Hal Pashler is 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). [1] [2] [3] and for his work on visual attention [4] [5] He has also developed and tested new methods for enhancing learning and reducing forgetting, focusing on the temporal spacing of learning and retrieval practice. [6]
Pashler is also known for influential critiques of methodological and statistical practices in behavioral science. His critiques have focused on statistical and logical issues in neuroimaging research ("voodoo correlations"), [7] educational psychology (learning styles concept) [8] testing of mathematical models, [9] and the replicability of “behavioral priming” research in the field of social psychology. [10]
Pashler was born in 1958 in New York. He received his BA in Logic and Philosophy of Science from Brown University in 1980 and his PhD in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1985. He joined the faculty of the University of California, San Diego in 1985.
Pashler was elected to membership in the Society of Experimental Psychologists in 2000. He is also an elected Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the Psychonomic Society. [11] Pashler received the Troland Research Awards from the National Academy of Sciences in 1999; the academy cited his "many experimental breakthroughs in the study of spatial attention and executive control, and... his insightful analysis of human cognitive architecture." He also received the Chancellor's Associates Award for Research given by University of California, San Diego. [12]
In the 1980s, Pashler and several colleagues developed the Response Selection Bottleneck model of dual-task interference. The model, partly inspired by early work by Alan Welford, [13] makes many predictions about patterns of behavioral response times in the Psychological Refractory Period experiment. The model has been supported by mathematical analyses of behavioral response times [14] and studies of brain activity when people engage in multitasking. [15]
In 1988, Pashler published the first demonstration of the perceptual phenomenon that later came to be called change blindness, using displays of letters that appeared, disappeared, and reappeared (sometimes with alterations). [16] He noted the contrast between observers' subjective sense of awareness of an entire display and their very limited ability to detect even large changes.
In 1992, Pashler (with Mark Carrier) showed that the testing effect (sometimes referred to as Retrieval Practice) directly strengthens associative learning, and does so more effectively than the same time spent re-studying the same associative links. [17] In 2007, Liqiang Huang and Pashler proposed the Boolean Map Theory of visual attention and awareness. The theory argues that a specific type of abstract data structure (the Boolean Map) characterizes the contents of human visual awareness at any given instant in time. [18]
In 2008 (with Melody Wiseheart & other collaborators) Pashler carried out the most systematic and long-term studies of the effect of temporal spacing on human learning. Holding total time constant, the team found that when people study information on two occasions separated by a temporal gap G, and then are given a memory test after a further delay D, performance on the test is best when the G is about 10-20% as long as D.
(This implies, for example, that if one wishes to study information on two occasions with the goal of retaining it for 1 year, the best practice would be to separate the two study events by about 1 month, whereas if one wished to retain the information for a week, a 1-day gap would work better.) This research is relied upon by some software developers in building spaced-learning apps and websites to help people to retain information more efficiently [20] [21]
In 2006, US Department of Education commissioned Pashler to lead a review of cognitive science findings that could best help guide teachers in scientifically validated instructional practices. The resulting Practice Guide is distributed by the department and is available free of charge on the department's website. [22]
In 2008 (with Edward Vul) Pashler showed that the famous Wisdom of Crowds Effect first noted by Francis Galton could be elicited within a single individual. Averaging two estimates from the same person (their first-choice answer and a second answer elicited later) produced an improvement in accuracy equal to about 1/3 the benefit obtained by averaging estimates from two different people. [23] This discovery, termed the “Inner Crowd Effect” by The Economist [24] helped prompt follow-up research examining potential new methods of improving human judgment accuracy. [25] Pashler has also published several articles on varied topics in political psychology, including biases in perception of newsworthiness and attitudes to pro-liberty views. [26]
In 2008, Pashler (along with Vul, Harris, and Winkielman) published a paper initially entitled “Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience” arguing that many of the most prominent research articles in cognitive and social neuroscience had made statistical errors resulting in gross over-estimation of brain-behavior correlation values. The paper (published under the milder title "Puzzlingly Large Correlations...") [27] produced an intense controversy that was covered in popular media [7] as well as academic press. [28] [29] Some writers have pointed to this paper as having helped launch the current period of intensive methodological debate and controversy in behavioral science [30] [31] Statistical practices in brain imaging field appear to have changed in response to the paper [32] with increased use of cross-validation.
In 2009, Pashler chaired a review commissioned by the American Psychological Society examining the validity of the concept of learning styles [33] The review concluded that widely accepted ideas about learning styles lacked serious empirical support and recommended that educators should not base instructional practices on these notions. These conclusions have prompted extensive controversy in the education field [34] [35] [36] Pashler has also been an outspoken proponent of efforts to increase replicability in psychological research, arguing that many very well-known findings in areas like social cognition and social psychology should not be believed due to statistical errors, publication bias, and other problems. [37] [38] Together with E. J. Wagenmakers, he edited the special issue of the Perspectives on Psychological Science which appears to have introduced the term ‘Replicability Crisis’ in reference to the current state of social and behavioral science. [39]
Psychology is the study of mind and behavior. Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both conscious and unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoughts, feelings, and motives. Psychology is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries between the natural and social sciences. Biological psychologists seek an understanding of the emergent properties of brains, linking the discipline to neuroscience. As social scientists, psychologists aim to understand the behavior of individuals and groups.
Working memory is a cognitive system with a limited capacity that can hold information temporarily. It is important for reasoning and the guidance of decision-making and behavior. Working memory is often used synonymously with short-term memory, but some theorists consider the two forms of memory distinct, assuming that working memory allows for the manipulation of stored information, whereas short-term memory only refers to the short-term storage of information. Working memory is a theoretical concept central to cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, and neuroscience.
A cognitive bias is a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment. Individuals create their own "subjective reality" from their perception of the input. An individual's construction of reality, not the objective input, may dictate their behavior in the world. Thus, cognitive biases may sometimes lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, and irrationality.
Attention is the concentration of awareness on some phenomenon to the exclusion of other stimuli. It is a process of selectively concentrating on a discrete aspect of information, whether considered subjective or objective. William James (1890) wrote that "Attention is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence." Attention has also been described as the allocation of limited cognitive processing resources. Attention is manifested by an attentional bottleneck, in terms of the amount of data the brain can process each second; for example, in human vision, only less than 1% of the visual input data can enter the bottleneck, leading to inattentional blindness.
Social cognition is a topic within psychology that focuses on how people process, store, and apply information about other people and social situations. It focuses on the role that cognitive processes play in social interactions.
The interference theory is a theory regarding human memory. Interference occurs in learning. The notion is that memories encoded in long-term memory (LTM) are forgotten and cannot be retrieved into short-term memory (STM) because either memory could interfere with the other. There is an immense number of encoded memories within the storage of LTM. The challenge for memory retrieval is recalling the specific memory and working in the temporary workspace provided in STM. Retaining information regarding the relevant time of encoding memories into LTM influences interference strength. There are two types of interference effects: proactive and retroactive interference.
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."
David Cyril Geary is an American cognitive developmental and evolutionary psychologist with interests in mathematical learning and sex differences. He is currently a Curators’ Professor and Thomas Jefferson Fellow in the Department of Psychological Sciences and Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Program at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri.
Social neuroscience is an interdisciplinary field devoted to understanding the relationship between social experiences and biological systems. Humans are fundamentally a social species, rather than solitary. As such, Homo sapiens create emergent organizations beyond the individual—structures that range from dyads, families, and groups to cities, civilizations, and cultures. In this regard, studies indicate that various social influences, including life events, poverty, unemployment and loneliness can influence health related biomarkers. The term "social neuroscience" can be traced to a publication entitled "Social Neuroscience Bulletin" which was published quarterly between 1988 and 1994. The term was subsequently popularized in an article by John Cacioppo and Gary Berntson, published in the American Psychologist in 1992. Cacioppo and Berntson are considered as the legitimate fathers of social neuroscience. Still a young field, social neuroscience is closely related to affective neuroscience and cognitive neuroscience, focusing on how the brain mediates social interactions. The biological underpinnings of social cognition are investigated in social cognitive neuroscience.
The negativity bias, also known as the negativity effect, is a cognitive bias that, even when of equal intensity, things of a more negative nature have a greater effect on one's psychological state and processes than neutral or positive things. In other words, something very positive will generally have less of an impact on a person's behavior and cognition than something equally emotional but negative. The negativity bias has been investigated within many different domains, including the formation of impressions and general evaluations; attention, learning, and memory; and decision-making and risk considerations.
Human multitasking is the concept that one can split their attention on more than one task or activity at the same time, such as speaking on the phone while driving a car. Multitasking can result in time wasted due to human context switching and becoming prone to errors due to insufficient attention. If one becomes proficient at two tasks, it is possible to rapidly shift attention between the tasks and perform the tasks well.
Nelson Cowan is the Curators' Distinguished Professor of Psychological Sciences at the University of Missouri. He specializes in working memory, the small amount of information held in mind and used for language processing and various kinds of problem solving. To overcome conceptual difficulties that arise for models of information processing in which different functions occur in separate boxes, Cowan proposed a more organically organized "embedded processes" model. Within it, representations held in working memory comprise an activated subset of the representations held in long-term memory, with a smaller subset held in a more integrated form in the current focus of attention. Other work has been on the developmental growth of working memory capacity and the scientific method. His work, funded by the National Institutes of Health since 1984, has been cited over 41,000 times according to Google Scholar. The work has resulted in over 250 peer-reviewed articles, over 60 book chapters, 2 sole-authored books, and 4 edited volumes.
Cultural neuroscience is a field of research that focuses on the interrelation between a human's cultural environment and neurobiological systems. The field particularly incorporates ideas and perspectives from related domains like anthropology, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience to study sociocultural influences on human behaviors. Such impacts on behavior are often measured using various neuroimaging methods, through which cross-cultural variability in neural activity can be examined.
Perceptual learning is learning better perception skills such as differentiating two musical tones from one another or categorizations of spatial and temporal patterns relevant to real-world expertise. Examples of this may include reading, seeing relations among chess pieces, and knowing whether or not an X-ray image shows a tumor.
Memory improvement is the act of enhancing one's memory. Research on improving memory is driven by amnesia, age-related memory loss, and people’s desire to enhance their memory. Research involved in memory improvement has also worked to determine what factors influence memory and cognition. There are many different techniques to improve memory some of which include cognitive training, psychopharmacology, diet, stress management, and exercise. Each technique can improve memory in different ways.
The Planning, Attention-Arousal, Simultaneous and Successive (P.A.S.S.) theory of intelligence, first proposed in 1975 by Das, Kirby, and Jarman (1975), and later elaborated by Das, Naglieri & Kirby (1994) and Das, Kar & Parrilla (1996), challenges g-theory on the grounds that the brain is made up of interdependent, but separate, functional systems. Neuroimaging studies and clinical studies of individuals with brain lesions make it clear that the brain is modularized; for example, damage to a very specific area of the left temporal lobe will impair the production of spoken and written language. Damage to an adjacent area will have the opposite impact, preserving the individual's ability to produce, but not understand speech and text.
The term psychological refractory period (PRP) refers to the period of time during which the response to a second stimulus is significantly slowed because a first stimulus is still being processed. This delay in response time when one is required to divide attention can exhibit a negative effect that is evident in many fields of study. The PRP can be used to investigate many areas of research that study processes which require divided attention, such as reading aloud, language, or driving and talking on the phone. PRP effects related to personality, age, and level of alcohol or caffeine intake have also been investigated.
Attentional control, colloquially referred to as concentration, refers to an individual's capacity to choose what they pay attention to and what they ignore. It is also known as endogenous attention or executive attention. In lay terms, attentional control can be described as an individual's ability to concentrate. Primarily mediated by the frontal areas of the brain including the anterior cingulate cortex, attentional control is thought to be closely related to other executive functions such as working memory.
Intelligence and personality have traditionally been studied as separate entities in psychology, but more recent work has increasingly challenged this view. An increasing number of studies have recently explored the relationship between intelligence and personality, in particular the Big Five personality traits.