The Awards for Distinguished Scientific Contributions are presented to persons who, in the opinion of the Committee on Scientific Awards, have made distinguished theoretical or empirical contributions to basic research in psychology. The 2016 recipients of the APA Scientific Contribution Awards were recognized by the 2015 Board of Scientific Affairs and selected by the 2015 Committee on Scientific Awards. Members of the committee were Scott M. Monroe, PhD (Chair); Susan Goldin-Meadow, PhD; James Grau, PhD; Hazel R. Markus, PhD; Karen A. Matthews, PhD; and Linda Smith, PhD. (PsycINFO Database Record

ABSTRACT-Here, I describe how I came to believe that the musical scales and tonal systems of diverse human cultures reflect both (a) underlying, universal principles of cognition, including a modality-general time-distance law, and (b) underlying cognitive structures corresponding to geometrically regular helical and toroidal configurations in higher-dimensional spaces. I review supportive evidence obtained, first, by means of methods (which I and my associates developed at the Bell Labs) of multidimensional scaling and of synthesizing tones that form the height-suppressed chroma circle and, second, by means of the probe-tone method (which Krumhansl and I developed at Stanford) for quantifying tonal hierarchies. I argue that two quite independent kinds of considerations-acoustical and abstract structural-converge in establishing the perceptual-cognitive optimality of the extended (12-tone) diatonic system. I then venture some speculations about the sources of the emotional power of music. At the end, I append an annotated list of my former students, coworkers, and associates who contributed to the work described here. PRELIMINARY REMARK Since retiring from Stanford and closing my psychological laboratory some dozen years ago, I have focused my professional endeavors on thinking and writing about more theoretical and philosophical issues of cognitive science (see Shepard, 2001, 2004, 2008). Accordingly, instead of presenting any new empirical findings of my own, I shall attempt to do two things: The first is to offer some reminiscences about how I have off and on sought to extend my general approach to cognitive science on to the investigation, specifically, of music perception and cognition. The second is to provide a relatively coherent overview of what I retrospectively regard as the most significant conclusions to be drawn from the work that my students and associates (at the Bell Labs and at Stanford) have carried out relating to auditory perception and music cognition. THE EMERGENCE OF MY INTERESTS IN SCIENCE, GEOMETRY, AND MUSIC My early scholastic record was not promising - from the first grade (which I was required to repeat) through my freshman year of college (from which I was required to take a two-quarter leave before being granted a probationary re-entry). I was always fascinated by things mechanical and geometrical and loved to tinker, to draw, and to explore the wonderful sounds produced by depressing various combinations of keys on the piano. But I was typically unable to tear myself away from these interests to undertake the less interesting work assigned by my teachers. I found the obligatory elementary school music class to be wholly devoid of intellectual content, and I was too shy and disdainful to join in the singing of what I regarded as silly songs. All of this changed following my probationary period at Stanford, when I was finally permitted to register for more advanced courses whose subject matters - particularly in science, math, and philosophy - did finally inspire me to work toward conceptual mastery and to explore various implications, extensions, and applications on my own. (These included the construction and study of two- and three-dimensional tessellations of constant curvature and of three- and four-dimensional regular polytopes.) I also began attending the Tuesday afternoon organ concerts in Stanford's Memorial Church (by Stanford's organist Herbert Nanny and by other, visiting organists). I was immediately enthralled by the architectonic grandeur of Bach's preludes, toccatas, and fugues and by the harmonically rich and splendorously driving 19th- and 20th-century organ music of Franck, Vierne, Widor, Dupre, and others of the "French" school. Later, while a graduate student in psychology at Yale, I became spellbound by the late string quartets of Beethoven and, soon thereafter, the quartets of Bartok. At an abstract level, it was the structural elegance and symmetries that appealed to me both in such geometrical objects as regular tessellations and polytopes and in contrapuntal music. …

Examples from Archimedes, Galileo, Newton, Einstein, and others suggest that fundamental laws of physics were-or, at least, could have been-discovered by experiments performed not in the physical world but only in the mind. Although problematic for a strict empiricist, the evolutionary emergence in humans of deeply internalized implicit knowledge of abstract principles of transformation and symmetry may have been crucial for humankind's step to rationality-including the discovery of universal principles of mathematics, physics, ethics, and an account of free will that is compatible with determinism.

Thought Experiments in Scientific Discovery: What Emergent Mental Capabilities Underlie their Efficacy? Roger N. Shepard (rshepard@cox.net) The Arizona Senior Academy 13805 E. Langtry Lane, Tucson, AZ 85747 USA Abstract measurements, and experiments on physical objects and phenomena are generally considered to be essential for the advancement of the empirical sciences. But mathematics is supposed to be concerned with what propositions are logically entailed by other propositions, without regard for whether any of these propositions are strictly true of anything in the physical world. Also, in physics, what are taken to be the elementary or primitive objects at any given stage of development of the field are always provisional and subject to later re- conceptualization—often in terms of still more elementary entities. Thus, water, experienced as a continuous fluid, is reconceived as composed of increasingly more elementary entities such as: discrete molecules, electrons and protons, quarks, vibrations in a convoluted high-dimensional manifold, and so on—with no clear end in sight. But in mathematics, what are taken to be the elementary or primitive objects are dictated by the mathematician rather than by nature. Such objects as the integers of arithmetic or number theory or the points and lines of geometry are completely transparent from the outset. We do not suppose that an integer or a point is ever going to be found to be composed of some previously unsuspected more elementary parts. Instead, the advances yet to be made in number theory or in geometry are expected to concern what relations among numbers or among points and lines will be found to be entailed by whatever axioms we have formulated for number theory or geometry. Nevertheless, mathematics and physics are alike in that, in both cases, we aspire to a consistent theoretical system of basic assumptions and derivable implications. But whereas in physics a system is valued primarily to the extent that the derivable implications succeed in explaining or predicting what we observe or measure in the physical world, in pure mathematics the system may be valued for the beauty and symmetry of the system and its results–independently of the extent to which they agree with anything we observe or measure in the physical world. Nevertheless, results of pure mathematics that were originally valued for their own intrinsic beauty were often later found to be useful or even crucial for the development of physical theory. Notable examples include the non-Euclidean geometries of Minkowski and of Riemann for special and general relativity, respectively, and matrix algebra, complex numbers, quaternions, and infinite-dimensional Hilbert spaces for quantum theory. Moreover, physics and mathematics are, alike, creations of the human mind. Absent a comprehending mind, the equations of either mathematics or of theoretical physics would not exist and, even if they did, would exist only as Examples from Archimedes, Galileo, Newton, Einstein and others suggest that fundamental laws of physics were—or, at least, could have been—discovered by experiments performed not in the physical world but only in the mind. Though problematic for a strict empiricist, this mode of discovery may have become possible, in part, through the evolutionary emergence in humans of deeply internalized implicit knowledge of abstract principles of transformation and symmetry. Keywords: Thought Experiments; Physical Laws; Imagined Transformations; Mental Rotation; Symmetry; Rationality; Moral Laws; Determinism; Free Will The Problem Thought experiments are widely reported to have played a prominent role in the discoveries of physical laws. I shall describe some specific thought experiments, similar to those that were (or may have been) carried out by Archimedes, Galileo, Newton, and Einstein and that appear to be sufficient to establish fundamental laws of physics, without having to carry out any of these experiments physically. How is this possible? Where does such knowledge originate if not, as supposed by strict empiricists, from an individual’s direct interactions with the physical world? The answer I propose grew out of my evolutionary perspective together with my cognitive psychological researches on mental transformations (Shepard & Cooper, 1982, Shepard & Metzler, 1971) and on generalization (Shepard, 1987; and the related far-reaching developments subsequently achieved by Tenenbaum and his coworkers— e.g., Tenenbaum & Griffiths, 2001a, 2001b). Here, however, I focus primarily on the role of mental transformations and an associated symmetry principle of invariance under transformation. (Some of the ideas I shall present here I have previously sketched, e.g., in Shepard, 1994, 2001, 2003, and in my 1994 William James Lectures at Harvard.) For readers engaged in the computational modeling of cognitive processes, I invite consideration of how the kinds of transformational processes and symmetry principles I consider here might be implemented in the modeling of processes of scientific discovery. Empirical Science and Mathematics Traditionally, a sharp distinction is maintained between the empirical sciences including physics, on one hand, and mathematics and logic, on the other. Observations,

My early fascination with geometry and physics and, later, with perception and imagination inspired a hope that fundamental phenomena of psychology, like those of physics, might approximate universal laws. Ensuing research led me to the following candidates, formulated in terms of distances along shortest paths in abstract representational spaces: Generalization probability decreases exponentially and discrimination time reciprocally with distance. Time to determine the identity of shapes and, provisionally, relation between musical tones or keys increases linearly with distance. Invariance of the laws is achieved by constructing the representational spaces from psychological rather than physical data (using multidimensional scaling) and from considerations of geometry, group theory, and symmetry. Universality of the laws is suggested by their behavioral approximation in cognitively advanced species and by theoretical considerations of optimality. Just possibly, not only physics but also psychology can aspire to laws that ultimately reflect mathematical constraints, such as those of group theory and symmetry, and, so, are both universal and nonarbitrary.

In psychology, as in physics, principles approach universality only if formulated at a sufficiently abstract level. Among the most fundamental principles are those of generalization and inductive inference and those of perceptual and mental transformation. With respect to their appropriate abstract representational space, the former principles are well formulated as (Bayesian) integration over suitable (e.g., connected) subsets of points in the space, and the latter as geodesic (hence, least-time) paths between points in the space. Critics sometimes insufficiently appreciate the following: (a) Generality requires such abstraction. (b) Perceptual principles are not themselves given in sensory input. (c) Principles of learning are not themselves learned. (d) Though all such principles are somehow instantiated in the brain, their ultimate, nonarbitrary source must be sought in the regularities of the world – including those reflecting abstract mathematical principles (e.g., of group theory and symmetry). New light may thus be shed on the cognitive grounds of science and ethics.

The ecologically most significant respect in which humankind now dominates all other terrestrial species is in its scientific understanding and technological manipulation of the world. What psychological adaptation underlies this seemingly discontinuous development? There is reason to believe that natural selection has endowed the perceptual/representational systems not only of humans but also of other perceptually and cognitively advanced animals with an implicit knowledge of pervasive and enduring properties of the world. Perhaps especially in the human species, natural selection has, in addition, favoured a heightened degree of voluntary access to the representational machinery embodying this implicit wisdom, thus facilitating the realistic mental simulation of possible actions in the world before taking the risk of carrying them out physically. This, together with the emergence of an unprecedented motivation toward understanding, seems to have enabled some human individuals to use 'thought experiments' to convert more and more of the implicit knowledge that we all share into a self-consistent set of explicit scientific laws. Although knowledge of the world must ultimately come from the world, as empiricists claim, it can in this way come through one's genes as well as through one's own direct perceptual interactions with the world.

Does the time to discriminate the presence or absence of a tactile stimulus depend on its distance from the bodily location to which one has been attending? Subjects were tested by the presentation of air puffs at four of eight possible locations on the body. In each trial of Experiment 1, (1) subjects attended auditorily to an announcement of one of the eight locations; (2) 2 sec later, a second location was announced and, simultaneously, air puffs were presented at a randomly selected four of the eight locations; (3) the subjects reported as quickly as possible on whether or not air puffs had been presented at the second-announced location. Overall, reaction times increased with the distance between the just-attended and the tested locations. Experiment 2 was undertaken to determine whether the operative distance was distance through the subject’s body or directly through three-dimensional space. The subjects were tested as in Experiment 1, but with their arms or legs either side-by-side in front or spread out to each side. Reaction times then depended more on straight-line distance in space than on distance through the body.

Maximum entropy inference is a method for estimating a probability distribution based on limited information expressed in terms of the moments of that distribution. This paper presents such a maximum entropy characterization of Shepard's theory of generalization. Shepard's theory assumes that an object has an important consequence for an individual only if it falls in a connected set, called the consequential region, in the individual's representational space. The assumption yields a generalization probability that decays exponentially with an appropriate psychological distance metric—either the city-block or the Euclidean, depending on the correlational structure between extensions of the consequential region along the dimensions. In this note we show that a generalization function similar to that derived by Shepard (1987) can be obtained by applying maximum entropy inference on limited information about interstimulus distances between two objects having a common consequence. In particular, we show that different shapes of equal generalization contours may be interpreted as optimal utilization—in the maximum entropy sense—of the correlation structure of stimulus dimensions, similar to the explanation by Shepard's theory.

Instead of speaking of conscious experience as arising in a brain, weprefer to speak of a brain as arising in conscious experience. From anepistemological standpoint, starting from direct experiences strikes us asmore justified. As a first option, we reconsider the `hard problem" ofthe relation between conscious experience and the physical world by thusturning that problem upside down.We also consider a second option: turning the hard problem sideways.Rather than starting with the...

If phenomenal consciousness is distinct from the computationally based access consciousness that controls overt behavior, how can I tell which things (other than myself) enjoy phenomenal consciousness? And if phenomenal consciousness plays no role in controlling overt behavior, how do human bodies come to write target articles arguing for the existence of phenomenal consciousness?

Abstract In the 300 years since Newton propounded the universal law of gravitation, physicists have established this and many other laws and proclaimed them to hold universally. Thus, the inverse-square decrease of gravitational or electromagnetic force with the distance between material bodies is taken to hold not only in the local terrestrial environment (Aristotle’s “sublunar realm”) but to hold and to have held, unchanging in pristine splendor, throughout all space and time.

Studies of visual apparent motion have relied on observers' subjective self-reports of experienced motion, for which there is no objective criterion of right or wrong. A new method of phase discrimination is reported that may offer an objective indicator of apparent motion. Ss discriminated the direction of an objective 75-ms phase shift, away from strict temporal alternation of 2 stimulus dots. Accuracy increased from 50% to 100% correct as rate of alternation and distance between the dots was decreased, in conformity with Korte's third law of apparent motion. This and additional evidence suggests that phase discrimination may be mediated by asymmetries between the experienced strengths of leftward and rightward motion. Phase discrimination may also be adaptable to the study of apparent motion and related phenomena in other sensory modalities and other animal species.

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