Robert W Proctor
Biographic Data
| ID | 1660014 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Robert W Proctor |
| GIVEN NAMES | Robert W |
| FAMILY NAME | Proctor |
| SIGNATURE | PROCTOR R W |
| AFFILIATIONS | Purdue University West Lafayette |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0149-8352 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 14 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1990 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Mechanism and contextualism in psychology
Psychology was established as a separate discipline when it split from philosophy. With the founding of Wundt’s lab and subsequent developments by Külpe, Titchener, and others, psychology was championed initially as a distinct science, in which controlled experiments played a major role. A parallel approach, beginning with Wundt, that eschews causal explanations established through controlled experiments and focuses on qualitative descriptions ba…
Testing the saliency-based account of phasic alertness
Historical Articles on Edward Bradford Titchener
E. B. Titchener was a major figure in psychology in the early 20th century, especially in the United States. A British national, graduate of Oxford University with a PhD from Leipzig under Wilhelm Wundt, he championed a system of psychology that emphasized the introspection of conscious experience as accessed and revealed under rigorously controlled experimental procedures. From his laboratory at Cornell University, he was the major professor for…
Attention for Designers
This book is the second edition of one published in 2008 by Wickens and McCarley. The goal, then and now, is for the book to reunite basic research on attention to applied research conducted in engineering psychology. In addition to updating the coverage of the main topic areas, the second edition includes two new chapters, one devoted to automation in general and the other to five specific disciplines: aviation, driving, education, health care, …
Family Relationships Under Work From Home
Work-from-home (WFH) influences both work and life, and further impacts family relationships. The current study explored the impacts of WFH on family relationships during the COVID-19 pandemic and identified effective adaptive processes for maintaining family relationships under WFH. Using the Vulnerability-Stress-Adaptation (VSA) model, the study examined the roles of adaptive processes (spending time with family members and balancing work and l…
A diffusion model for the congruency sequence effect
A neglected pioneer of psychology
Tribute to E. J. Capaldi
E. J. (John) Capaldi (1928–2020) made numerous contributions to experimental psychology in his long career at the University of Texas at Austin and Purdue University. He was a pioneer in the area of animal learning and cognition, known for his sequential theory of partial reinforcement extinction effects. His research in this area and in memory and counting phenomena was conducted for the most part with rats running in straight alley mazes under …
Word- and arrow-based Simon effects emerge for eccentrically presented location words and arrows
Examination of a Response–Effect Compatibility Task With Continuous Mouse Movements
According to ideomotor theory, we select actions by recalling and anticipating their sensory consequences, that is, their action effects. Compelling evidence for this theory comes from response–effect compatibility (REC) experiments, in which a response produces an effect with which it is either compatible or incompatible. For example, pressing a left/right response key is faster if it is predictably followed by an action effect on the same, comp…
Emotion-induced attentional bias
Schlaghecken, F., Blagrove, E., Mantantzis, K., Maylor, E. A., & Watson, D. G. [(2017). Look on the bright side: Positivity bias modulates interference effects in the Simon task. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 146(6), 763–770] found larger spatial Simon effects for happy than sad faces. Unexpectedly, this enhancement was also observed for nonvalenced objects requiring the same response as happy faces. We examined whether the increas…
Parallel Development of James J. Gibson’s Ecological and Paul M. Fitts’s Information Processing Approaches to Perception and Performance
James J. Gibson and Paul M. Fitts, two psychologists who had, and continue to have, a substantial influence on research in perception, action, and human performance, had remarkable, parallel careers with roots in the U.S. Army Air Forces Aviation Psychology program in World War II. Fitts is widely regarded as founder of the applied field of engineering psychology and the basic field of human performance, both based on a human information processi…
How psychologists help solve real-world problems in multidisciplinary research teams
Real-world problems are not confined to a single discipline. Multidisciplinary team research combines the methods and theories from different disciplines to achieve a common goal. It fosters collaboration among researchers with different expertise, which can lead to novel solutions and new discoveries that could not be achieved otherwise. This special issue of the American Psychologist consists of 10 articles that cover a range of research areas …
Taking into consideration explanations of perception-action interactions that may be “less dramatic, but more reflective of what happens in the real world”
Action Selection
The choices people make in selecting which action to perform in response to various stimulus events have been studied since the earliest days of the field of psychology. Many investigations have used choice-reaction tasks, although other behavioral methods have also been employed. As with other areas of experimental psychology, methods of neuroscience have come to be used increasingly more often in addition to behavioral methods. Phenomena attrib…
Approach–avoidance actions or categorization? A matching account of reference valence effects in affective S–R compatibility
The prepared emotional reflex
Advance preparation of action courses toward emotional stimuli is an effective means to regulate impulsive emotional behavior. Our experiment shows that performing intentional acts of approach and avoidance in an evaluation task influences the unintended activation of approach and avoidance tendencies in another task in which stimulus valence is irrelevant. For the evaluation-relevant blocks, participants received either congruent (positive-appro…
A review of contemporary ideomotor theory
A framework for action planning, called ideomotor theory, suggests that actions are represented by their perceivable effects. Thus, any activation of the effect image, either endogenously or exogenously, will trigger the corresponding action. We review contemporary studies relating to ideomotor theory in which researchers have investigated various manipulations of action effects and how those effects acquire discriminative control over the action…
Mother nature doesn’t have a bullet with your name on it”
The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance
This book was the first handbook where the world's foremost 'experts on expertise' reviewed our scientific knowledge on expertise and expert performance and how experts may differ from non-experts in terms of their development, training, reasoning, knowledge, social support, and innate talent. Methods are described for the study of experts' knowledge and their performance of representative tasks from their domain of expertise. The development of …
Polarity correspondence
Differences in performance with various stimulus-response mappings are among the most prevalent findings for binary choice reaction tasks. The authors show that perceptual or conceptual similarity is not necessary to obtain mapping effects; a type of structural similarity is sufficient. Specifically, stimulus and response alternatives are coded as positive and negative polarity along several dimensions, and polarity correspondence is sufficient t…
A feature-integration account of sequential effects in the Simon task
Empirical evaluation and justification of methodologies in psychological science
The purpose of this article is to describe a relatively new movement in the history and philosophy of science, naturalism, a form of pragmatism emphasizing that methodological principles are empirical statements. Thus, methodological principles must be evaluated and justified on the same basis as other empirical statements. On this view, methodological statements may be less secure than the specific scientific theories to which they give rise. Th…
Empirical evaluation and justification of methodologies in psychological science
Stalinist Science (review)
Reviewed by: Stalinist Science Robert N. Proctor Nikolai Krementsov. Stalinist Science. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. xvii + 371 pp. Figures, tables. $45.00. Krementsov begins his book with a provocative insight, that “many of the greatest triumphs of Stalinist science occurred exactly at the time of the greatest repression,” the period when “arrests were common and the Gulag camps overflowing” (p. 3). The pursuit of Nobel-quality …
Polarity correspondence
Differences in performance with various stimulus-response mappings are among the most prevalent findings for binary choice reaction tasks. The authors show that perceptual or conceptual similarity is not necessary to obtain mapping effects; a type of structural similarity is sufficient. Specifically, stimulus and response alternatives are coded as positive and negative polarity along several dimensions, and polarity correspondence is sufficient t…
How psychologists help solve real-world problems in multidisciplinary research teams
Real-world problems are not confined to a single discipline. Multidisciplinary team research combines the methods and theories from different disciplines to achieve a common goal. It fosters collaboration among researchers with different expertise, which can lead to novel solutions and new discoveries that could not be achieved otherwise. This special issue of the American Psychologist consists of 10 articles that cover a range of research areas …
Approach–avoidance actions or categorization? A matching account of reference valence effects in affective S–R compatibility
Mother nature doesn’t have a bullet with your name on it”
There is no room for scientism in scientific psychology
There is no room for scientism in scientific psychology
The influence of irrelevant location information on performance
Experiment and Interpretation
Stalinist Science (review)
Reviewed by: Stalinist Science Robert N. Proctor Nikolai Krementsov. Stalinist Science. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. xvii + 371 pp. Figures, tables. $45.00. Krementsov begins his book with a provocative insight, that “many of the greatest triumphs of Stalinist science occurred exactly at the time of the greatest repression,” the period when “arrests were common and the Gulag camps overflowing” (p. 3). The pursuit of Nobel-quality …
Empirical evaluation and justification of methodologies in psychological science
The purpose of this article is to describe a relatively new movement in the history and philosophy of science, naturalism, a form of pragmatism emphasizing that methodological principles are empirical statements. Thus, methodological principles must be evaluated and justified on the same basis as other empirical statements. On this view, methodological statements may be less secure than the specific scientific theories to which they give rise. Th…
Empirical evaluation and justification of methodologies in psychological science
A feature-integration account of sequential effects in the Simon task
The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance
This book was the first handbook where the world's foremost 'experts on expertise' reviewed our scientific knowledge on expertise and expert performance and how experts may differ from non-experts in terms of their development, training, reasoning, knowledge, social support, and innate talent. Methods are described for the study of experts' knowledge and their performance of representative tasks from their domain of expertise. The development of …
Polarity correspondence
Differences in performance with various stimulus-response mappings are among the most prevalent findings for binary choice reaction tasks. The authors show that perceptual or conceptual similarity is not necessary to obtain mapping effects; a type of structural similarity is sufficient. Specifically, stimulus and response alternatives are coded as positive and negative polarity along several dimensions, and polarity correspondence is sufficient t…
Mother nature doesn’t have a bullet with your name on it”
The prepared emotional reflex
Advance preparation of action courses toward emotional stimuli is an effective means to regulate impulsive emotional behavior. Our experiment shows that performing intentional acts of approach and avoidance in an evaluation task influences the unintended activation of approach and avoidance tendencies in another task in which stimulus valence is irrelevant. For the evaluation-relevant blocks, participants received either congruent (positive-appro…
A review of contemporary ideomotor theory
A framework for action planning, called ideomotor theory, suggests that actions are represented by their perceivable effects. Thus, any activation of the effect image, either endogenously or exogenously, will trigger the corresponding action. We review contemporary studies relating to ideomotor theory in which researchers have investigated various manipulations of action effects and how those effects acquire discriminative control over the action…
Action Selection
The choices people make in selecting which action to perform in response to various stimulus events have been studied since the earliest days of the field of psychology. Many investigations have used choice-reaction tasks, although other behavioral methods have also been employed. As with other areas of experimental psychology, methods of neuroscience have come to be used increasingly more often in addition to behavioral methods. Phenomena attrib…
Approach–avoidance actions or categorization? A matching account of reference valence effects in affective S–R compatibility
Taking into consideration explanations of perception-action interactions that may be “less dramatic, but more reflective of what happens in the real world”
How psychologists help solve real-world problems in multidisciplinary research teams
Real-world problems are not confined to a single discipline. Multidisciplinary team research combines the methods and theories from different disciplines to achieve a common goal. It fosters collaboration among researchers with different expertise, which can lead to novel solutions and new discoveries that could not be achieved otherwise. This special issue of the American Psychologist consists of 10 articles that cover a range of research areas …
Emotion-induced attentional bias
Schlaghecken, F., Blagrove, E., Mantantzis, K., Maylor, E. A., & Watson, D. G. [(2017). Look on the bright side: Positivity bias modulates interference effects in the Simon task. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 146(6), 763–770] found larger spatial Simon effects for happy than sad faces. Unexpectedly, this enhancement was also observed for nonvalenced objects requiring the same response as happy faces. We examined whether the increas…
Parallel Development of James J. Gibson’s Ecological and Paul M. Fitts’s Information Processing Approaches to Perception and Performance
James J. Gibson and Paul M. Fitts, two psychologists who had, and continue to have, a substantial influence on research in perception, action, and human performance, had remarkable, parallel careers with roots in the U.S. Army Air Forces Aviation Psychology program in World War II. Fitts is widely regarded as founder of the applied field of engineering psychology and the basic field of human performance, both based on a human information processi…
Word- and arrow-based Simon effects emerge for eccentrically presented location words and arrows
Examination of a Response–Effect Compatibility Task With Continuous Mouse Movements
According to ideomotor theory, we select actions by recalling and anticipating their sensory consequences, that is, their action effects. Compelling evidence for this theory comes from response–effect compatibility (REC) experiments, in which a response produces an effect with which it is either compatible or incompatible. For example, pressing a left/right response key is faster if it is predictably followed by an action effect on the same, comp…
Family Relationships Under Work From Home
Work-from-home (WFH) influences both work and life, and further impacts family relationships. The current study explored the impacts of WFH on family relationships during the COVID-19 pandemic and identified effective adaptive processes for maintaining family relationships under WFH. Using the Vulnerability-Stress-Adaptation (VSA) model, the study examined the roles of adaptive processes (spending time with family members and balancing work and l…
A diffusion model for the congruency sequence effect
A neglected pioneer of psychology
Tribute to E. J. Capaldi
E. J. (John) Capaldi (1928–2020) made numerous contributions to experimental psychology in his long career at the University of Texas at Austin and Purdue University. He was a pioneer in the area of animal learning and cognition, known for his sequential theory of partial reinforcement extinction effects. His research in this area and in memory and counting phenomena was conducted for the most part with rats running in straight alley mazes under …
Psychology (26 works) · Cognitive psychology (18 works) · Cognition (13 works) · Social Psychology (12 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies (11 works) · Neuroscience (11 works) · Perception (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology (7 works)