Last January 2020, I stepped into the position of the Psychonomic Society Digital Content Editor. My very first post in that role was titled “New Year New Cognitive Science,” and with optimism, the post began with,
We have much to look forward to in the New Year, including reading and hearing about new cognitive science from Psychonomic Society members and published in the Society’s journals.
With 20/20 hindsight, I should have started that post with something like,
Brace yourselves: 2020 is going to be unlike anything you’ve experienced before.
This year’s New Years poster (pictured on the right below) is starkly contrasted to the one I created last year (pictured on the left below). The striking comparison says a lot about the mood before the start of each year.
The bit I had right, was that there was a lot of new cognitive science from Psychonomic Society members and published in the Society’s journals. This kept the Society’s Digital Content team busy. We wrote 79 posts, including posts covering many of the papers published in the Psychonomic Society journals. We started new initiatives, including producing and hosting the podcast, All Things Cognition, and interviews with members. We also worked closely with the COVID-19 Working Group to develop and disseminate content about behavioral methods that reduce transmission of the virus.
Here are our most-read COVID-19 related posts:
- The behavioral science response to COVID-19 Working Group: Recommendations to reduce face touching
- The behavioral science response to COVID-19 Working Group: Recommendations to increase social distancing
- The behavioral science response to COVID-19 Working Group: Recommendations to promote hand washing
- Interview with Jonathon Crystal about reducing face touches to reduce COVID-19 spread
- A recipe for moving your physical lab to the online lab
If you have COVID-19 fatigue, you may want to check out our other popular posts of 2020:
- The music myth?
- Wait! Don’t forget the women in the world of men: The little known impact of women on memory research
- What do TikToks, the Macarena, and memory have in common?
- Right-wing authoritarianism and reduced updating
- Why we don’t serve “cheese and macaroni”: Investigating directionality of relationships between words
We held two Digital Events:
One Digital Event was COVID-19 inspired and called “#researchINcrisis: Research in time of crisis” and featured new ideas about conducting and disseminating pandemic-related research quicker than the status quo. The start of the event is here.
The other Digital Event accompanied the Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics Special Issue and was called “#AttnAnneTreisman: A Digital Event to honour the contributions of Anne Treisman.” Start reading the event here with Jeremey Wolfe’s (Editor of Cognitive Research: Principles & Implications and Guest Editor of the Special Issue) welcome post.
We met (virtually):
Our Annual Meeting was scheduled to be in Austin, Texas, USA, and while there indeed were some Psychonomic Society members in Austin then, the rest of us were scattered across the world attending from the comfort of our homes. And it was a great conference. If you missed any talks, you could still watch them through June 2021. Will our next meeting be face-to-face in San Diego, CA, USA? Who knows?
What the Digital Content team will be doing in 2021:
The Digital Content team, pictured below, will continue to write posts highlighting the research published in the Psychonomic Society journals, interview members about their research, host Digital Events, and produce our All Things Cognition podcast all throughout 2021.
And finally:
We’ll see you on Twitter @Psychonomic_Soc.
Happy New Year to you all!