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2010
SEP AWARDS, May 1, 2010
2010 Howard Crosby Warren Medal:
ELIZABETH LOFTUS, University of California, Irvine
Citation on Certificate:
“To Elizabeth
Loftus...for her significant contributions to the understanding of the
phenomenology of human memory, especially its fragility and
vulnerability to distortion.”
Oral Presentation at Banquet
The Howard Crosby Warren Medal is presented to Elizabeth Loftus for her
influential studies of human memory. In creative studies of
normal human memory, she has demonstrated its fragility and its
vulnerability to distortion. Her research on postevent
information effects on the prior memory of the event and her research
on false memories, in which she demonstrated that it is possible to
possess memories of events that never happened, have significantly
influenced modern research on human memory. Estes, for example, began a
recent Psychological Review article by stating that one of the four
facts of memory for which any satisfactory theory must account is
memory distortion.
Before the seminal work of Elizabeth Loftus, models of memory assumed
the loss of information over time, or forgetting, but modelers had not
contemplated the possibility of the inclusion of postevent information
in the representation of an event. Hence, Dr. Loftus’ initial
reports on the effect of post-event information were greeted with
skepticism, and early follow-up studies by other researchers were
attempts to demonstrate that her findings were artifacts of loss of
information plus guessing. This led to methodological advances in the
study of memory, however, and completely vindicated her work. In
the 1990s, when the claim was advanced that memories could be
deliberately repressed and then years later recovered, virtually all of
the experimental research with humans that was relevant to this claim
had been either performed by Dr. Loftus or inspired by her research.
She took the lead in presenting the experimental evidence in the
courtroom and to the public. Dr. Loftus is a prolific writer and
a tireless communicator of her findings, and the relevance of her work
to topics such as eyewitness testimony and recovered memories has now
been widely recognized.
Today, students learn in their textbooks that, contrary to intuition,
the inevitable effect of postevent information on memory is the
recovery of memories that are false. However, in the 1990s, because the
fact that victims could unwittingly make false claims was seen to
undermine their heartfelt accusations of horrific crimes, Dr. Loftus
was subjected to a campaign of vilification that impaired her ability
to perform the research essential to evaluate these claims. During this
period she stood alone, without public support from any colleague. Her
aplomb and fidelity to empirical evidence are a profile in courage that
deserves to be remembered and honored. We do so tonight.
The Society of Experimental
Psychologist is pleased to award the 2010 HOWARD CROSBY WARREN MEDAL
for significant research in Experimental Psychology to ELIZABETH LOFTUS.
Norman
Anderson
Lifetime Achievement Award
2010 NORMAN A.
ANDERSON LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD:
BRENDA
MILNER, McGill University
Citation on Certificate
“To Brenda Milner... for her
foundational contributions to the science of memory and the brain and
elegant studies elucidating the neuropsychology of human memory.”
Oral Presentation
The scientific study
of the relation of brain to behavior dates back to the early 19th
century, but the modern era of memory research was inaugurated by
Brenda Milner. Her elegant studies of the noted patient H.M.
established fundamental principles about how memory functions are
organized in the brain--principles that continue to guide the
discipline. Dr. Milner’s seminal discovery of the central role
that the hippocampus plays in memory was instrumental in establishing
the field of cognitive neuroscience. Long before sophisticated
neuroimaging techniques became available, she illuminated the function
of the medial temporal and frontal lobes and the two hemispheres by
combining psychometric techniques and psychological experimentation
with detailed knowledge of the locus of brain damage. In fact,
her early studies on the effects of damage to the medial temporal lobes
with Penfield in 1958 and Scoville in 1957 are among the most cited
papers in the whole of Neuroscience.
These early studies
were followed by others demonstrating that the memory deficit Incurred
by damage to the medial temporal lobes is confined to the encoding,
retention, and retrieval of information only from long-term memory and
does not affect all long-term memories equally. Perceptual and motor
learning, for example, proceed normally without a hippocampus, even
though the individual has no conscious recollection of performing the
task before. Semantic memory, or the general knowledge we have
about the world, also survives hippocampal damage if it was acquired
sufficiently long before the damage occurred. In the 1960s and 1970s,
Dr. Milner’s studies of damage to prefrontal cortex provided the
basis from which all current theories of the role of the prefrontal
cortex in cognition are derived. In this work, she demonstrated that
damage to different regions of prefrontal cortex in humans leads to
selective and relatively independent deficits. Her research has had a
profound and continuing influence on clinical domains in the
development of tests to assess, diagnose, and treat people with brain
disorders resulting from traumatic injury and degenerative diseases,
and from psychiatric illness.
Dr. Milner has also
made major contributions to our knowledge of hemispheric specialization
in memory, cognition, and language. She and Rasmussen showed that
language lateralization following brain damage is related to handedness
and to the timing and locus of the injury. Recently, she and Dr. Denise
Klein have been examining the functional organization of language in
the brains of bilingual people. Finally, Dr. Milner has mentored two
generations of scientists who themselves have become leaders in the
field and made major contributions to our understanding of
brain-behavior relations. Among these is one of our new Fellows,
Morris Moscovitch.
Dr. Milner is a
member of the pantheon of great psychologists and neuroscientists,
standing alongside the greatest neuroscientists of the last half
century, including Nobel Prize winners. Like them, she has
transformed the field--and has done so in a most dignified and elegant
fashion. Her scientific contributions have been recognized by at least
20 honorary degrees and many of the most prestigious awards that Canada
and international scientific societies representing both psychologists
and neuroscientists can confer. She is a fellow of the Royal Society of
Canada, the Royal Society of Canada of the United Kingdom, and the
National Academy of Sciences (USA), and was recently awarded the highly
coveted Balzan Prize.
SEP is late in
stepping up to the table. Tonight,
The Society of Experimental Psychologists
is pleased to present the 2010 NORMAN A. ANDERSON LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT
AWARD to BRENDA MILNER for her foundational contributions to the
science of memory and the brain.
2010 SOCIETY OF
EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGISTS YOUNG INVESTIGATOR AWARD:
THOMAS GRIFFITHS,
University of California, Berkeley
Citation on Certificate
"To Thomas Griffiths... in recognition of his contributions
in using Bayesian statistics to advance our understanding of human
cognition."
Oral Presentation
Tom Griffiths'
research sheds new light on how, with seemingly minimal effort, people
represent the rich conceptual complexity of the world, grasp causal
relationships, and share this information with fellow humans through
language. His general strategy has been to take an abstract learning
problem, develop a mathematical model that would provide an optimal
solution, and then compare that solution with human behavior. For
inductive problems like learning languages, concepts, and causal
relationships,
this typically means
comparing human learning with statistical inference, using the theory
of Bayesian statistics to quantify how much structure people should be
able to infer from the data provided by their environment. In this way,
it becomes possible to ask what kind of assumptions or constraints
people bring to problems in order to account for the inferences they
make, providing a way to identify what makes people such effective
learners.
The applications of
Griffiths's research extend well beyond their primary focus on human
cognition. In computational linguistics, his work has been influential
in illustrating how the methods of Bayesian statistics can be used with
traditional formalisms such as probabilistic grammars. Recent work on
the transmission of information between Bayesian agents has provided
the first analytic results indicating how constraints on learning
influence the outcomes of cultural evolution, making predictions that
help
explain how human
languages adapt to the minds of their learners. Griffiths has also made
significant contributions in computer science and statistics,
developing efficient algorithms for analyzing structure in complex data
sets.
We are pleased to recognize you as a Fellow of The Society of
Experimental Psychologists.
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