Barbara Anne ("Bobbie") Spellman | |
---|---|
Born | September 30, 1956 Queens, New York |
Citizenship | United States |
Spouse(s) | Frederick Schauer [1] (2010-present), Larry Cohen (bridge) (1983-85) |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | Roslyn High School (Long Island, NY), Wesleyan University (B.A.), New York University School of Law (J.D.), UCLA (Ph.D.) |
Academic work | |
Institutions | University of Virginia (1997-present),University of Texas (1993-97) |
Website | https://www.law.virginia.edu/spellman |
Barbara Anne ("Bobbie") Spellman is a professor of law and professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. [2] Trained first as a lawyer,then as a cognitive psychologist,her work spans the two fields. As an academic psychologist,Spellman's research was in memory and higher order cognition (analogical,inductive,and causal reasoning). She also was involved early in the Open Science movement,mostly in her role as editor in chief of the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science from 2010 to 2015. [3] As a legal academic,her work includes co-authoring "The Psychological Foundations of Evidence Law" with Michael J. Saks. She currently advocates for psychological science,and for science generally,as a fellow and member of the steering group of the Psychology Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. [4] She has over 7,500 citations. [5]
Spellman was born on September 30,1956,in New York City.[ citation needed ] Her family later moved to Roslyn,New York,where she graduated from Roslyn High School in 1974. In 1979,she received her B.A. degree from Wesleyan University (see List of Wesleyan University people). In 1982,she received her J.D. degree from New York University School of Law. In 1993 she received her Ph.D. from UCLA in cognitive psychology. While at UCLA she was a member of the Bjork Learning and Forgetting Lab and Cogfog. [6] She is a member of the American Contract Bridge League and won several local and regional events during the 1980s. [7] [8]
After graduation from NYU School of Law,Spellman practiced tax law with the firm of Chadbourne &Parke (since merged with Norton Rose Fulbright). She then became a writer and editor in the tax area with Matthew Bender Company (now part of LexisNexis). As a law student,she worked summers at the United States Environmental Protection Agency and the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York.
Spellman's work on analogy,mostly with her advisor Keith Holyoak, [9] is best known for the article:“If Saddam IS Hitler then Who is George Bush?”(JPSP,1991). [10] It uses real life current events (the first Persian Gulf War) to examine the importance of knowledge and flexibility in analogical mapping. She is also known for an early paper that advanced the idea of “Analogical Priming”(M&C,2001). [11] Unlike most people who work on causal reasoning,Spellman wrote about both single-event causal reasoning and multiple-event contingency-causal reasoning (what she loosely refers to as:reasoning in law vs reasoning in science). “Crediting Causality”(1997,JEP:G),based on her dissertation,formed the groundwork for later papers with implications for views of legal causation. [12] [13] Her work on multi-event causation illustrated limitations on reasoning about the independent effects of two causes on one outcome (as might be seen in Simpson's paradox [14] ).
Spellman's work on memory includes a Psychological Review paper on the role of inhibition in human retrieval memory. [15] She also worked on metamemory [16] —specifically,the mechanisms behind the benefits of testing and judging one's own memory (with Robert A. Bjork). With Elizabeth R. Tenney [17] (and others),she published several papers on evaluating people's credibility based on their previous memory performance. [18] [19]
She also contributed to a National Academies Report on lessons for intelligence analysis from the behavioral and social sciences (2011). [20]
Spellman was an early advocate for Open Science. During her tenure as editor of the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science (2010–15), [21] the journal published over 100 articles related to the movement to reform science. [22] Her final editorial,“A Short (Personal) Future History of Revolution 2.0” [23] has been cited frequently as an introduction to the reform movement. She was involved in creating the TOP (Transparency and Openness Promotion) Guidelines,published in Science, [24] which describes how journals can introduce practices to improve science,and she has often spoken publicly [25] about those solutions.
In the late 2000s,Spellman realized that law —both academic and as practiced —had become more sympathetic toward research from Psychological Science. She has described this appreciation as coming from two directions:(1) the mounting DNA exonerations showing that factors psychologists had worried about for years (e.g.,bad eyewitness testimony;false confessions) had indeed contributed to wrongful convictions;and (2) the influence of economics on law,and the following influence of psychology on economics. [26]
Spellman's law research includes applying psychology to legal issues —including questions about the reasoning of judges and juries,about the psychology embedded in the rules of evidence,and about how psychological is implicated in wrongful convictions. [27] Currently,working with the Organization of Scientific Area Committees (OSAC) [28] for Forensic Science,she is working on ways that psychology can help improve forensic science. [29]
Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of mental processes such as attention,language use,memory,perception,problem solving,creativity,and reasoning.
Analogy is a comparison or correspondence between two things because of a third element that they are considered to share.
In philosophy of mind and cognitive science,folk psychology,or commonsense psychology,is a human capacity to explain and predict the behavior and mental state of other people. Processes and items encountered in daily life such as pain,pleasure,excitement,and anxiety use common linguistic terms as opposed to technical or scientific jargon. Folk psychology allows for an insight into social interactions and communication,thus stretching the importance of connection and how it is experienced.
Moral reasoning is the study of how people think about right and wrong and how they acquire and apply moral rules. It is a subdiscipline of moral psychology that overlaps with moral philosophy,and is the foundation of descriptive ethics.
The testing effect suggests long-term memory is increased when part of the learning period is devoted to retrieving information from memory. It is different from the more general practice effect,defined in the APA Dictionary of Psychology as "any change or improvement that results from practice or repetition of task items or activities."
Dedre Dariel Gentner is an American cognitive and developmental psychologist. She is the Alice Gabriel Twight Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University,and a leading researcher in the study of analogical reasoning.
Marcia K. Johnson is a Sterling Professor emeritus of Psychology at Yale University. She was born in 1943 in Alameda,California. Johnson attended public schools in Oakland and Ventura. She attended the University of California,Berkeley where she received both her B.A. in psychology (1965) and Ph.D. in experimental psychology (1971). In 1970 Johnson moved to Long Island,New York to take a faculty position at The State University of New York at Stony Brook,where she worked until 1985. She then accepted a position at Princeton University and was there from 1985 to 2000. Johnson became Sterling Professor of Psychology at Yale University in 2000.
Susan Tufts Fiske is an American psychologist who serves as the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs in the Department of Psychology at Princeton University. She is a social psychologist known for her work on social cognition,stereotypes,and prejudice. Fiske leads the Intergroup Relations,Social Cognition,and Social Neuroscience Lab at Princeton University. Her theoretical contributions include the development of the stereotype content model,ambivalent sexism theory,power as control theory,and the continuum model of impression formation.
Patricia Wenjie Cheng is a Chinese American psychologist. She is a leading researcher in cognitive psychology who works on human reasoning. She is best known for her psychological work on human understanding of causality. Her "power theory of the probabilistic contrast model," or power PC theory (1997) posits that people filter observations of events through a basic belief that causes have the power to generate their effects,thereby inferring specific cause-effect relations.
Nora S. Newcombe is the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Psychology and the James H. Glackin Distinguished Faculty Fellow at Temple University. She is a Canadian-American researcher in cognitive development,cognitive psychology and cognitive science,and expert on the development of spatial thinking and reasoning and episodic memory. She was the principal investigator of the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (2006-2018),one of six Science of Learning Centers funded by the National Science Foundation.
Susan A. Gelman is currently Heinz Werner Distinguished University Professor of psychology and linguistics and the director of the Conceptual Development Laboratory at the University of Michigan. Gelman studies language and concept development in young children. Gelman subscribes to the domain specificity view of cognition,which asserts that the mind is composed of specialized modules supervising specific functions in the human and other animals. Her book The Essential Child is an influential work on cognitive development.
Renée Baillargeon is a Canadian American research psychologist. An Alumni Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Baillargeon specializes in the development of cognition in infancy.
Retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) is a memory phenomenon where remembering causes forgetting of other information in memory. The phenomenon was first demonstrated in 1994,although the concept of RIF has been previously discussed in the context of retrieval inhibition.
Patricia J. Bauer is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Psychology at Emory University. She is known for her research in the field of cognitive development,with a specific focus on how children develop their earliest memories and how their memory is influenced by parents,peers,and the environment around them. Her research has explored the phenomenon of childhood amnesia and how social,cognitive,and neural changes relate to the development of autobiographical memory.
Elizabeth Kensinger is Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Boston College. She is known for her research on emotion and memory over the human lifespan. She is co-author of the book Why We Forget and How To Remember Better:The Science Behind Memory,published in 2023 by Oxford University Press,which provides an overview of the psychology and neuroscience of memory. She also is the author of the book Emotional Memory Across the Adult Lifespan, which describes the selectivity of memory,i.e.,how events infused with personal significance and emotion are much more memorable than nonemotional events. This book provides an overview of research on the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying the formation and retrieval of emotional memories. Kensinger is co-author of a third book How Does Emotion Affect Attention and Memory? Attentional Capture,Tunnel Memory,and the Implications for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder with Katherine Mickley Steinmetz,which highlights the roles of emotion in determining what people pay attention to and later remember.
Suparna Rajaram, SUNY Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Stony Brook University,is an Indian-born cognitive psychologist and expert on memory and amnesia. Rajaram served as Chair of the Governing Board of the Psychonomic Society (2008) and as president of the Association for Psychological Science (2017-2018). Along with Judith Kroll and Randi Martin,Rajaram co-founded the organization Women in Cognitive Science in 2001,with the aim of improving the visibility of contributions of women to cognitive science. In 2019,she was an inaugural recipient of Psychonomic Society's Clifford T. Morgan Distinguished Leadership Award for significant contributions and sustained leadership in the discipline of cognitive psychology.
Lisa Feigenson is Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University and co-director of the Johns Hopkins University Laboratory for Child Development. Feigenson is known for her research on the development of numerical abilities,working memory,and early learning. She has served on the editorial board of Cognition and the Journal of Experimental Psychology:General.
Ayanna Kim Thomas is an American scientist,author,and cognitive researcher and the Dean of Research for the School of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University since 2021. Her research focuses on the intersection of memory and aging,particularly as those fields relate to brain and cognitive science. She is a founding member of SPARK Society,editor-in-chief of the journal Memory &Cognition,and a fellow of the Psychonomic Society and the American Psychological Association Minority Fellowship Program.
Tania Lombrozo is an American psychologist who is the Arthur W. Marks Professor of Psychology at Princeton University. She oversees the Concepts and Cognition Laboratory,which looks to understand the science that underpins cognition.
Cogfog is the informal name of the Bjork Learning and Forgetting Lab in the Psychology Department at the University of California,Los Angeles (UCLA) and the official name of the weekly research group meeting associated with the lab. Led by Professors Robert Bjork and Elizabeth Bjork,Cogfog has been a cornerstone of cognitive psychology research since its inception in 1979.