The 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century.

A rank-ordered list was constructed that reports the first 99 of the 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century. Eminence was measured by scores on 3 quantitative variables and 3 qualitative variables. The quantitative variables were journal citation frequency, introductory psychology textbook citation frequency, and survey response frequency. The qualitative variables were National Academy of Sciences membership, election as American Psychological Association (APA) president or receipt of the APA Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award, and surname used as an eponym. The qualitative variables were quantified and combined with the other 3 quantitative variables to produce a composite score that was then used to construct a rank-ordered list of the most eminent psychologists of the 20th century. The discipline of psychology underwent a remarkable transformation during the 20th cen-tury, a transformation that included a shift away from the European-influenced philosophical psychology of the late 19th century to th

Practice and incentive motivation in recognition of inverted faces

In each of three experiments, participants received successive daily practice sessions on the task of recognizing inverted faces. In all practice sessions, an initial study series of 25 inverted faces was followed immediately by a test series of 17 pairs of inverted faces. Each test pair comprised a face from the study series and a new face. Completely new sets of faces were used in each session. Recognition of inverted faces did not improve across sessions in Exp. 1 but did improve in Exps. 2 and 3. Unlike Exp. 1, Exps. 2 and 3 employed an explicit incentive for improved performance. These results show that sufficiently motivated participants can become quite proficient at recognizing inverted faces. Implications of the results for the role of expertise at recognition in producing the inversion effect are discussed

Tribute to E. J. Capaldi: Celebration of a Psychological Scientist

E. J. (John) Capaldi (1928-2020) made numerous contributions to experimental psychology in his long career at the University of Texas at Austin and Purdue University. He was a pioneer in the area of animal learning and cognition, known for his sequential theory of partial reinforcement extinction effects. His research in this area and in memory and counting phenomena was conducted for the most part with rats running in straight alley mazes under various sequences of trial outcomes (e.g., reward, nonreward, variations in reward size). John's other interests included the sequential theory applied to Pavlovian conditioning, evolutionary theory, and psychology of science. More generally, John was a scientist to the core who served as a role model to those who knew him. His career centered on rigorous critical thinking based in empirical data, coupled with a curiosity and openness to different and new ideas in psychology