Jeffrey Rouder, UC Irvine cognitive sciences professor and Falmagne Endowed Chair, has received the Psychonomic Society Best Article Award for his paper, "Why many studies of individual differences with inhibition tasks may not localize correlations," which appeared in the July 2023 issue of the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. His award-winning work highlights flaws in existing methods for testing cognitive control, or the ability to stay focused on a demanding task even in the face of distraction. 

“Is there one cognitive control where people who are good in one setting are good in other settings, or is cognitive control more varied with perhaps a type relevant to different settings? My colleagues and I showed that the existing methods for answering this question do not work well in typical experiments because the cognitive-control effects are too small and the data are too noise prone,” says Rouder. “Extant findings are likely irreproducible capitalizing unwittingly on spurious relations.”

Rouder specializes in mathematical and statistical models of perception and cognition - particularly Bayesian mixed models and psychometrics. He earned his Ph.D. in mathematical behavioral sciences at UCI in 1995. His work - funded by the National Science Foundation, Air Force Office of Research, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institutes of Health, and the Office of Naval Research - has been published in more than 135 articles which have appeared in the Journal of Mathematical Psychology, Psychological Review, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Cognitive Psychology, and others. Prior to his return to UCI in 2017, Rouder held professorial posts at the University of Missouri and the Universidad da La Coruna in Spain. He’s currently a Mercator Fellow of the German National Science Foundation, and he’s also a past recipient of the Luce Award for Most Outstanding Paper in the Journal of Mathematical Psychology.

Rouder is one of seven recipients of this year’s Psychonomic Society Best Article Awards with one given for each of the society’s journals. Awardees will be honored at the annual meeting in New York City in November and will receive a $1,000 cash prize.