The Troland Research Awards are an annual prize given by the United States National Academy of Sciences to two researchers (preferably 45 years of age or younger) in recognition of psychological research on the relationship between consciousness and the physical world. The areas where these award funds are to be spent include but are not limited to areas of experimental psychology, the topics of sensation, perception, motivation, emotion, learning, memory, cognition, language, and action. The award preference is given to experimental work with a quantitative approach or experimental research seeking physiological explanations.[1]
For her innovative discoveries of critical windows of affective development during childhood and adolescence, their underlying neural basis at the circuit level and their disruption following early life stress.
For her experimental advances characterizing the neurobiological mechanisms underlying adaptive and risky adolescent behavior, elucidating theoretical models of adolescence and the impact of this research on decisions of juvenile justice.
For his pioneering work bringing the methods of Bayesian inference to bear on understanding a broad range of cognitive functions, from perception to language, decision making, reasoning, and cognitive control, and for bringing formal rigor to the notion of bounded rationality, explaining apparent irrationalities of behavior in rational terms.
Josh McDermott (2018)
For groundbreaking research into how humans hear and interpret sound.
For her fundamental contributions to our understanding of human skill learning and performance breakdowns in high-pressure and anxiety-provoking situations.
For his artful blending of behavioral, electrophysiological and neurophysiological techniques in humans and nonhuman primates to reveal neural concomitants of attention, cognitive control and memory. His most recent work pairing transcranial electrical stimulation with error monitoring introduces an important new strategy for improving cognitive function in people with brain disorders.
For her meticulous investigations of the origins and early development of representations of objects and numbers. Her research on cognition in infancy illuminates the foundations of young children's mathematical reasoning and learning.
For his insightful use of neuroimaging and behavioral methods to enrich our understanding of how people infer the thoughts, feelings, and opinions of others.
For formulating a groundbreaking new Bayesian model of human inductive learning and for using this model to generate innovative empirical studies of human perception, language, and reasoning.
For profound and rigorous contributions to our understanding of the relationship between auditory perception and its underlying physiological mechanisms.
For sophisticated theoretical analysis and modeling that address fundamental issues in perception and cognition and their application to the practical problems of medical imaging.
For seminal experiments on the role of visual expertise in the recognition of complex objects including faces and for exploration of brain areas activated by this recognition.
For creative use of behavioral, brain-imaging, and neuropsychological evidence to elucidate the interplay of conscious and unconscious processes in perception, memory, and learning.
For his fundamental contributions to understanding the neural mechanisms underlying stereoscopic vision: the discovery of a disparity mechanism and how it contributes to depth perception.
Jacob Feldman (2005)
For his advancement of mathematical and computational approaches to perceptual organization in human vision and human concept learning.
For novel experimental analyses and elegant modeling that show how perceptual learning dynamically adjusts dimensions and boundaries of categories and concepts in human thought.
For his penetrating computational analyses of reading, language, and other aspects of cognition, which elucidate normal function and the consequences of brain injury.
For his empirical and theoretical investigations of object recognition and for demonstrating the importance of expertise in organizing brain areas for faces and other objects.
For his groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of the relation between perceptual experience and neural activity in visual cortex, using neuroimaging and computational methods.
For deep insights and empirical evaluations concerning concept formation and attention in learning and rigorous formalization of the underlying psychological principles in connectionist frameworks.
For her discoveries about neurogenesis in adult mammals and its modulation by hormones, neurotransmitters, and experience, which have radically altered our ideas regarding brain function.
For her innovative research on visual attention, awareness, and imagery, including the characterization of a face perception module and discovery of a place encoding module.
For his many experimental breakthroughs in the study of spatial attention and central executive control and for his insightful theoretical analysis of human cognitive architecture.
For her contributions to auditory perception, especially to the understanding of the envelope and energy cues that contribute to detecting signals in noise.
For his contributions to our understanding of neural mechanisms of visual selective attention, the control of voluntary movements, and response time.
Richard Ivry (1997)
For his innovative work with normal humans and neurological patients, showing the importance of the cerebellum for computations related to sensory and motor timing.
For his pioneering anatomical, physiological, and behavioral studies that identify pathways in the brain, subserving a basic form of learning, associating conditioned and unconditioned stimuli.
For his insightful research on visual attention and perception, especially his studies on the capture and the interactions between attention and perceptual organization.
For his ingenious analysis of the mechanisms that enable stimuli to acquire the ability to produce fear and how fear translates into specifics behaviors.
For his creative synthesis of information processing models and techniques of psychological measurement in the combined theoretical and experimental analysis of human categorization learning.
For advancing the formal and empirical study of human visual perception and for developing a general theoretical framework for the analysis of perceptual inference.
For his pioneering application of the method of reversible cooling inactivation of regions of neural tissue to localize a memory trace in the mammalian brain.
For her rigorous empirical and theoretical analysis of visual cognition, in which understanding of normal function and analysis of neurological deficits illuminate and strengthen one another.
For his investigations of the amnesic syndrome and of explicit versus implicit memory, major steps toward a neuro-psychological analysis of the functions of consciousness.
For his contributions to understanding the psychophysiological correlates of attitudes, cognition, and emotions, and for his use of non-invasive physiological measures to resolve basic theoretical questions regarding psychological processes.
For his elegant analysis—integrating behavior, neurophysiology, and neuroanatomy—which elucidated the role of experience in the development of directional hearing in the owl.
For their elegant account of how we preserve the inherent colors of surfaces despite wide variations in illumination, and of Wandell's other fundamental investigations of color vision.
Roger Ratcliff (1986)
For his effectively combined mathematical and experimental analyses of human information processing.
For his distinguished, quantitative psychophysical work on mechanisms of color adaptation and to encourage his physiological work on mechanisms of receptor transduction and sensitivity control.[1]