of science and statistics. The two have evolved together, so the answer to the title question is ‘both’, but the recent focus on irreproducible reports may have tipped the balance toward more and better statistical regulations for producing data and for publication criteria. Some believe reform is needed, possible remedies lying in stricter statistical criteria. Others believe flexibility in scientific decision making is more important. Related issues concern the emphasis upon replication vs. generalization, a-priori hypothesis generation and study design vs post-hoc fishing for data patterns, the importance of patterns of data across multiple conditions versus amount of data per condition, and tension between data collection and costs of research. Should the primary goal be statistical rigor or scientific progress, to the extent these might differ? These issues are a sample of what should be covered in a debate among scientists and statisticians about the appropriate cooperation between science and statistics.

Time for Action: Reaching for a Better Understanding of the Dynamics of Cognition

From the Psychonomic Society Leading Edge Workshop Initiative.

Friday, November 16, 3:50 p.m.-5:50 p.m. | Celestin D

Co-chairs: Joo-Hyun Song, Brown University, USA, and Timothy Welsh, University of Toronto, Canada

The goal of this symposium is to share research and theoretical perspectives that have advanced the understanding of how cognition and action systems are integrated and operate synergistically. Historically, the transformation of sensory inputs into action has been treated as a set of relatively unidirectional processing events with the results of low-level sensory and earlier perceptual processes informing higher-order cognitive processes until a decision is made to respond, at which point the action system receives its instructions. Given this approach, it may not be too surprising that there has been relatively little interaction between researchers in cognitive and motor domains. Thus, a deeper understanding of human behavior has been hindered because little attention has been paid to the broader context of action and how action processes are embedded in the larger canvas of visual attention, memory, learning, decision making and interpersonal interaction. This knowledge is vital understanding of human behavior and will help shape the design of everyday objects and training and working environments.

Medical Image Perception and Decision Making

Saturday, November 17, 10:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m. | Celestin E

Chair: Trafton Drew, University of Utah, USA

Despite technological advances, cancer detection and diagnosis remain fallible: false negative rates vary across the field, but are often >15%. Moreover, radiology is often the subject of medical malpractice lawsuits on the basis of lesions that are retrospectively visible. Are these perceptual errors, decision errors or something else? Cognitive psychology has much to say about the differences between retrospectively visible and prospectively visible phenomena, but there is often a disconnect between the basic science of cognitive psychology and the applied questions that are relevant to medical image interpretation. The growing field of medical image perception is devoted to leveraging cognitive psychology to improve diagnostic image evaluation. This symposium will highlight some recent advances in this field as researchers use cyclic interactions between clinical observations and basic science to advance our understanding of the role of perception and decision making in diagnostic image evaluation.

What Speech Prosody Can Tell Us About Cognition

Saturday, November 17, 1:30 p.m.-3:30 p.m. | Celestin E

Chair: Cassandra Jacobs, University of California, Davis, USA

Prosody is an often-overlooked, but incredibly expressive aspect of language production, encompassing acoustic and temporal factors like word durations, speech rate, disfluencies, pitch or intonation, and volume or intensity. Differences in prosody reflect cognitive factors such as the degree of taxation on working memory, recent experience or ease of processing, and linguistic factors. Prosody is useful in first language acquisition, learning and memory, and online language comprehension. Both children and adult listeners use it to guide their decision-making about how to interact with the real world. The prosodic forms of utterances can betray our cognitive and mental states, such as what we know, but others do not know. This symposium will focus on how speech prosody can inform cognitive scientific theories of learning and memory and categories and concepts in addition to psycholinguistic theories.