Award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology: Brian A. Anderson

The Early Career Awards, given for the first time in 1974, recognize the large number of excellent early career psychologists. Recipients of this award may not have held a doctoral degree for more than nine years. For purposes of this award, psychology has been divided into 10 areas: animal learning and behavior, comparative; developmental; health; cognition/human learning; psychopathology; behavioral and cognitive neuroscience; perception/motor performance; social; applied research; and individual differences. Five areas are considered each year, with areas rotated in two-year cycles. The areas considered in 2021 were animal learning and behavior, comparative; developmental; health; cognition/human learning; and psychopathology. Each year, panels are selected for the areas under consideration, and these panels recommend nominees to the Committee on Scientific Awards. The 2021 recipients of the APA Scientific Contribution Awards were recognized by the 2020 Board of Scientific Affairs and selected by the 2020 Committee on Scientific Awards. For his outstanding and pioneering work on the role of learning in automatic attentional biases. Brian A. Anderson's development of methodologies to study attentional capture by stimuli associated with reward gave rise to the popular idea of an overarching learning-dependent mechanism of attentional control referred to as 'selection history.' His programmatic and prolific exploration of these phenomena using both behavioral and neuroscientific methods has revealed multiple independent learning mechanisms influencing attentional control. A tireless, creative and dedicated researcher, his work has important translational implications for behavioral health and our understanding of addiction. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).