Experimental psychology refers to work done by those who apply experimental methods to psychological study and the underlying processes. Experimental psychologists employ human participants and animal subjects to study a great many topics, including sensation & perception, memory, cognition, learning, motivation, emotion; developmental processes, social psychology, and the neural substrates of all of these.
Psychophysics quantitatively investigates the relationship between physical stimuli and the sensations and perceptions they produce. Psychophysics has been described as "the scientific study of the relation between stimulus and sensation" or, more completely, as "the analysis of perceptual processes by studying the effect on a subject's experience or behaviour of systematically varying the properties of a stimulus along one or more physical dimensions".
Béla Julesz was a Hungarian-born American visual neuroscientist and experimental psychologist in the fields of visual and auditory perception.
Mathematical psychology is an approach to psychological research that is based on mathematical modeling of perceptual, thought, cognitive and motor processes, and on the establishment of law-like rules that relate quantifiable stimulus characteristics with quantifiable behavior. The mathematical approach is used with the goal of deriving hypotheses that are more exact and thus yield stricter empirical validations. There are five major research areas in mathematical psychology: learning and memory, perception and psychophysics, choice and decision-making, language and thinking, and measurement and scaling.
Robert Goldstone is a Distinguished Professor of psychology and cognitive science at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. His research interests include concept learning and representation, perceptual learning, collective behavior, and computational modeling of human cognition. He has developed and empirically tested neural network models that simultaneously learn new perceptual and conceptual representations, with the learned concepts both affecting and being affected by perception. He has also developed computational models of how groups of people compete for resources, cooperate to solve problems, exchange information and innovations, and form coalitions.
The Psychonomic Society is an international scientific society of over 4,500 scientists in the field of experimental psychology. The mission of the Psychonomic Society is to foster the science of cognition through the advancement and communication of basic research in experimental psychology and allied sciences. It is open to international researchers, and almost 40% of members are based outside of North America. Although open to all areas of experimental and cognitive psychology, its members typically study areas such as learning, memory, attention, motivation, perception, categorization, decision making, and psycholinguistics. Its name is taken from the word psychonomics, meaning "the science of the laws of the mind".
Wolfgang Prinz is a German cognitive psychologist. He is the director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, and an internationally recognized expert in experimental psychology, cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind. He is the founder of the common coding theory between perception and action that has a significant impact in cognitive neuroscience and social cognition.
Akiyoshi Kitaoka is a Professor of Psychology at the College of Letters, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan.
Some of the research that is conducted in the field of psychology is more "fundamental" than the research conducted in the applied psychological disciplines, and does not necessarily have a direct application. The subdisciplines within psychology that can be thought to reflect a basic-science orientation include biological psychology, cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, and so on. Research in these subdisciplines is characterized by methodological rigor. The concern of psychology as a basic science is in understanding the laws and processes that underlie behavior, cognition, and emotion. Psychology as a basic science provides a foundation for applied psychology. Applied psychology, by contrast, involves the application of psychological principles and theories yielded up by the basic psychological sciences; these applications are aimed at overcoming problems or promoting well-being in areas such as mental and physical health and education.
The Troland Research Awards are an annual prize given by the United States National Academy of Sciences to two researchers in recognition of psychological research on the relationship between consciousness and the physical world. The areas where these award funds are to be spent include but are not limited to areas of experimental psychology, the topics of sensation, perception, motivation, emotion, learning, memory, cognition, language, and action. The award preference is given to experimental work with a quantitative approach or experimental research seeking physiological explanations.
Scholar, educator, and philanthropist Herschel Leibowitz is widely recognized for his research in visual perception and for his symbiotic approach to conducting research that both advanced theory and helped in the understanding and relief of societal problems. His research on transportation safety included studies of nearsightedness during night driving, vision during civil twilight, an illusion that underlies the behavior of motorists involved in auto-train collisions, susceptibility of pilots to illusions caused by visual-vestibular interactions, and the design of aircraft instrument panels.
Representational momentum is a small, but reliable, error in our visual perception of moving objects. Representational moment was discovered and named by Jennifer Freyd and Ronald Finke. Instead of knowing the exact location of a moving object, viewers actually think it is a bit further along its trajectory as time goes forward. For example, people viewing an object moving from left to right that suddenly disappears will report they saw it a bit further to the right than where it actually vanished. While not a big error, it has been found in a variety of different events ranging from simple rotations to camera movement through a scene. The name "representational momentum" initially reflected the idea that the forward displacement was the result of the perceptual system having internalized, or evolved to include, basic principles of Newtonian physics, but it has come to mean forward displacements that continue a presented pattern along a variety of dimensions, not just position or orientation. As with many areas of cognitive psychology, theories can focus on bottom-up or top-down aspects of the task. Bottom-up theories of representational momentum highlight the role of eye movements and stimulus presentation, while top-down theories highlight the role of the observer's experience and expectations regarding the presented event.
The psychology of film is a sub-field of the psychology of art that studies the characteristics of film and its production in relation to perception, cognition, narrative understanding, and emotion. A growing number of psychological scientists and brain scientists have begun conducting empirical studies that describe the cognitive and biological underpinnings of motion pictures or what has been called "psychocinematics". Early theoretical approaches included works by psychologists Hugo Münsterberg and Rudolf Arnheim. Cognitive film theorists David Bordwell and Noël Carroll fostered its philosophical underpinnings.
Hans Wallach was a German-American experimental psychologist whose research focused on perception and learning. Although he was trained in the Gestalt psychology tradition, much of his later work explored the adaptability of perceptual systems based on the perceiver's experience, whereas most Gestalt theorists emphasized inherent qualities of stimuli and downplayed the role of experience. Wallach's studies of achromatic surface color laid the groundwork for subsequent theories of lightness constancy, and his work on sound localization elucidated the perceptual processing that underlies stereophonic sound. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Guggenheim Fellow, and recipient of the Howard Crosby Warren Medal of the Society of Experimental Psychologists.
Experimental aesthetics is a field of psychology founded by Gustav Theodor Fechner in the 19th century. According to Fechner, aesthetics is an experiential perception which is empirically comprehensible in light of the characteristics of the subject undergoing the experience and those of the object. Experimental aesthetics is the second oldest research area in psychology, psychophysics being the only field which is older. In his central work Introduction to Aesthetics Fechner describes his empirical approach extensively and in detail. Experimental aesthetics is characterized by a subject-based, inductive approach.
Nilli Lavie, FBA, is an academic, psychologist, and neuroscientist with British-Israeli dual nationality.
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. 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.
Barbara Dosher is an American scientist and academic specializing in neurology of human memory and attention processes. She is the former dean of the School of Social Sciences and a Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Sciences at University of California, Irvine. She is also the director of the Memory Attention Perception Lab at UC Irvine. Dosher is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Dosher received the 2018 Atkinson Prize in Psychological and Cognitive Sciences.
Michael Kubovy is an Israeli American psychologist known for his work on the psychology of perception and psychology of art.
