| | 1 | Name: | Dr. Susan E. Carey | | | Institution: | Harvard University | | | Year Elected: | 2007 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 305 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1942 | | | | | | |
Susan Carey is Henry A. Morss, Jr. and Elizabeth W. Morss Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. Her research illuminates the development and nature of human knowledge and charts the intuitive theories that organize children's and adults' concepts of numbers, living things and the material world. Concepts are the basic units of thought. Dr. Carey has shown how children's concepts gain meaning and functional use from theories they construct about the world, starting from a few innate notions. She initiated modern experimental studies of children's understanding of numbers and counting, of physical causation, and of biology with its associated concepts of person, animal, and living thing, arguing for parallels between infants' developing concepts of number and causality and similar changes over mankind's intellectual history. She has also made seminal contributions to areas such as language acquisition, cognitive neuroscience, comparative primate cognition, and science education. Her research sheds light on children's thought and language and shows how educators can enhance the teaching of science and mathematics. Dr. Carey has been a Fulbright Fellow and William James Fellow and has been elected a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2001) and the National Academy of Sciences (2002). | |
| 2 | Name: | Dr. Anne Cutler | | | Institution: | University of Western Sydney, Australia | | | Year Elected: | 2007 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 305 | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1945 | | | Death Date: | June 7, 2022 | | | | | | |
Born in Australia, as a postwar baby-boomer, Anne Cutler could benefit from a little-known side-effect of the wartime disruption of Europe: the extraordinarily high quality of language teaching in 1950s Australian schools. Overqualified refugee academics surviving by teaching their native language included her Belgian high-school teacher of French, and her Austrian teacher of German (with a University of Vienna Ph.D.). This background led her to study languages - at Melbourne University, where, thanks to regulations mandating a "science subject" in BA degrees, she discovered psychology as well. Psycholinguistics, investigating language with the methods of experimental psychology, emerged as an independent discipline in nice time for her Ph.D. study (at the University of Texas). Her research has centred on the recognition of spoken language, beginning (in her Ph.D.) with the role of rhythm and intonation in comprehension; since these vary greatly across languages, this prompted her to cross-linguistic comparisons. Her most important discoveries have concerned how adult processing of spoken language is exquisitely adapted to suit the native language (making for great efficiency in listening to the native language, but difficulty in listening to structurally different foreign languages). Her research was conducted from 1982 to 1993 at the Medical Research Council's Applied Psychology Unit in Cambridge, UK (which she joined after postdoctoral fellowships at MIT and the University of Sussex), and from 1993 at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, where she served as director until 2013. She is currently Research Professor at Australia's MARCS Institute at the University of Western Sydney. Her awards include the Spinoza Prize of the Dutch Science Council (1999); further, she is a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences, the Academia Europaea, the Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen, and the National Academy of Sciences (US). | |
| 3 | Name: | Dr. John R. Anderson | | | Institution: | Carnegie Mellon University | | | Year Elected: | 2007 | | | Class: | 3. Social Sciences | | | Subdivision: | 305 | | | Residency: | Resident | | | Living? : |
Living
| | | Birth Date: | 1947 | | | | | | |
As winner of his field's highest honors, member of most honorary societies, recipient of numerous research grants, and publisher of hundreds of important articles and influential books, John Anderson has made numerous critically important contributions to cognitive psychology. These include: production of large scale architectures of human cognition that predict behavior from sensory input and perception to cognition, decision making and motor behavior; initiation of the field's movement to encompass adaptation to the demands of the environment, in large part through Bayesian modeling; the bringing of scientific models to practical applications in education, with highly successful computer based algebra and programming tutors; experimental demonstrations using functional magnetic resonance imaging that his system architecture is implemented in the brain in neural systems; and the linkage of formal behavioral models with neural architectures. His impact is hinted at by an enormous yearly citation count but goes well beyond this measure. Dr. Anderson is one of the pre-eminent cognitive scientists/psychologists in the world today. Since 2002 he has been Richard King Mellon Professor of Psychology and Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where he has taught since 1978. He has also served on the Yale University faculty and holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University. Most recent among his numerous awards is the 2011 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science from the Franklin Institute. | |
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