ESCoP: The European Society for Cognitive Psychology

Modeling word recognition has tremendously advanced our understanding of the core processes involved in reading. Indeed, over the past 30 years, purely verbal theories of word recognition have increasingly been replaced by explicit computational models. These models produce detailed item-based simulations of various phenomena and benchmark effects, which allow them to be tested and falsified. The sophistication and impact of recent modeling has become obvious during a symposium held at the 15th ESCoP Conference in Marseille.

To continue and extend the discussions that took place during the symposium, we decided to put together a special issue on computational modeling of word recognition and reading aloud to be published in the European Journal of Cognitive Psychology. Contributions should provide simulations of critical benchmark effects of word recognition or reading aloud. Especially welcome are contributions that describe novel modeling approaches and/or test competing models.

The guest editors of this special issue are Johannes Ziegler, Jonathan Grainger and Marc Brysbaert. The deadline for receipt of papers is September 30, 2008. Papers can be submitted by email to reviews@psypress.co.uk and further details on manuscripts submission and instructions for authors can be found on the Journal website at http://www.psypress.co.uk/ecp. Please be sure to specify in your cover letter that the submission is intended for this special issue. All papers will be peer reviewed.

Search for an Editor-Elect

The executive committee of ESCoP invites proposals for a new editor for The European Journal of Cognitive Psychology. Among the proposed candidates, the committee will select the new editor of the journal. This person must be a full member of ESCoP and will start as editor-elect as from January 2009 on, while the present editor continues to handle resubmissions. From 2010 until end of 2013, this person will be editor of the journal.

The editor is responsible for matters concerning the journal and is free to seek support from a team of associate editors and an editorial board of his/her own choice. The editor is ex officio member of the executive committee of ESCoP and reports annually to the committee. The editor can also consult the committee about journal matters. Proposals can be sent to the Secretary, Dr. Diane Pecher, pecher@fsw.eur.nl or Erasmus University Rotterdam, Institute of Psychology, Woudestein T12-33, PO Box 1738, 3000 DR Rotterdam, The Netherlands, until May 31, 2008.

European Journal of Cognitive Psychology

image of Journal's cover page First and foremost is the European Journal of Cognitive Psychology (EJCP), ESCoP's official peer-reviewed journal, published worldwide by Psychology Press.

EJCP is currently edited by André Vandierendonck.

The journal publishes reports of empirical work (including brief reports), theoretical contributions, and reviews of the literature in all areas of cognitive psychology, including applied cognitive psychology.

Note that the journal's web page contains complete information, including the composition of the editorial board, subscription information, submission information, and a list of forthcoming papers. In addition, EJCP material is also available on internet (for a fee) through the Informaworld service.

EJCP is available free of charge to current ESCoP members.

Call for Papers

Deadline extended until December 31st, 2007

The European Journal of Cognitive Psychology invites manuscripts for a special issue on Ageing, Cognition, and Neuroscience.

Ageing is a universal complex multifaceted process that profoundly affects mind and brain of all individuals. Important discoveries are being made at different levels of research on cognitive aging: from the molecular/genetic level, to the cell, the synapse, the network, and the processing of information at the cognitive level. The ultimate goal in cognitive neuroscience is to understand this whole set of stages. We are not yet there. Most studies conducted so far have collected data at single levels only. One ambition with this Special Issue is to encourage researchers to report cognitive data that are related to neural data at other levels. The research reported may be empirical, theoretical or computational. It may focus on normal cognitive aging or pathology.

The guest editors of this special issue are Soledad Ballesteros, Lars-Göran Nilsson and Patrick Lemaire. The deadline for receipt papers is ~~October 1, 2007~~ December 31st, 2007. Papers can be submitted by e-mail to reviews@psypress.co.uk and further details on manuscript submission and instructions for authors can be found on the Journal website at www.psypress.com/ecp. Please, specify in your cover letter that the submission is intended for this special issue. All papers will be peer-reviewed.

Editorial

Since first published in 1989, the European Journal of Cognitive Psychology has become one of the standard international outlets for research reports on different themes within the field of cognitive psychology. Over the years, the mission of the Journal has remained basically unchanged, and for the years to come, the Journal will continue to publish reports of empirical work (including brief reports), theoretical contributions and reviews of the literature in all areas of cognitive psychology. Even though the Journal has been very successful in attracting contributions in the domains of memory, attention and performance, language and higher cognition, submissions in other domains of cognitive psychology are equally welcome. In view of the increasing body of neuro-cognitive research, papers on these themes are also welcome provided there is a clear contribution to psychological theory. In the same vein, contributions from applied cognitive psychology can find an outlet in the Journal, again provided that there is a clear link to cognitive theory.

Clearly, the Journal wants to advance cognitive psychological theory. From the very start (see the Editorial by Michael Eysenck in 1989), it was hoped that this could be achieved by means of a good mixture of theoretical and empirical contributions. This objective is still relevant, but it is fair to say that over the years the balance has been tilted towards empirical contributions. Therefore I strongly encourage authors to submit not only empirical papers (regular or brief ones), but also to consider the Journal as a legitimate outlet for theoretical papers and for theory-driven literature reviews. The present editorial team is committed to accepting such papers, provided they attain the necessary standards of quality.

From January 2005 onwards, submissions are handled by a new team of editors. Some members of this team also served in the previous editorial team (Marc Brysbaert and Patrick Lemaire) and others were part of the editorial team of the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section A: Human Experimental Psychology (Nelson Cowan and André Vandierendonck). The completed team have been selected for their expertise across the range of different sub-domains of cognitive psychology. The other members of the editorial team are: Soledad Ballesteros, Karl-Heinz Bäuml, JoAnne LeFevre, Henry Markovits, Jochen Müsseler, and Philippe Peigneux.

Increasingly, authors select a journal with the help of so-called objective indicators of journal impact, in particular, the impact-factor as published by Thomson ISI. Many will have noticed that the impact factor is not a constant given and that for some journals it goes up and down over the years. This has been the case for this Journal, because until recently it published a small number of articles (about 25) per year. However, looking at the average impact over the last four years, a more stable result appears with an average impact of 0.99 in the journal citation reports in the period 2001–2004. Also in this respect, the present team is committed to maintaining and hopefully raising the impact of the Journal. However, the ways in which such an objective can be achieved are rather limited. The Journal’s editorial process is already quite efficient and we hope that by maintaining and further improving the efficiency of the editorial process, we can achieve our goal.

Another editorial choice that we believe may help to increase the importance of the Journal is by publishing thematic issues on a regular basis. For that reason, the editorship will set up calls for papers for special issues addressing timely and appropriate themes. The Editor welcomes any suggestions for relevant themes from the stakeholders of the Journal (authors, readers of the Journal, ESCoP members, etc.). Calls for special issues will appear in the Journal, in the ESCoP Newsletter, and on the Journal and ESCoP websites. Anyone can submit a paper to these special issues. An editorial team consisting of one or two members of the editorial board and one or more guest editors, who are experts in the area of the special issue, will supervise these papers via standard manuscript reviewing procedures.

One more small editorial change concerns book reviews. Sometimes book reviews help us to find our way in the plethora of new publications; at other times, book reviews are dull. It is difficult to predict. In view of the increasing number of paper submissions since 2005, it was decided to drop the book review section. Occasionally, a type of book review will be invited in which experts will be asked to comment on the books they were charmed with during the past year.

André Vandierendonck
Editor

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