2008 APA Program Preview

Mind, Brain, & Behavior in Boston

Jeremy Wolf, Division 3 2008 Program Chair

Top Ten Reasons to Attend the APA Meeting in Boston this August:

Herewith, a list of the top ten reasons to come to Boston this summer from the completely unbiased perspective of the Program Chair for Division Three.

1)      You could learn "How Animals, Humans, and Computer Models Remember Visual Objects".  We are remarkably good at remembering scenes and objects that we have only seen once and briefly, at that. How is that done? Robert Cook (Tufts) has organized a symposium with a set of speakers from MIT, CNRS(Marseilles), and Tufts to bring you up-to-date on the latest data and theory.

2)      You will be able to hear three of last years winners of Division 3 New Investigator Awards discuss their work. Evan Palmer (Wichita State) will talk about "Occlusion, Illusion, and Spatiotemporal Fusion". Jochen Barth (SAMHOUD, Utrecht) describes work on how great apes and small children keep track of objects. Finally, Michael Bunting will tell us about the "role of attention in short term memory retrieval." Each of these speakers had an award-winning article in on of the JEP journals last year.

3)      You can mingle with your friends from Division Six at our joint poster session.

4)      You can mingle with your friends from Division Six at our joint social hour.

5)      You can trace the path "From Eye to Brain and Back Again" with three professors from the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Science. Jim DiCarlo will describe his work on object recognition pathways in the primate visual system. Pawan Sinha has revived research on the classic question of what the blind see if their sight is restored. Peter Schiller will summarize several decades'  work on how we point the eyes at what we want to see.

6)      You will meet and learn from six of our new Division Three Fellows. Mark Hollins (UNC), Andrew Hollingworth (Iowa), and  Woo-Kyoung Ahn (Yale) will introduce us to topics in Perception and Cognition in one New Fellows symposium. In the other symposium, Jeffrey Katz (Auburn), Cody Brook (Denison), and Bruce Brown (CUNY) consider topics from concept-learning to reducing relapse to timing mechanisms.

7)      In one symposium, you could encounter the topics of ear infections, taste perception, and obesity. More surprisingly, you could discover that these topics are connected. Linda Bartoshuk (U. Florida) has brought together a panel to review the data that tie ear infections in childhood to adult obesity with damage to the sense of taste as the link.

8)      You can hear The President - not that president, our Division Three president, Ed Wasserman (Iowa) giving an address on the "Yin and Yang of Same--Different Discrimination Learning".  At this writing, it is not known if Ed will be offering a plan for the US economy.

9)      If you can get past the hordes of paparazzi, you will not want to miss the Division Three Business Meeting.

10)  Finally, if you have a bit of time, you might have a look at Boston and environs. While it is hard to compete with the Business Meeting for sheer excitement, the city does have its attractions.