Making Science Available to the Public

​The Psychonomic Society is making great strides towards making science more accessible to the public. This became very evident to me when I attended a lunchtime workshop on Saturday, and I have to say, I was impressed. One way they’re doing this is through the featured content page on website. It was launched a little over 4 years ago, and since then they’ve posted over 400 blog-style posts covering research that’s been published in their journals. The posts are written with lay-people in mind, so the reading level wouldn’t be too tough if you were to incorporate their posts into your undergraduate curriculum. I’ll say more about that in a bit. 

On the featured content page, there are 3 highlighted subsections that allow for science to be shared to the public in slightly different ways.
 
Digital events:

• Digital events are a series of posts surrounding one overarching topic that’s of interest to the Psychonomic Society. They are usually published back-to-back in a week. Previous topics have covered things like diversity and inclusion, or working memory, or even Bayesian statistics. There is an upcoming one in December that’s covering canine cognition!

 
Learning groups:

• Learning groups consist of a customized collection of posts that are linked to a common landing page. These collections can be customized by instructors who want to use Psychonomics Featured Content material in their teaching. How neat it that? This service is open to anyone teaching cognitive psychology. You can set up your own learning group by contacting their digital team! This is something I’m especially excited to use in the future. What a great way to incorporate research into the classroom!

 
Resources for research:

• This section provides brief summaries of selected resources for research that have been published in journals of the Psychonomic Society. These resources can be anything from linguistic norms, or visual stimuli, to novel analysis techniques and software. I’m using one of the resources already! This page was only recently launched, so I’m sure the amount of resources they have listed will grow.

 
Also, Psychonomics is trying to up their social media presence. They normally have an active twitter account (@Psychonomic_Soc). I already mentioned this, but during the recent conference, they had a team of about 15 Twitternomes live-tweeting research talks and posters each day. I was one of them! This was the first year they did this, so it was exciting to be part of the inaugural team!
 
The society is trying to reach more people with up-to-date and digestible research findings in so many ways! I’m excited to see if they have any other ideas up their sleeves!


From all of us at TNP team, we wish you all a happy and yummy Thanksgiving! 
 
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written by Jen Blush