Award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology: Alexandra G. Rosati.

The Early Career Awards, given for the first time in 1974, recognize the large number of excellent early career psychologists. Recipients of this award may not have held a doctoral degree for more than nine years. For her outstanding contributions to the understanding of the mind’s origins with the aim of elucidating the unique aspects of human cognition and the evolutionary processes that generate complex thought. Alexandra Rosati’s approach is unparalleled due to the range of species she compares, and her innovation of novel experimental measures to study animal cognition. Her work has shown that species with different natural histories vary systematically in their cognitive capacities, including decision-making, spatial memory, and social cognition. She has also pioneered a comparative developmental approach tracing cognition across the life span of animals to understand the processes of human development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]