The American Psychological Association (APA) is the largest scientific and professional organization of psychologists in the United States, with over 146,000 members, including scientists, educators, clinicians, consultants, and students. It has 54 divisions—interest groups for different subspecialties of psychology or topical areas. The APA has an annual budget of around $125 million.
Psychology is an academic and applied discipline involving the scientific study of human mental functions and behavior. Occasionally, in addition or opposition to employing the scientific method, it also relies on symbolic interpretation and critical analysis, although these traditions have tended to be less pronounced than in other social sciences, such as sociology. Psychologists study phenomena such as perception, cognition, emotion, personality, behavior, and interpersonal relationships. Some, especially depth psychologists, also study the unconscious mind.
Margaret Floy Washburn, was a leading American psychologist in the early 20th century, was best known for her experimental work in animal behavior and motor theory development. She was the first woman to be granted a PhD in psychology (1894); the second woman, after Mary Whiton Calkins, to serve as president of the American Psychological Association (1921); and the first woman elected to the Society of Experimental Psychologists. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Washburn as the 88th most cited psychologist of the 20th century, tied with John Garcia, James J. Gibson, David Rumelhart, Louis Leon Thurstone, and Robert S. Woodworth.
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."
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.
This article is a general timeline of psychology.
James J. Jenkins is an American psychologist who played a significant role in the development of cognitive psychology.
Robert Allen Bjork is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on human learning and memory and on the implications of the science of learning for instruction and training. He is the creator of the directed forgetting paradigm. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022.
Comparative cognition is the comparative study of the mechanisms and origins of cognition in various species, and is sometimes seen as more general than, or similar to, comparative psychology. From a biological point of view, work is being done on the brains of fruit flies that should yield techniques precise enough to allow an understanding of the workings of the human brain on a scale appreciative of individual groups of neurons rather than the more regional scale previously used. Similarly, gene activity in the human brain is better understood through examination of the brains of mice by the Seattle-based Allen Institute for Brain Science, yielding the freely available Allen Brain Atlas. This type of study is related to comparative cognition, but better classified as one of comparative genomics. Increasing emphasis in psychology and ethology on the biological aspects of perception and behavior is bridging the gap between genomics and behavioral analysis.
Richard Shiffrin is an American psychologist, professor of cognitive science in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University, Bloomington. Shiffrin has contributed a number of theories of attention and memory to the field of psychology. He co-authored the Atkinson–Shiffrin model of memory in 1968 with Richard Atkinson, who was his academic adviser at the time. In 1977, he published a theory of attention with Walter Schneider. With Jeroen G.W. Raaijmakers in 1980, Shiffrin published the Search of Associative Memory (SAM) model, which has served as the standard model of recall for cognitive psychologists well into the 2000s. He extended the SAM model with the Retrieving Effectively From Memory (REM) model in 1997 with Mark Steyvers.
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.
The Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the American Psychological Association. It was established in 1975 as an independent section of the Journal of Experimental Psychology and covers research in experimental psychology. The journal "publishes studies on perception, control of action, perceptual aspects of language processing, and related cognitive processes."
The Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the American Psychological Association. It was established in 1975 as an independent section of the Journal of Experimental Psychology and covers research in experimental psychology. More specifically, the journal "publishes original experimental studies on basic processes of cognition, learning, memory, imagery, concept formation, problem solving, decision making, thinking, reading, and language processing". The current editor-in-chief is Aaron S. Benjamin.
The Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the American Psychological Association. It covers research in experimental psychology, specifically pertaining to all aspects of animal behavior processes. It was established in 1975 as the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes , an independent section of the Journal of Experimental Psychology. In 2014, the journal subtitle was changed to Animal Learning and Cognition. The editor-in-chief is Ralph R. Miller.
The Society for Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Science (SEPCS) (also known as American Psychological Association Division 3; formerly known as the Division of Experimental Psychology and the Division for Theoretical-Experimental Psychology) is a scholarly organization of psychologists in the principal area of general experimental psychology. The goals of this society are to promote, advance, and increase inclusion and exchange of ideas among the scholars in the many subfields of experimental psychology (including but not limited to behavior analysis, psychophysics, comparative, social, developmental, bio/physiological/neuropsychology/behavioral neuroscience, and the many topic areas of cognitive psychology, such as the study of memory, attention, language, intelligence, decision making, and so forth), both in basic and applied research. The society focuses on supporting research through advocacy, training and education, public policy, and outreach. It engages in a wide variety of service work, including leadership in the American Psychological Association's governance.
Arthur Weever Melton was an American experimental psychologist, researcher, and professor. He served as the editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology for twelve years.
Alice Fenvessy Healy is a psychologist and College Professor of Distinction Emeritus at the University of Colorado Boulder where she founded and directed the Center for Research on Training. She is known for her research in the field of cognitive psychology, spanning diverse topics including short-term memory, long-term memory, psycholinguistics, reading, decision-making, and cognitive training.
Gretchen Chapman is a cognitive psychologist known for her work on judgment and decision making in health-related contexts, such as clinical decision making and patient preferences, preventive health behavior, and vaccination. She is Professor of Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. Chapman served as an Editor of the journal Psychological Science and is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science.
J. Bruce Overmier is an American experimental psychologist, author, and academic. He is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychology at the University of Minnesota (UMN).
