Posted on December 1, 2020 by Amanda Cerreto
Associate Professor of Psychology Joseph Houpt has been selected as the new president of the Society for Mathematical Psychology - a prestigious accomplishment in the field.
As president, Houpt will represent the executive board and the society in interacting with the publishers of the society's journals, liaising with other professional societies, organizing the process for choosing the recipients of the society's awards, and contributing to the organization of the society meetings.
Mathematical psychology is a subfield of psychology that focuses on developing and applying formal quantitative models of psychological phenomena. Most of mathematical psychology is applied to cognitive psychology, particularly memory, decision making, and reasoning.
Major influences of mathematical psychology include significant foundational research on artificial neural networks, Nobel prize winning work on choice behavior, and the concept of memory as a having sensory, short-term, and long-term components.
Academic societies serve a number of roles. Perhaps the foremost value is facilitating the development of professional networks and the dissemination of research findings. The Society for Mathematical Psychology achieves these goals by hosting annual meetings and running two journals, The Journal of Mathematical Psychology and Computational Brain and Behavior.
"As a field, psychology is shifting away from an over reliance on null hypothesis testing as the bedrock for scientific inference," Houpt said. "The Society for Mathematical Psychology and its members continue to be major contributors to shaping the new standards of inference in psychological research."
— Amanda Cerreto
