PEOPLE

As winners of a 1998 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), Nalini Ambady, PhD, and Marlene Behrmann, PhD, will each receive $500,000 to further their research. The award is the highest recognition by the U.S. government of scientists and engineers in the early stages of their research careers.

Ambady, an assistant professor of psychology at Harvard University, is one of 20 National Science Foundation­supported researchers out of 60 winners of this prestigious honor. NSF selected its nominees for the prize from the 338 NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award winners.

Ambady's research examines the accuracy of what she calls "thin-slice judgments," or how people make judgments based on brief observations of behavior. Specifically, she looks at the variables that promote accurate or inaccurate judgments. She plans to use her grant to study how effective "thin-slice judgments" are for navigating the social environment.

Behrmann, an associate psychology professor at Carnegie Mellon University, was nominated for the award by the National Institute of Mental Health. Through her research on visual cognition, Behrmann is uncovering clues about how the brain gathers and makes sense of visual material.

She is also investigating the effects of brain injury and rehabilitation interventions on the psychological and neural mechanisms of visual cognition. She plans to use her grant money to continue this research and fund functional imaging studies of normal and brain-damaged adults.

William E. Collins, PhD, the first nonphysician to head medical certification, education and human factors research at the Federal Aviation Administration's Civil Aeromedical Institute (CAMI), has earned three aeromedical honors in 1998 for his research and contributions to flight safety:

* The Paul T. Hansen Award from the Aerospace Human Factors Association for directing human factors research to improve the selection and training of air traffic controllers.

* The Silver Medal Award from the South African Society of Aerospace and Environmental Medicine for helping their country develop better aviation safety programs.

* The Harry G. Mosley Award from the Aerospace Medical Association for his research, including his role in developing the first commercial spatial disorientation familiarization device, which trains pilots to manage spatial disorientation during flight.

As director of CAMI, Collins is exploring more effective information display designs for aircraft, training physicians to serve as aviation medical examiners--doctors who are qualified to determine whether a pilot is physically and mentally capable of flying safely--and helping less-developed countries create safer aviation programs. Collins began work at CAMI in 1961 as a research psychologist, and was promoted to director in 1989.

University of Missouri­ Columbus professor of psychology Jim Davis, PhD, has received a $2 million, four-year grant from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to develop methods to reduce smoking among teen-agers. With the grant, Davis and his colleagues are developing programs to educate citizens in 40 rural communities in Missouri about the problem of teen smoking.

"In particular, we will be encouraging compliance with two state laws--clean indoor air and no tobacco sales to minors," says Davis.

The programs will teach business owners about the importance of state tobacco laws and increase parents' and community leaders' awareness that many of these laws are ignored. Davis and his colleagues also plan to organize local advocacy groups that will promote compliance with state tobacco laws.

"Our whole approach is to empower local citizens to solve their own problems through a leadership role in their community," says Davis.

Davis's grant is one of 25 grants given by the NCI to address youth smoking in the United States.

The public interest arm of APA's Public Policy Office (PPO) has added the expertise of two psychologists to its staff. Ellen Greenberg Garrison, PhD, has been appointed director of public interest policy and Lauren Fasig, PhD, JD, has been selected as the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues's (SPSSI) James Marshall Public Policy Scholar, a two-year position with the PPO office.

Garrison brings strong advocacy skills, federal policy and clinical experience and knowledge of APA structure to her new position. She has held several senior policy positions at APA, including director of health policy, acting director of scientific affairs and administrative officer for child, youth and family policy.

For the past four years, she has worked as a federal policy consultant to APA's science directorate and public policy office, helping develop projects such as the Summer Science Institute as part of the special science initiative.

Garrison also worked for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee as a Congressional Science Fellow and later as a professional staff member. More recently, she created and directed a school-based mental health program for Latino immigrant and other at-risk children and families in Montgomery County, Md. She also worked at the Center for School Mental Health Assistance at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

Among her office's current priorities are conveying psychology's perspective to the White House Conference on Mental Health and the Surgeon General's Report on Mental Health and promoting reauthorization of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

The office is developing policy initiatives in child care, school violence prevention and psychological services for crime victims. The office is also working to preserve affirmative action programs and women's reproductive rights, among other initiatives.

Fasig, who received her law degree and psychology doctorate from the University of Florida, brings a strong background in child development, legal issues affecting children and court program development to her position as SPSSI scholar. She developed and administered the Juvenile Dependency Mediation Program in the Eighth Judicial Circuit in Florida and received mediator certification from the Florida Supreme Court. She is working to bring psychological research to bear on the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the legislation that provides federal aid to elementary and secondary schools for the education of children living in high-poverty communities. Additionally, she is focusing on federal policy related to school violence and the proposed Congressional Advisory Committee on Mental Illness. She also provides support to other PPO staff addressing juvenile justice and child welfare issues.

Developmental psychologist William Kessen, PhD, best known for his early research on infant perception, died of a stroke on Feb. 13. He was 74.

Kessen had a 45-year career at Yale University, beginning as a postdoctoral fellow in the Child Study Center at the school and retiring as the Eugene Higgins Professor Emeritus of Psychology and professor of pediatrics in 1997. Many of Kessen's students went on to become the leading researchers in developmental psychology, says Edward Zigler, PhD, professor of psychology at Yale and Kessen's colleague for more than 40 years. "He was one of the great developmental thinkers of his age," says Zigler.

While at Yale, Kessen did groundbreaking work on infants' perception. Also a great historian, Kessen studied how social history affects child development and the evolution of psychology in the late nineteenth century.

He wrote or edited several books on child psychology, and was completing "The Baby Book: 75 Years of Infant Care" before he died. Kessen was to receive the Distinguished Contributions to Education in Child Development Award from the Society for Research and Child Development this month.

Kessen's contributions to child development are honored by his peers in the book "Contemporary Constructions of the Child: Essays in Honor of William Kessen" (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1991).

Developmental psychologist Joan Lucariello, PhD, has left her post as APA's senior scientist to head up a research program at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD).

Lucariello will help shape NICHD's behavioral research portfolio as director of the Research Programs in Cognitive Social and Affective Development in NICHD's Child Development and Behavior Branch. Her program will fund research related to normal cognitive, social and affective development; language development; family-peer interactions; child care; development in infancy, childhood and adolescence; and mathematical development and cognition.

Lucariello joined APA in July 1997 as the senior scientist in the Science Directorate. She worked as an advocate for behavioral and social science as APA's liaison with the National Science Foundation and several institutes at the National Institutes of Health.

James R. P. Ogloff, JD, PhD, is president-elect of the Canadian Psychological Association (CPA); his one-year presidential term will begin in June 2000. Ogloff is professor of psychology at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia and an adjunct professor of law at the University of British Columbia. As president of CPA, he plans to focus on uniting and strengthening psychology in Canada. He also hopes to collaborate on initiatives in psychology and law with Patrick DeLeon, PhD, JD, who will be APA president during Ogloff's term. Ogloff is also an APA member and president of Div. 41 (American Psychology­Law Society).

Two young investigators have each won a $1 million grant from the McDonnell Foundation for their exceptional, innovative research.

Mathematical psychologist Stanislas Dehaene, PhD, 33, and comparative psychologist Daniel Povinelli, PhD, 34, are two of only 10 scientists to be selected as James S. McDonnell Centennial Fellows.

While Povinelli works with chimpanzees and Dehaene works with numbers, these two scientists share an original approach to psychology and a keen ability to articulate the concepts and value of their research.

Searching for differences...

Povinelli, director of the Institute for Comparative Cognitive Science at the University of Southwestern Louisiana, is challenging a belief that has been held firmly in place since Darwin: The conviction that there are no qualitative differences between the brains of humans and chimpanzees and no way of defining what is unique about the human mind.

He believes there are differences and that the key to identifying them is to abandon the idea that chimpanzees reason the same way humans do, he says.

"Behavioral similarity is no guarantee of comparable psychological similarity," he says.

Povinelli is attempting to understand how humans and chimpanzees reason about the social and physical world by comparing preschool children and chimpanzees. He's uncovered some interesting differences.

For example, he found that while 2- to 3-year-old human children understand that an experimenter with covered eyes cannot see them, a chimp does not grasp that concept. When confronted with a "seeing" and a "nonseeing" experimenter, Povinelli has found, chimps gesture to each for food equally.

"I don't think that they have a concept of 'seeing,'" he says.

With the help of colleague Todd Pruess, PhD, an assistant professor at the University of Southwestern Louisiana, Povinelli will use the money to establish a research center at the university to investigate these differences and fund students and postdoctoral fellows.

He also plans to use a portion of the grant to raise newborn chimps in a human culture and compare them to chimps raised as chimps, says Povinelli.

"People worry that if we demonstrate difference that it diminishes the status of other animals," says Povinelli. But Povinelli argues that their research will actually uncover the unique qualities of chimps and provide insight about the types of animals that are appropriate models for specific research.

...and investigating sums

A mathematician turned cognitive neuroscientist, Dehaene is one of a handful of researchers working in an area of cognitive neuroscience known as "numerical cognition."

His research on how the brain performs mathematical calculations has led to his conclusion that humans, and many animals, have a biologically determined ability to make sense of numbers and mathematics.

He has determined that numbers are similar to colors--they are a subjective quality constructed by the brain. Just as it is useful for humans to extract color from the brain to recognize objects, it is useful for humans to extract numbers to track predators or select foraging grounds, he says.

With the use of brain imaging, Dehaene has also concluded that the brain's inferior parietal cortex plays a key role in the quantitative processing of numbers.

As a research director at the Institut National de la Sante et de la Recherche Medicale in Paris, Dehaene plans to use the grant money to fund postdoctoral fellowships and hire young scientists to help with his research. He also plans to update his laboratory with new technology such as infrared imaging and transcranial magnetic stimulation.

In addition, he will explore the characteristics of the different cerebral substrates of arithmetic using brain imaging and by studying brain-lesioned patients who lose specific mathematical abilities such as subtraction or comparison. With his wife, psychologist Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz, PhD, he will study infants to uncover clues about developmental calculational deficits.

With his research, Dehaene is also discovering more effective ways to teach and learn mathematics. He outlines these suggestions and much of his research in his book, "Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics" (Oxford University Press, 1997).

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