University of Iowa psychology professors Grazyna Kochanska and Edward Wasserman have recently had their Stuit Professorships renewed. These Professorships are designed to recognize distinguished Psychology Department faculty. The professorships were established in 1997 by Dewey and Velma Stuit. They are awarded for five-year terms and are renewable.

Kochanska is the Stuit Professor of Developmental Psychology and Wasserman is the Stuit Professor of Experimental Psychology.

In connection with these renewals, each individual is asked to present a departmental colloquium.

Wasserman's colloquium was held on October 19, 2007. It was entitled, "Humans, animals, and computers: Minding machines?" It takes a broad look at cognitive science and neuroscience and is available for viewing here. (windows media player required)

Eating disorders represent a significant source of distress, impairment, and medical risk among women. Although anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa receive the greatest attention in popular media and research literature, most individuals who have clinically significant disorders of eating do not meet criteria for anorexia or bulimia. To address the gap between the conditions that people have and what we know about them, recent research from Dr. Pamela Keel's laboratory is characterizing a newly defined eating disorder that Keel has termed "purging disorder."

Individuals with purging disorder have a normal weight and purge after eating normal or even small amounts of food. A study published in September's issue of Archives of General Psychiatry supports the clinical significance of purging disorder and its distinctiveness from bulimia nervosa on subjective and physiological responses to food intake.

Press coverage of this research can be found by following the link below:

CBS News

Between one and two years of age, toddlers show a dramatic increase in the rate at which they add new words to their vocabularies. This ‘word spurt’ has often been explained as the development of a specialized word-learning mechanism, which dramatically increases the efficiency of word learning. Recent research from Dr. Bob McMurray’s laboratory, published in Science Magazine, indicates that the ‘word spurt’ need not be generated by a change in the rate of learning. If one assumes that toddlers learn many words at once, and most words take a significant period of time to learn, the ‘word’ spurt will be generated naturally without any increase in the rate at which words are learned.

Press coverage of this research can be found by following the links below:

Washington Post
Scientific American

Cathleen Moore will join the department as a Professor of Psychology in the Fall of 2007. Dr. Moore received her Ph. D. in 1994 from The University of California, San Diego. Her research focuses on visual perception and attention. She studies the means by which attention and the eyes are directed to individual perceptual objects. In addition, her research probes the mechanisms by which visual object representations are updated as the perceptual properties of an object change.

J. Toby Mordkoff to join faculty in 2007

J. Toby Mordkoff will join the department as Associate Professor of Psychology in the Fall of 2007. Dr. Mordkoff received his Ph. D. in 1991 from Johns Hopkins University. His research concerns basic issues in human perception, attention, and motor control, with a recent focus on motor-perceptual interactions and phylogenically "primitive" connections between these systems. He uses event-related brain potentials and electromyographic activity to address these questions, in addition to the traditional measures of response time and accuracy.

Mark Blumberg Named as Editor of the Behavioral Neuroscience  (7/18/2007)

Professor Mark Blumberg will serve as Editor of Behavioral Neuroscience. Behavioral Neuroscience is the American Psychological Association flagship journal for research on the biological bases of behavior.

Kristian Markon to join faculty in 2007

Kristian Markon will join the department as Assistant Professor of Psychology in the Fall of 2007. He is expected to receive his Ph.D. in 2007 from the University of Minnesota. His research reflects a general interest in how to statistically model the causes and expression of individual differences, especially with regard to adaptive versus maladaptive personality variation. Recent lines of research have focused in particular on assessment of personality and psychopathology, and methods for modeling psychopathology in the areas of nosology and genetics.

Professor Jodie Plumert has been named an associate editor of the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, which is a leading source of empirical research on all aspects of children's development from infancy through adolescence, including cognitive, social, and physical development.

John Freeman to Serve as Associate Editor for Behavioral Neuroscience

Associate professor John Freeman has been named an associate editor of the journal Behavioral Neuroscience. Behavioral Neuroscience is the American Psychological Association flagship journal for research on the biological bases of behavior.

Mark Blumberg elected President-Elect of the International Society for Developmental Psychobiology

Professor Mark Blumberg has been elected to be the next President of the International Society for Developmental Psychobiology (ISDP). Founded in 1968, ISDP promotes research on the development of behavior in all organisms, including man, with special attention to the effects of biological factors operating at any level of organization.

Three Iowa graduate students win awards from the International Society for Developmental Psychobiology

Gale Kleven was selected by the International Society for Developmental Psychobiology (ISDP) as the winner of the 2006 Dissertation Award. In addition, Amy Jo Marcano-Reik and Adele Seelke received the Sandra G. Wiener Award. Iowa graduate students picked up three of the top four graduate student awards presented by ISDP. All three were invited to give oral presentations of their work at ISDP's annual meeting, held in October, 2006, in Atlanta.

Andrew Hollingworth to Serve as Associate Editor for the journal Cognition

Associate professor Andrew Hollingworth has been named an associate editor of the journal Cognition. Cognition publishes theoretical and experimental papers on the study of the mind, including contributions from the fields of psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, computer science, mathematics, ethology, and philosophy.

Lee Anna Clark receives Regent's Award for Faculty Excellence

Professor Lee Anna Clark has received the University of Iowa Regent's Award for Faculty Excellence. The award honors faculty members for work representing a significant contribution to excellence in public education.

David Watson Named as Editor of the Journal of Abnormal Psychology

Starting in 2006, Professor David Watson is serving as Editor of the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, which is the field's premier journal for research in clinical psychology and psychopathology.

Alan Christensen Named as Editor of the The Annals of Behavioral Medicine

Professor Alan Christensen will serve as Editor of The Annals of Behavioral Medicine, the official publication of the Society of Behavioral Medicine. The Annals of Behavioral Medicine publishes research involving the integration of biological, psychological, and behavioral factors and principles as they relate to physical health.

Psychology Graduate Student Awarded NSF Graduate Fellowship

Rachel Casas has won a 2006-07 National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Fellowship Award to support her graduate studies in the Department of Psychology. Rachel is one of three University of Iowa recipients who were among some 900 winners nationwide.

UI Researchers Win $1.5 Million NIH Grant To Study Children's Bike Safety

A team of University of Iowa researchers has won a five-year, $1,530,315 grant from the National Institutes of Health to continue studying how immature perceptual and motor skills put children riding bicycles at risk for being hit by cars when crossing roads.

Led by Jodie Plumert, professor of psychology, the interdisciplinary team from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences includes co-investigators Joseph Kearney and James Cremer, both professors of computer science. With their combined expertise, the team has developed an immersive, interactive bicycling simulator that allows them to observe children as they ride a bike through a virtual environment that includes crossing busy intersections.

The new grant will support research on two important aspects of perceptual-motor development and how they influence road-crossing behavior. The first is coordinating motor movement with visual information. The team's previous studies have shown that children choose the same size gaps between cars as adults, but end up with far less time to spare when they clear the path of the oncoming car. This puts child cyclists at greater risk for a collision because they have less time available to recover from an error such as a foot slipping off the pedal.

The team will also address a second aspect of perceptual-motor development, namely adapting movement to changing circumstances. Skilled road crossing requires that cyclists adjust quickly to changes from one intersection to the next such as the speed and density of the traffic. Children must be sensitive to these changing circumstances and act accordingly in order to avoid a collision.

Bicycle crashes are among the most common causes of severe injuries in late childhood and early adolescence. Motor vehicles are involved in approximately one-third of all bicycle-related brain injuries and in 90 percent of all fatalities resulting from bicycle crashes. The UI team's work to understand why such collisions occur represents a critical step in developing programs to prevent collisions between child cyclists and motor vehicles.

"By bringing together the study of basic and applied issues into a single program of research, this work will contribute both to our understanding of the development of perceptual-motor functioning and to our understanding of the underlying causes of child bicycling injuries," Plumert said.

STORY SOURCE: University of Iowa News Services, 300 Plaza Centre One, Suite 371, Iowa City, Iowa 52242-2500.

Ed Wasserman elected President of APA Division 3

Professor Ed Wasserman has been elected President of the American Psychological Association Division 3 (Division for Experimental Psychology).

Inah Lee will be joining the Iowa Psychology faculty in January 2006. Dr. Lee's research seeks to uncover how the brain forms and retrieves memory. He is particularly interested in neural representations of episodic memory in different brain regions of the medial temporal lobe (e.g., hippocampus, entorhinal cortex, etc.). Episodic memory entails remembering events with unique time and place information: remembering when and where you had dinner last night, or recalling a particular incident that happened during dining. While you try to remember details to answer these questions, different structures in the medial temporal lobe actively work together to retrieve relevant memories. Dr. Lee develops animal models of episodic memory and investigates underlying neural bases, using state-of-the-art electrophysiological and pharmacological techniques. His work illuminates the long-held psychological question of "how do we remember?" and will provide foundational evidence important for curing memory disorders associated with brain diseases, such as Alzheimer’s disease.

Connectionist and Dynamic Systems Approaches to Development: On the Cusp of a New Grand Theory or Still Too Distributed?

Date: Sunday, June 19 through Wednesday, June 22, 2005

Visit the conference website for more details

Deptartment of Psychology 2002-2003 newsletter

     Pamela Keel will join the department as Associate Professor of Psychology in the Fall of 2003. Dr. Keel received her Ph.D. in 1998 from The University of Minnesota. She is currently an Associate Professor at Harvard University. Dr. Keel’s research focuses on eating disorders and body image, in general, and bulimia nervosa outcome, nosology, and epidemiology in particular. One line of research examines psychological and biological mechanisms that may explain the emergence of binge eating in bulimia nervosa. A second line of research examines the prevalence of bulimia nervosa over the last 20 years and examines the outcome of individuals diagnosed with bulimia nervosa 10 and 20 years ago.

     Eliot Hazeltine will join the department as Assistant Professor of Psychology in the Fall of 2003. Dr. Hazeltine received his Ph.D. from The University of California, Berkeley. He is currently a Research Scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center. Dr. Hazeltine’s research is on the control of cognitive processes. In particular, he investigates response selection, the set of cognitive processes that enable us to transform sensory information into goal-directed actions. Dr. Hazeltine approaches this topic from a variety of perspectives, including motor learning, bimanual coordination, and dual-task interference using a range of cognitive neuroscience methodologies. A central theme of this research is that response selection processes act on flexible representations based on codes that incorporate action goals.

     Assistant Professor Andrew Hollingworth has been awarded the 2003 American Psychological Association Division 3 (Experimental Psychology) Young Investigator Award for the paper:

     Professor Don Fowles has been elected President of the Society for a Science of Clinical Psychology. His term as President begins in 2004. The Society seeks to affirm and promote the integration of the scientist and the practitioner in training, research, and the application of clinical psychology.

     Assistant Professor John Spencer has been awarded the Society for Research in Child Development Award for Early Research Contributions. The award recognizes Dr. Spencer’s research into the development of spatial working memory as "building connections between cognitive development and cognitive science through the sophisticated use of computational and behavioral approaches to the study of cognitive development."

     Professor Steven Luck has been selected as the first recipient of the Frank J. McGuigan Young Investigator Research Prize for his pioneering work on the mechanisms of visual attention. The $25,000 prize is awarded biennially by the American Psychological Foundation to support “empirical research explicating the concept of the human mind”.