Congratulations Gordon Logan!
Gordon Logan is the 2014 recipient of the Howard Crosby Warren Medal from the Society of Experimental Psychologists.The Warren Medal is the oldest and one of the most prestigious awards in the field of experimental psychology. As the formal announcement (shown below) of the award made last night at the 2014 Meeting of the Society details, Gordon has made profound theoretical, experimental, and methodological contribution to our understanding of critical phenomena in the area of cognitive psychology. Congratulations Gordon for this well-deserved award!
THE SOCIETY OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGISTS Awards the 2014 Howard Crosby Warren Medal to *Gordon D. Logan* Vanderbilt University “for his innovative and penetrating theoretical and empirical work in attention, automaticity and skill acquisition, executive control, and neural mechanisms of information processing.”
Oral Presentation:
Gordon Logan has made profound theoretical and empirical contributions to the study of attention and automaticity, the development of skill acquisition, and the nature of executive control. He pioneered and extensively developed the stop-signal paradigm, which requires subjects to inhibit an ongoing action in response to a stop signal. He conceptualized and modeled performance in the task in terms of a race between the mental processes that govern the action and a “stop process” that inhibits the action. The paradigm provides an elegant approach to assessing the issue of how people inhibit their behaviors, and has been applied successfully to the study of performance in wide varieties of clinical populations who show deficits in inhibitory control.
Logan also developed the hugely influential “instance theory of automatization.” The theory holds that automatic processing develops because the observer stores separate representations or “instances” of each exposure to a task. Consistent practice results in an increase in the speed of retrieval of the instances. The theory accounts for fundamental quantitative results involving the speed-up functions associated with practice in cognitive tasks. It formalizes the view that novice performance is limited not by a scarcity of resources but rather by a lack of domain-specific knowledge.
In his recent work, Logan has provided ingenious demonstrations of multiple forms of error-detection processes in skilled typists; has significantly advanced compound-cue retrieval theories of performance in task-switching paradigms; and has made major contributions in a collaborative program of research that uses neural-measurement approaches to constraining information-accumulation models of choice response times and saccadic eye movements.