Dr. Isabel Gauthier is the David K. Wilson Chair of Psychology and professor of Radiology and Radiological Sciences at Vanderbilt University. At Vanderbilt, Dr. Gauthier leads the Object Perception Lab.
Dr. Gauthier received her PhD in psychology from Yale University.
Tell us a bit about your background: What is your area of research? What is your most recent journal-editing experience?
My lab studies perceptual expertise and individual differences in object recognition, using behavioral and neuroimaging methods. We sometimes train people in the lab to acquire expertise with new categories, and in other work, we recruit people with a wide range of experience in a particular domain, for instance cars, birds, or musical notation.
I am currently editor of Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (JEP: General), and have been for the last 6 years.
Before this, I was an associate editor at Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance (JEP: HPP) for several years in Glyn Humphreys' editorial team.
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?
My first priority is to not undo the good work that previous editors, including Jim Enns' team, have done at JEP: HPP.
What I can bring to the Journal comes from my experience at JEP: General. I have come to value theoretically broad papers that speak to more then a few experts.
While the work JEP: HPP publishes cannot be expected to have the breadth we sought at JEP: General, even within the realm of "Perception and Performance" there is room to encourage articles in one sub-discipline to reach out to other sub-disciplines.
What challenges, if any, lie ahead for the field?
It is a tumultuous time for science in general and for psychology in particular.
I want JEP: HPP stakeholders (authors, reviewers, and readers) to work together to raise the bar on the quality of the research we publish, first in motivating the multiple decisions that are made in the course of a research project and second in being willing to collect enough data to turn a provocative result into a compelling one.
I do not believe in habit and tradition as arguments for sample size decisions and other methodological and analytical choices, but I am aware that in a more specialized journal like JEP: HPP, some of these issues can sometime be taken for granted out of a kind of shared, unspoken, understanding.
Still, I believe readers of JEP: HPP articles want to know why specific choices were made, authors would like to be more free to discuss the tradeoffs and the limitations of their approaches and for this, reviewers and editors need to tolerate less then perfect results for the sake of transparency.
Do you have plans for a special issue or changes to the editorial process? Are you making any changes?
I am not making any big changes to our instructions for authors, although we will encourage authors to include figures and tables in the text where they belong for the copy we send out for review.
My editorial team is almost entirely composed of associate editors who are staying from Jim Enns' team or coming over from my JEP: General team. They are experienced and ready to go!
Editor Spotlight features interviews with the newly-appointed editors of APA Journals.
APA Journals produces an array of scholarly journals that cover the spectrum of modern psychology and feature the latest research in the field.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance® publishes studies on perception, control of action, perceptual aspects of language processing, and related cognitive processes. All sensory modalities and motor systems are within its purview.