Editorial
Experimental Psychology Volume 50, No. 1, 2003
Experimental Psychology: Quo Vadis?
By Karl Christoph Klauer
Upon completion of the first volume of Experimental Psychology, it is appropriate to
draw a brief résumé of journal operations and contents. Considering the first 12month period of effective operations, between 1 June 2001 and 31 May 2002, we
received 63 manuscripts, of which three (5%) were accepted, 34 (54%) were
accepted conditionally upon revision, and 26 (41%) were rejected. The rate of
submissions steadily increased in this 12-month period. The mean processing time of
these manuscripts, from date of submission until editorial decision, was 33 days ( SD
= 12.9), and it ranged from 2 to 61 days. In 51 of 63 cases, we were able to keep the
six-week deadline that is our target for manuscript processing time. Within this 12month period, 28 authors resubmitted revisions of their conditionally accepted
manuscripts. The mean processing time of these papers was 15 days and thereby
substantially shorter as sometimes the changes required by the reviewers were of a
minor nature and a further review process was not needed. Many authors provided
laudatory feedback about what they perceived to be a fast and efficient review
process.
Not only do we aim to publish manuscripts rapidly in print, but we also set ourselves
the aim of putting the manuscripts online in the form of PDFs as soon as possible
after the acceptance date. This means that individual subscribers are able to read
prepublished papers online sometimes several weeks before they receive their print
copies. This service was implemented in the course of 2002, and for Issues 3 and 4
the average time it took to put manuscripts online was 12.55 weeks. Another feature
that was also introduced in the course of last year was a fully linked online full-text
version of the journal as part of the Hogrefe & Huber PsyJOURNALS service. Further
information about this new fully searchable journal articles database can be found at
www.psycontent.com.
Manuscripts were received from many parts of the world and were reviewed by an
equally international set of reviewers whose names are listed in the fourth issue of
the 2002 annual volume. Experimental Psychology attracted submissions from many
different areas of psychology. Four areas received particular attention. These were
memory, learning, reasoning and decision making, and social cognition.
From different perspectives, a number of authors addressed memory phenomena.
Vaterrodt-Plünnecke, Krüger, and Bredenkamp (2002) looked at the stochastical
relationship between consciously controlled and automatic process in an implicit
memory task, and Zimmer, Steiner, and Ecker (2002) addressed the related question
of how far implicit color memory is independent of explicit recollection. Czienskowski
and Giljohann (2002) studied the self-reference effect in memory in relation to the
effects of concreteness and imageability of to-be-remembered material, and Blank
(2002) was concerned with categorical relationships across the members of stimulusresponse pairs of successive lists in paired-associate learning and their effects on
retroactive and proactive interference.
Learning was also a frequent topic for authors publishing in Experimental
Psychology, and papers addressed diverse forms of learning, ranging from relatively
simple learning paradigms to learning in multimedia environments. Zirngibl and Koch
(2002) manipulated response mode (manual vs. vocal) in sequence learning in a
serial reaction time task and found different effects of response mode on implicit and
explicit learning. Two papers focused on causal learning (De Houwer & Beckers,
2002; Shanks, 2002). De Houwer and Beckers (2002) demonstrated the phenomena
of higher-order unovershadowing and higher-order backward blocking in human
causal learning, and Shanks (2002) conducted a critical test of the power PC theory
of causal induction (Cheng, 1997). Acquiring and generalizing mental transformations
were the phenomena tackled by Müller (2002) and Müller and Gehrke (2002). Müller
(2002) investigated transfer between different uses of function concepts and the
effects of practice of a specific kind of use on transfer, while Müller and Gehrke
(2002) assessed the role of different kinds of representations such as rules, mental
models, instances, and chunks in the acquisition of mental operators. Learning in
multimedia contexts was the topic of two papers, both of which built on cognitive-load
theory (Sweller, 1988): Vollmeyer and Burns (2002) contrasted conditions with
specific goals and with nonspecific, exploratory goals in learning the contents and
use of a hypermedia program about the outbreak of World War I. A computer-based
training program about the human cardiovascular system was used by Brünken,
Steinbacher, Plass, and Leutner (2002), who assessed cognitive load during learning
by means of dual-task methodology.
Another class of papers turned to processes of reasoning, problem solving, and
decision making. A case in point is the paper by Roberts (2002) demonstrating an
inverted matching bias in disjunctive reasoning. The interpretation of conditional
statements was the focus of a paper by Dieussaert, Schaeken, and d’Ydewalle
(2002). Turning to decision making, Västfjäll and Gärling (2002) looked at affective
reactions in a decision-making context. Nückles and Bromme (2002) studied how
Internet experts plan explanations for laypersons as a function of the addressee’s
intention and prior knowledge.
Many authors tackled research questions from the area of social cognition. One issue
was the cognitive antecedents and consequents of stereotyping (Araya, Akrami,
Ekehammar, & Hedlund, 2002; Heredia & Blumentritt, 2002). Araya et al. (2002)
demonstrated that unobtrusively raising the accessibility of the concept of self-control
reduced prejudice in judging a member of a stereotyped group. Heredia and
Blumentritt (2002) studied how far stereotype contents (e.g., bomb) mentioned in
spoken language prime a stereotypically related person or category (e.g., Arab)
under different temporal and contextual conditions. Another issue was biases and
heuristics: Mussweiler (2002) took a new look at the anchor heuristic on the basis of
his selective accessibility model (Mussweiler, 1997), whereas Pohl, Bender, and
Lachmann (2002) investigated hindsight bias in different cultural contexts. In a study
by Gawronski (2002), the convergent and discriminant validity of two IAT measures
of ethnic prejudice was assessed, and De Houwer and Randell (2002) discussed
another potential indirect measure of affect and prejudice, namely affective priming.
They identify conditions under which an affective-priming effect is observed in the
naming task.
Other topics addressed by the authors of the first volume comprised priming effects
on word identification under degraded viewing conditions (Eichstaedt, 2002), the
application of social-cognitive theories to perceived personal vulnerability to sexual
assault (Bohner, Danner, Siebler, & Samson, 2002), national differences in children’s
event recall and suggestibility (Roebers, Bjorklund, Schneider, & Cassel, 2002), the
comprehension of metaphoric reference (Stewart & Heredia, 2002), and pain
sensitivity as a function of perceived control (Rothermund, Brandstädter, Meiniger, &
Anton, 2002). A methodological contribution by Reips (2002) proposed standards for
internet-based experiments. Forthcoming issues further expand the range of topics
with papers on visual and auditory perception and attention.
It is probably unavoidable and indeed desirable that a journal’s contents come to be
focused around a few key topics in the course of time, giving the journal a distinctive
profile, and Experimental Psychology was lucky to attract papers from core areas of
experimental work in psychology. The trends that emerged for the first volume should
not, however, discourage prospective authors from submitting papers from other
areas of psychology. Experimental Psychology welcomes manuscripts reporting
experimental work from any area of psychology.
References
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Blank, H. (2002). The role of horizontal categorization in retroactive and proactive
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