Nora S. Newcombe, Linda B. Smith Receive SEP Awards

The Society of Experimental Psychologists (SEP) has awarded its most prestigious honors to APS William James Fellows Nora S. Newcombe and Linda B. Smith in recognition of their pioneering achievements in experimental psychology. Newcombe, editor of Psychological Science in the Public Interest and a professor of psychology at Temple University, has received the 2019 Howard Crosby Warren Medal for “her distinguished research contributions on fundamental aspects of cognition and development, with emphasis on spatial cognition and the development of memory.” The Howard Crosby Warren Medal recognizes outstanding achievement in experimental psychology, and was the first major award in American psychology when it was established in 1936. Newcombe APS’s highest honor, the William James Fellow award, in 2014, in recognition of her lifetime of contributions to basic science. Her highly influential research on the development of spatial cognition has demonstrated how both children and adults can improve these skills through training and play, and that some of these abilities, such as using maps, develop even earlier than once thought. Newcombe’s adaptive combination model of the development of spatial cognition has shed light on how information sources are combined through psychological mechanisms that prioritize sources based on their potential usefulness. In the realm of memory research, Newcombe has proposed that the hippocampal maturation necessary to support explicit episodic memory may not occur until around 2 years of age. Later in life, this early absence of specific memories may then lead to “infantile amnesia,” a phenomena in which our earliest memories become impossible to retrieve as older children and adults. In 2014, Newcombe presented her neoconstructivist approach to cognitive development as part of her APS William James Fellow Award Address at the 26th Annual APS Convention in San Francisco. Linda B. Smith , a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Indiana […]

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