Psychonomic Society 2025 Annual Meeting: Saturday Recap

Day 3: Saturday Recap

Lunchtime Workshop: Funding at the U.S. National Science Foundation

Summary by: Samantha Cruz

The talk featured two experts, including a former program officer at the U.S. National Science Foundation.

These experts focused their informational talk on navigating the current grant and funding process at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). Across the federal landscape, we have seen modifications, cuts, and budget adjustments that affect academics, especially in the sciences. The NSF has also suffered an employee cut of about 25-50% while the person-power needed to meet the demand remains the same.

2025 Carbon Conscious Award Winners

Congratulations to Alyssa Asmar, University of Denver, Shanti Astra, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Mikayla Cutler, Loyola University Chicago, for their efforts to reduce their carbon footprint at this year’s Annual Meeting.

CORRECTION: In yesterday's Psychonomic Society 2025 Annual Meeting: Friday Recap email, Simon Fischer-Baum was incorrectly affiliated. Simon's affiliation is Rice University, USA.

Jogonomics In Denver

Early Saturday morning, meeting attendees participated in the Jogonomics 5k/5 mile run. What a way to kick off Day 3 of the Annual Meeting!

Saturday: A Day in Pictures

Poster Session IV

Summary by: Heather Hill

This morning, I dropped in on a talk session about language research. Language research always has a special place in my heart as it was one of the shared topics of interest I had with my mentor, Dr. Stan Kuczaj. While I may have been more curious about dolphin communication than about human language, language fascinates me, and I often discuss it in my comparative psychology, cognition, and general psychology courses.

Two talks that caught my interest were the data blitz by two graduate students, Claire Guang and Mary Avery. Claire’s talk was about bilinguals’ use of words when discussing emotionally aversive topics. Across two experiments using slightly different paradigms (forced choice and free response) and embarrassing topics (farts and belches vs sexually oriented topics), bilinguals chose to use their foreign language to discuss these aversive topics. Claire interpreted this strategy as an effort to distance oneself from an emotional experience, which may, in turn, facilitate emotional regulation.

Lunchtime Workshop: Keeping Your Options Open: Alternative Non-Academic Career Paths

Summary by: Raunak Pillai

For the second year in a row, the Psychonomic Society’s Graduate Student and Postdoc Committee hosted a lunchtime workshop to help early-career Psychonomes learn about possible career opportunities outside academia. This year, student and postdoc trainees heard from some familiar voices from returning panel members Alex Burgoyne, Aubrey Lau, and Rachel Ostrand, along with new panelists Adam Bigs, Andrew Gordon, and Anna Madison.

In addition, this year marked the first time the committee organized a free-form meet-and-greet for trainees to chat with panel members after the session. The event was a resounding success with rich conversations—we had to practically pull our panelists away from the trainees to get a group photo at the end!

Read on for some of the main insights from the panelists.

Poster Session V

Summary by: Samantha Cruz

The poster reception took place on this fine evening. Those final presenters were able to give their hard work and effort the well-deserved spotlight, finally.

Various Psychonomic Society attendees were seen walking around and stopping at different posters with a drink in hand, hopefully easing the tension or nervousness some of the speakers might have felt. If adult beverages can help you speak a language more fluidly, can they make you speak cognitive psychology more easily? Who knows, maybe that’s someone's next big discovery.

All sorts of psychological conversations were taking place, and people seemed to be enjoying themselves—all good signs for a final poster session nightcap. The final poster session has concluded, and all is well. We can now start getting ready to do it again next year.

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