John Castellan Award Recipients

The Society sponsors The John Castellan Student Paper Award for the outstanding student paper annually. Student papers on the application of computers to any area of psychology (theoretical, experimental, applied) are welcome. Eligibility is open to work done by a student currently enrolled in undergraduate or graduate courses, or work done as part of a course, thesis, or other student research by a person who graduated within the past year. The student must be the primary author and the presenter of the paper to be considered. The award is presented at the conference.

The late N. John Castellan

2017:
Matt Cook, University of Manitoba, Canada
Winning Paper: "A computational cognitively-inspired technology for clinical diagnosis."

2016:
Pascal Kieslich, University of Mannheim, Germany
Winning Paper: "Mousetrap: An integrated, open-source mouse-tracking package.”

2015:
Felix Henninger, University of Koblenz-Landau, Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, University of Mannheim
Winning Paper: "A flexible, cross-platform, open framework for interactive experiments."

2014:
Erica Snow, Arizona State University
Winning Paper: “Does agency matter? Path analysis within a game-based system.”

2013:
Haiying Li, University of Memphis
Winning Paper: "A comparative study on measures of text formality."

2012:
Alexandra Paxton, University of California, Merced
Winning Paper: "Linguistic alignment in debate."

2011:
Brent Kievit-Kylar, Indiana University
Winning Paper: “Word2Word: A visualization tool for high-dimensional semantic data.”

2010:
Jun Xie, University of Memphis
Winning Paper: "Analyzing Directed Data by using MPT Models of Source Monitoring."

2009:
Brendan Johns, Indiana University
Winning Paper: "Using automated semantic measures to test the assumptions of memory models: Do random representations reflect the organization of semantic memory?"

2008:
Gabriel Recchia, Indiana University
Winning Paper: "More data trumps smarter algorithms: Training computational models of semantics on very large corpora."

2007:
Richard Landers, University of Minnesota
Winning Paper: “TREND: A tool for rapid online research literature analysis and quantification.”

2006:
Jessica Ray, University of Central Florida
Winning Paper: “Train-to-code: An adaptive expert system for training systematic observation and coding skills.”

2005:
Cyrus Shaoul, University of Alberta
Winning Paper: “Toward a more psychologically relevant high-dimensional model of lexical semantics.”

2004:
Christopher Myers, The Air Force Research Laboratory's Human Effectiveness Directorate
Winning Paper: "Computational cognitive modeling of adaptive choice behavior in a dynamic decision paradigm."

2003:
Michael Jones, Queen's University
Winning Paper: "Tracking attention with the focus-window technique: The information filter must be calibrated."

2002:
Andrew Edmonds, Clemson University
Winning Paper: "Uzilla: A new tool for web usability testing."

2001:
Matthew Pastizzo, State University of New York
Winning Paper: “Multi-dimensional data visualization.”

2000:
Wai-Tat Fu, George Mason University
Winning Paper: “ACT-PRO action protocol analyzer: A tool for analyzing discrete action protocols.”

1999:
Patrick Conley, UC Riverside
Winning Paper: "A computational approach to modeling population differences."

1998:
Ricard Downing, University of Missouri
Winning Paper: "The missouri developmental disability resource center: A web site responding to a critical need for information of parents with a child with a disability."

1997:
Katja Wiemer-Hastings, University of Memphis
Winning Paper: "Abstract noun classification: using a neural network to match word context and word meaning."

1994:
Ed Colet, New York University
Winning Paper: "Visualization of multivariate data: Human factors considerations."

1991:
Hilary Broadbent, Brown University
Winning Paper: "Analysis of periodic data using walsh functions."

1987:
Steven Greene, Yale University and Northwestern University
Winning Paper: "A flexible programming language for generating stimulus lists for cognitive psychology experiments."

1984:
Michael Granaas, University of Kansas
Winning Paper: "Simple, applied text parsing."

1983:
Timothy Post, University of Pittsburgh

1982:
Winford A. Gordon, University of North Carolina

1980:
Mark Alan Johnson, Washington University

1977:
Timothy Post, Syracuse University
Winning Paper: "Software control of reaction time studies."

Early Career Impact Award Recipients

The Federation of Associations in Behavioral & Brain Sciences (FABBS), which provides support for the Early Career Impact Award for the Society for Computers in Psychology, is a FABBS society.

2016
Rick Dale, University of California, Merced

Dr. Rick Dale is an internationally recognized authority in the experimental and computational analyses of language, human interaction, language evolution, cognitive dynamics, and big data. He uses computational modeling, analysis of naturalistic behavior, and human experimentation to investigate a range of linguistic behaviors related to conversation, thinking, sentence processing, word categorization, and deception.

Dale is known for a number of contributions but he is particularly well known for inventing technologies to measure subtle supportive nonlinguistic gestures that people make during conversation (e.g., eye and arm movements) and for his sophisticated application of numeric methods including dynamical systems theory to make sense of how those gestures impact and influence peoples' comprehension and interaction. He is also very well known for his efforts to step outside of a limited analysis of linguistic behaviour to build a comprehensive analysis of how people use and understand language in naturalistic settings and without the imposition of too-artificial constraints. The fact that he makes progress on such an ambitious goal is impressive. He is quickly gaining a reputation for forging new paths and inventing techniques to tackle the frustratingly complex problem of how to measure, quantify, and examine the very difficult problem of unconstrained everyday linguistic behaviour.

Dale has already published an astounding 73 articles and has exerted an influence on the field. Google Scholar calculates his h-index at 29, his i10- index at 46, and his citation count at 2784. He collaborates with a large number of junior scientists and an impressive number of prominent senior scientists from around the world.

Dale is engaged in outreach and science advocacy. He has been cited and played roles in discussion of popular articles on language and psychology for The Economist, ABCnews.com, and Science Magazine. He has serve as an Associate Editor to several journals including Behavior Research Methods, Discourse Processes, and Cognitive Science. He also edited the Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, which he also hosted in Pasadena. He is an active member of several academic societies. For example, Dale has also served as a program coordinator for meetings of the Cognitive Science Society and the International Conference on Development and Learning. Finally, Dale has been an extremely active member of SCiP for close to a decade, both as a researcher and as an invaluable part our leadership (he is the current secretary-treasurer).

Dr. Dale is an associate professor in the Cognitive & Information Sciences Department at the University of California, Merced and earned his doctorate in experimental and computational psychology in 2006 from Cornell University.

2012
Michael Jones, Indiana University

Michael Jones’ research focuses on language learning, comprehension, and knowledge representation in humans and machines. Jones combines computational and experimental techniques to examine large-scale statistical structure of certain environments with the goal of understanding how this structure could be learned and represented with the mathematical capabilities of human learning and memory. Jones also studies associative and recognition memory, categorization, decision-making, and the role of attention in reading and perception. He is particularly interested in the temporal dynamics of learning in all these domains, and how to model the time course of knowledge acquisition. His secondary interests involve the application of these models to practical problems in text mining, intelligent search algorithms, and automated comprehension and scoring algorithms.

The National Science Foundation recently awarded Jones a CAREER grant to investigate computational mechanisms for integrating linguistic and perceptual information in semantic representation. This project includes a very large scale “Semantic Pictionary” crowdsourcing project that includes several online games aimed at collecting massive amounts of perceptual data describing tens of thousands of words and explores mechanisms humans use to integrate the perceptual and linguistic information into a unified and embodied semantic representation.

Jones is an assistant professor of psychology at Indiana University, Bloomington. He received his Ph.D. in psychology from Queen’s University in 2005 after which he spent two years as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Colorado.