Molly Potter Awardees
Women in Cognitive Science is pleased to announce that the Potter Award for 2009 will be given to two investigators at different points of their early careers. Ingrid Olson (PhD 2000) receives an award for her groundbreaking work on visual processing and memory functions, using methods that include fMRI, TMS, neuropsychology, psychophysics, and eye tracking. Tania Lombrozo (PhD 2006) receives an award for her invention of a new field of research - the cognitive science of explanation. Both will present a short description of their work at the WICS meeting on 19 November 2009, just before the start of the Psychonomic Society meeting in Boston.
WICS would like to acknowledge the outstanding work of the Potter Award Committee (Virginia Valian, Chair, Marvin Chun, Helene Intraub, and Nancy Kanwisher) and the generous support of a grant from the National Science Foundation for Women in Cognitive Science that made this award possible.
The Mary C. Potter Award
To honor the contributions of Mary C. Potter to cognitive psychology and in anticipation of the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Psychonomic Society, Women in Cognitive Science (WICS) (http://www.womencogsci.org/) is delighted to announce the Mary C. Potter Award to recognize an outstanding junior scientist. The award, made possible by a grant from the National Science Foundation, is open to any individual in cognitive psychology who has received the PhD and has not received tenure before the time of application. The award will cover travel expenses to Boston for the Psychonomic Society meeting. The award will go to the person who best exemplifies the three hallmarks of Potter's research: creativity of approach, experimental rigor, and a focus on basic questions in cognition.
Throughout her career, Mary C. Potter has used ingenious new methods to address fundamental questions about the first few fleeting moments of cognition. How quickly are representations accessed? How do people identify and categorize new stimuli? What is remembered and what is lost? How abstract are representations? How is information from long-term memory recruited to subserve the everyday miracles of perceptual cognition and categorization?
Potter's laboratory investigates questions about perception, attention, memory, and language processing, including the attentional blink, repetition blindness, the creative misperception of a nonword as influenced by semantic context, cross-modal (visual-auditory) processing of sentences, the abstract perception of pictures of objects, and the conceptual basis of "verbatim" recall of sentences. Through her peerless experiments, Potter has contributed to our understanding of how a stimulus such as a word, sentence, or picture generates an interpretation and a fleeting or stable memory. In Potter's research program, meaning does not come along slowly once other processes are complete, but guides even the earliest stages of perceptual experience. A key discovery is that comprehension of the meaning of a pictured scene or written word happens in a fraction of a second, much faster than the time required for stabilizing even a brief memory of that stimulus. The viewer may not even become conscious of the stimulus unless it fits in with the context.
Potter received her BA from Swarthmore College and her PhD from Harvard University. She has spent her career as a faculty member at MIT. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Association, and the Association for Psychological Science; she is also a member of the Society of Experimental Psychologists. Her research has been supported by NIH and NSF.
Potter's clear-sighted judgment is sought by her peers: she has served as chair of the faculty at MIT, as chair of the committee on women faculty in the School of Science at MIT, as member and chair of the governing board of the Psychonomic Society, and as member and chair of numerous site visit teams.
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