Experimental Psychology: Continuity and Change

Abstract

Like the volumes of previous years, Volume 56/2009 of Experimental Psychology is characterized by both continuity and change. One of the changes in 2009 refers to the team of editors. After serving as editors for several years, Ute J. Bayen, Anthony G. Greenwald, Glynn W. Humphreys, Dirk Kerzel, and Herbert Schriefers decided to step down upon completion of Volume 55. I would like to thank all of the outgoing editors for their excellent editorial work and their continuous support in the past years. Starting with Issue 1 of Volume 56, the outgoing editors will be replaced by seven new editors, namely, Arndt Broder (Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms University, Bonn, Germany), Roberto Dell’Acqua (University of Padova, Italy), Adele Diederich (Jacobs University, Bremen, Germany), Nachshon Meiran (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva, Israel), Neil W. Mulligan (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA), Manuel Perea (University of Valencia, Spain), and Melanie C. Steffens (FriedrichSchiller-University, Jena, Germany). I would like to thank these colleagues for their willingness to contribute to our common editorial work in the next years. In addition, I would also like to thank Iring Koch, Hartmut Leuthold, Thorsten Meiser, Jochen Musch, Klaus Rothermund, and Eva Walther for agreeing to stay in the team of editors. We are thus well prepared to manage the steadily increasing number of manuscript submissions to Experimental Psychology until the next major change in the team of editors in 2011. A second change concerns the editorial board. To cope with the wealth and the heterogeneity of topics addressed in research papers submitted to our journal, we decided to extend the editorial board of Experimental Psychology. I am grateful to Ute J. Bayen (Heinrich-Heine University, Dusseldorf, Germany), Hartmut Blank (University of Portsmouth, UK), Anthony G. Greenwald (University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA), Ralph Hertwig (University of Basel, Switzerland), Dirk Kerzel (University of Geneva, Switzerland), Elizabeth F. Loftus (University of California, Irvine, CA, USA), Michel Regenwetter (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA), Jeffrey N. Rouder (University of Missouri-Columbia, Columbia, MO, USA), and Herbert Schriefers (Catholic University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands) for agreeing to supplement our editorial board in the next years. A third change concerns the book review section that will not be continued in 2009. Although Experimental Psychology switched from a quarterly to a bimonthly publication cycle in 2008, journal space continues to be scarce. To be able to publish accepted research articles as quickly as possible, we were forced to drop the book review section. This means that, beginning with the year 2009, new book review submissions will not be considered for publication anymore. Book reviews that have already been accepted will, of course, be published. The decision to drop the book review section was not easy. It has a long tradition both in Experimental Psychology and its predecessor journal, the Zeitschrift fur Experimentelle Psychologie. In recent years, Andreas Voss, our book review editor, did a great job in acquiring excellent book reviews addressing topics of high relevance for experimental psychologists. Nevertheless, given the current situation, we all agreed that the goal of reducing publication lag is more important than the continuation of the book review section. As with the other outgoing editors, I would also like to thank Andreas Voss for his excellent work as book review editor in the past years. Despite these major changes in the editorial team, the content and the scope of Experimental Psychology will not change. As Klauer (2002, p. 1) already stated in his first editorial of Experimental Psychology, ‘‘the scope of the journal is defined by the experimental method, and thus, papers based on experiments from all areas of psychology are welcome’’. We will stick to this strict definition in the future. By implication, papers comparing nonexperimental groups of participants (e.g., men and women, old and young people, amnesics and controls, participants with and without prosopagnosia, etc.) will not be considered for publication unless they report manipulations of at least one experimental independent variable (IV) in addition to the nonexperimental IV of interest. In other words, papers comparing experimental treatment effects between nonexperimental groups of participants would be appropriate in principle (e.g., experimental age group comparisons; cf. Carretti, Borella, & De Beni, 2007; Jansen-Osmann & Heil, 2007; Taconnat, Froger, Sacher, & Isingrini, 2008; Tsujimoto, Kuwajima, & Sawaguchi, 2007). We are also willing to consider correlational studies to some extent (see, e.g., Friese, Bluemke, & Wanke, 2007; Hilbig & Pohl, 2008; Nosek &