Aaron S. Benjamin, PhD, is a professor of psychology and director of the Human Memory and Cognition Laboratory at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Dr. Benjamin received his PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Tell us a bit about your background: What is your area of research? What is your most recent journal-editing experience?
I conduct research on basic and applied issues in human memory, metamemory and decision-making. I have served on many editorial boards and was an Associate Editor for Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition (JEP:LMC) when Randi Martin was Editor.
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?
The content areas will remain the same, but I'd like to see more attention paid to methodological rigor, thoughtful analytic technique, and replicability. This shift means that we will be seeing more papers that report preregistered analyses, that are accompanied by raw(-ish) data, that explicitly address questions about power and error, that include replications, and that use alternative statistical methods.
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?
It is natural that JEP:LMC helps lead the charge for enhanced replicability within cognitive psychology, in part because the journal has a tradition of longer manuscripts that allow authors the space to combine the best aspects of confirmatory and exploratory approaches to science.
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: Learning, Memory, and Cognition® publishes original experimental studies on basic processes of cognition, learning, memory, imagery, concept formation, problem solving, decision making, thinking, reading, and language processing.