David Melcher: Award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology

Presents David Melcher, the 2011 winner of the American Psychological Association Award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology. "For his elegant and groundbreaking work on one of the most important problems in perceptual psychology, the transfer of perceptual representations across eye movements. David Melcher's innovative experiments used perceptual aftereffects to show how remapping of visual locations underlies the creation of the percept of a clear and stable world. His work on the accumulation of memory contributed importantly to the understanding of natural perceptual representations and their neural underpinnings. His elegant reviews of transsaccadic perception communicated to a broad audience the remarkable capacity of the brain to create seamless perceptual representations despite the disruptions produced by eye movements." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved).     

进化心理学取向与当代心理学

进化心理学以进化论为理论基础,用适应的观点来解释人类的心理机制及其行为方式。本文通过阐明进化心理学的产生背景,重点论述了进化心理学的思维方式及其与心理学主要学科分支的联系,并指出了进化心理学对当代心理学发展的影响。     

The Psychology of Referencing in Psychology Journal Articles

ABSTRACT— Citation statistics can affect major professional decisions, but little is known about how important a particular reference is to the citing document. We asked 49 psychologists to rate the importance of every reference in their own empirical paper and to indicate the primary citation reason. References cited for conceptual ideas or to justify methods and data analyses were regarded as more important than references cited for general background, limitations, or future research. The location, frequency, and length of a citation predicted its importance, but such relationships were weaker for self-citations. We make suggestions about referencing for authors, editors, and bibliographic database designers.     

The Psychology of Waste

In order to avoid the appearance of wastefulness people may be motivated to make choices that compromise their own self-interest. In Experiment 1 subjects learned that Mr Munn didn't take advantage of a ‘three-pack’ which would have enabled him to see three movies for $12, the regular price being $5 per movie. Most subjects predicted that after having attended two movies at the regular price, Mr Munn would then be unwilling to purchase a ticket to attend a potentially enjoyable third movie, either because he would consider such a purchase to be wasteful or because he would be angry at having eschewed the ‘three-pack’. In Experiment 2 subjects who could use an obsolete product to ‘trade-up’ to a new model were more likely to buy the new model than were subjects who could purchase it at the identical low price. It was hypothesized that utilizing an obsolete product to obtain a new model would seem less wasteful than making an outright purchase of the new model. In Experiment 3 a large majority of subjects faced with a sunk cost situation persevered with the failing project if the alternative was selling the material ‘for its scrap value’. However, if the alternative consisted of selling the materials for an identical price to someone who could use them, then subjects were less likely to persevere with the failing project. Marketing implications and the propriety of retrospective evaluation of prior decisions were also discussed.