Gordon Logan, Centennial Professor of Psychology
Gordon Logan is a highly distinguished scholar with profound theoretical and empirical contributions to the field of psychology through his seminal studies of attention, skill acquisition, and executive control. He is a foreign associate of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences.
Logan has pioneered the widely influential “stop-signal paradigm” that forces an individual to inhibit an ongoing action in response to a stop signal, which has allowed psychologists to learn how people arrest an ongoing behavior. The paradigm has been applied successfully to the study of performance in wide varieties of clinical populations who show deficits in inhibitory control. His “instance theory of automatization” also has been extremely influential because it accounts for how people “automate” repetitive cognitive tasks. The theory holds that automatic processing develops because an individual stores separate representations, or “instances,” of each exposure to a task, and this consistent practice increases the speed with which a person can retrieve these instances. In addition, Logan has shown that the hands of skilled typists know when they make an error, even when the mind does not.