Editor Spotlight

Nelson Cowan, PhD, is a Curators' Distinguished Professor at the University of Missouri Department of Psychological Sciences and a past president of APA Division 3 (Society for Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Science). Dr. Cowan's research specializations include childhood development of working memory and relations between working memory and selective attention in information processing.

Dr. Cowan was previously an Associate Editor of three journals: the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition; Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology; and European Journal of Cognitive Psychology.

Recently, he and Dr. Robert Logie co-edited a special issue of Memory & Cognition.

Dr. Cowan and Dr. David Balota are editors-in-chief of a book series by Routledge, Frontiers of Cognitive Psychology.

Briefly, what are your main priorities? For example, how will you grow readership, what type of scholarship would you like to see in the journal, and what kind of content are you hoping to attract?

Associate Editors were selected with a broad range of expertise so the journal can welcome articles on empirical research of wide, general interest in psychology, or of interest to more than one subfield. The importance of the work can be theoretical, practical, or both. Topics can be, for example, cognitive, social, and/or developmental, and methods can be behavioral, physiological, or and/or mathematical. Persistent unanswered questions can be as important as currently hot topics. A key trait of this journal is that the empirical evidence must be strong, typically on the basis of replications and extensions within an article or a large-N study.

Like the previous editor, I will continue to accept both long papers and brief reports; on-line supplementary material can be used to provide further empirical strength even for brief reports. I also encourage authors to include a brief paragraph at the end of the article describing its broader context, explaining such things as how the ideas originated, how the findings are related to the authors' research program, and how the research will be extended in the future, much as one provides in oral presentations.

Why is this journal important for the field? What is its relevance to society/public health? What are the hot issues in your area right now?

The value to society is that we can provide strong evidence on important issues related to human behavior, often with implications for such areas as health, social relations, education, and political and economic thought.

What challenges, if any, lie ahead for the field?

The journal's emphasis meets head on the current crisis of replicability in science. Another modern challenge is that, with electronic delivery, there is less need than in the past to group similar articles together into a journal format, but I hope to invigorate the format with reliably interesting articles and improved use of electronic table-of-contents to alert readers to articles germane to them.

Do you have plans for a special issue or changes to the editorial process? Are you making any changes?

I plan to minimize changes to the editorial process until I have acquired sufficient first-hand editorial experience on how this journal currently functions. Many manuscripts are returned quickly without being sent out for review, but we will try to provide their authors with brief comments from two editors on our team.

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