Society of Experimental Psychologists meets on campus through Saturday

By Roger Segelken

Why do autistic children avoid eye contact? What makes airline pilots steer the wrong way between the runway and the terminal? How did an International Space Station astronaut help explain why the horizon moon appears larger than the zenith moon? And whatever happened to the scientific discipline called the psychophysics of climate?

More than two dozen questions like these, some nearly as old as the Society of Experimental Psychologists (SEP) itself, might finally find answers when researchers gather for the organization's 101st meeting, today, March 18, through Saturday, March 20, on the Cornell campus.

"We'll begin by reviewing the career of a rather complicated man who was a force in American psychology for three decades," said meeting organizer James E. Cutting, Cornell professor of psychology, referring to SEP founder E.B. Titchener. Soon after joining the Cornell faculty in 1892, Titchener hosted the fifth meeting of the American Psychological Association (APA). Then Titchener had a "falling out" with the APA and founded SEP in 1904.

"Titchener was a complicated man," Cutting continued. "He wanted to keep women out of smoke-filled rooms during discussions of science, yet he helped several women advance in the sciences. Today he is remembered for promoting the most famous dead end in psychology, introspection as the method of studying the contents of consciousness "

Nevertheless, Titchener made many useful contributions as well. He proposed the study of the psychophysics of climate, which is alive and well at Yale University's John B. Pierce Laboratory, according to Lawrence E. Marks, who will present a paper on human responses to thermal environments at the SEP meeting.

Hints to other answers can be found in speakers' abstracts at the Web site http://www2.psych.cornell.edu/cutting/sep2004abstracts.pdf. SEP meeting scientific sessions begin at 9 a.m. Friday in the Yale/Princeton Room of the Statler Hotel on campus and continue on Saturday at the same location. The full schedule is at http://www2.psych.cornell.edu/cutting/sep2004program.pdf.