Div. 6 President

Michael J. Beran is associate professor of psychology and the associate director of the Language Research Center at Georgia State University. He received his BA in psychology from Oglethorpe University and his MA and PhD from Georgia State University. His research is conducted with human and nonhuman primates, including chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans, capuchin monkeys and rhesus monkeys. His research interests include perception, numerical cognition, metacognition, planning and prospective memory, self-control, decision making and language acquisition. Beran is a fellow of Divs. 3 and 6. He also has served as the president of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology and the Southeastern Psychological Association and on the Executive Councils of Divs. 3 and 6 of APA and of the Southeastern Psychological Association. He serves on numerous editorial boards including Journal of Comparative Psychology and Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition, and he is co-editor of Animal Behavior and Cognition. His research has been funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the National Science Foundation. He is co-editor of the book Foundations of Metacognition (2012) and author of the book Self-Control in Animals and People (2018).

Allyson Bennett is an associated professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her biography and a list of represented publications is available on the University of Wisconsin-Madison's faculty website.

Mary Cain is a professor of psychology at Kansas State University, where she also serves as the program coordinator for the behavioral neuroscience/animal learning area. She completed her graduate training in experimental psychology at the University of Vermont and her postdoctoral training at the University of Kentucky. She examines neurobiological factors that contribute to environmental and individual differences in drug use and fear. Her research is currently funded by the National Institute of Drug Abuse. She is a fellow of Div. 6 and previously was the division's secretary-treasurer.

Stan Kuczaj is professor of psychology and director of the Marine Mammal Behavior and Cognition Laboratory at the University of Southern Mississippi. He received a BA in psychology from the University of Texas at Austin and a PhD in child psychology from the University of Minnesota. 

He is an AAAS fellow, an APA fellow, an APS charter fellow, a founding member of the Comparative Cognition Society, a fellow of the Explorers Club of New York, and a fellow of the Psychonomics Society. 

He has served as editor of Animal Behavior and Cognition, the International Journal of Comparative Psychology, associate editor of First Language, associate editor of the British Journal of Developmental Psychology and as a member of the executive committees of the International Society for the Study of Child Language and the International Society for Comparative Psychology, a member of the standards plenary group of the animal bioacoustics section of the Acoustical Society of America and as a member of the scientific committees of the Dolphin Communication Project, European Association for Aquatic Mammals, Marine Mammal Conservancy and Wild Dolphin Project. 

His research focuses on dolphin behavior, communication and cognition, the overarching goal being to understand how dolphins make sense of their world and to put this understanding in a comparative perspective.

David A. Washburn is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Georgia State University, where he also serves as director of the Language Research Center. He earned his PhD in psychological sciences from this same institution in 1991. The primary emphasis of his research program is the investigation of individual and group (including species) differences in attention, executive function, learning, memory and other cognitive competencies. This research is funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and has also been supported by NASA, the Army Research Office, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Office of Naval Research, the Federal Aviation Administration, the McDonnell-Pew Foundation and Georgia State University. Results have been reported in more than 100 articles and chapters. Washburn is editor of the book "Primate Perspectives on Behavior and Cognition" and co-author with Duane M. Rumbaugh of "The Intelligence of Apes and Other Rational Beings."