Preface

This special issue of The American Journal of Psychology is a Festschrift for Gordon D. Logan, PhD, a Centennial Professor of Psychology at Vanderbilt University. The timing of the Festschrift marks the 50th anniversary of Gordon earning his PhD degree in 1975 from McGill University. Over the past 50 years, Gordon has contributed extensively to cognitive psychology and related fields through his research on topics that include attention and performance, automaticity and skill acquisition, and executive control processes and strategies, including response inhibition. This Festschrift recognizes Gordon's contributions and highlights the wide-ranging influence of his research on the work of others, which is reflected partly in the articles that appear in this special issue.Gordon's journey in higher education began at the University of Alberta, where he earned his BA and MSc degrees in 1969 and 1972, respectively. After he earned his PhD from McGill University, he stayed in Canada for the next several years, holding fellowships or faculty positions at the University of Waterloo, Erindale College at the University of Toronto in Mississauga, and the University of British Columbia. He then moved to the United States, where he held tenured faculty positions at Purdue University and the University of Illinois. His time at the aforementioned institutions marked the first 25 years of his post-PhD career. In 2000, he became a faculty member with an endowed chair at Vanderbilt University, where he spent the next 25 years (and counting) of his career. It was at Vanderbilt where the three of us each had the good fortune to work with Gordon. Readers can find additional biographical information about Gordon in an article published in American Psychologist (“Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions: Gordon D. Logan,” 2017) in conjunction with him receiving one of the most prestigious awards given by the American Psychological Association (APA): the APA Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions.This APA award is just one of many honors bestowed on Gordon during his career. Other notable honors include the Chancellor's Award for Research and the Earl Sutherland Prize for Achievement in Research from Vanderbilt University, the Sir Frederic Bartlett Prize Lecture for the Experimental Psychology Society in the United Kingdom, the Howard Crosby Warren Medal from the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and Fellow status in organizations that include APA, the Association for Psychological Science, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. And in 2019, he was elected as an international member of the National Academy of Sciences. These well-deserved honors are in recognition of the substantial impact of Gordon's research over the past 50 years.Another way in which this impact can be seen is in the citations to Gordon's published body of work (which includes more than 230 refereed journal articles and more than 20 book chapters). Gordon's research has been highly cited throughout his career. According to data from Google Scholar (as of April 2025; all citation data reported here come from that source), there have been more than 62,000 citations to Gordon's publications, with more than 2,000 citations annually since 2010. Gordon has an h-index of 111, which indicates that he has published several dozen articles that have been highly influential and valued by other researchers.This poses a challenge for a Festschrift: How can Gordon's extensive contributions to cognitive psychology over a 50-year period be adequately recognized and celebrated? The articles in this special issue help address this challenge by providing readers with specific examples of research influenced by Gordon's work. In writing this preface, one of our goals was to supplement those articles by highlighting some of Gordon's most prominent contributions.Our approach was inspired by Gordon's lifelong love of music. Gordon is an avid guitar player (he even attended Fender University, a music education program for guitarists), and he likes to collect guitars (a hobby that benefits from Vanderbilt University being located in Nashville, a.k.a. “Music City,” with his favorite vintage guitar shop, Gruhn Guitars). We have had the memorable experiences of hearing him play guitar in Vanderbilt's cognition and cognitive neuroscience colloquium. We do not know whether he has ever recorded his original composition “Instance Theory Blues,” but it would undoubtedly be a hit on the cognitive psychology music scene (if one exists). On that note, when brainstorming for this preface, we thought about the ways in which listeners are able to appreciate the music of well-known artists who have extensive songbooks from decades of work. One way, which is especially helpful for newcomers to an artist's music, is to listen to a “greatest hits” album consisting of the artist's most popular or influential songs. Why not have something similar for Gordon's contributions?To that end, we compiled a short list of Gordon's “greatest hits,” a set of articles showcasing some of his most important and influential research contributions to cognitive psychology. In making the list, we chose articles that were first-authored by Gordon, are among his most highly cited, and collectively span several topics, to highlight the breadth of his scholarship and influence. Multiple articles involve a combination of behavioral experimentation and formal modeling, reflecting Gordon's productive integration of data and theory in studying cognition. The list is subjective, and some readers might disagree with some of our choices, analogous to how different fans of a music artist might not completely agree on what songs should be on that artist's greatest hits album. We also limited the list to six articles because of space constraints, analogous to how only so many songs can fit on an album. That said, we think these samples of Gordon's greatest hits are seminal articles from his body of work, and the list might serve as a guide to new researchers who are interested in reading Gordon's contributions to cognitive psychology but do not know where to start. The articles are listed in chronological order, and we provide brief notes—liner notes, one might say—about why the articles can be considered among Gordon's greatest hits. We hope that the list will give readers some sense of the ways in which Gordon has influenced the field of cognitive psychology over the past 50 years and why he is being honored with this Festschrift.One of Gordon's earliest hits—written with his wife and longtime collaborator, Jane Zbrodoff—targeted one of the most iconic phenomena in cognitive psychology: the Stroop effect. The classic Stroop task shows how difficult it is to ignore conflicting information. But in this clever study, Gordon and Jane flipped the script. They showed that under the right circumstances, being misled can actually make you faster. By varying the frequency of inconsistent word–place pairings (such as the word “ABOVE” appearing below a fixation point), they discovered that people did not just struggle when incompatible stimuli were presented; they adapted to it. As conflicting trials became more frequent, participants adjusted their attentional strategies, sometimes responding even faster on the supposedly harder trials than on the easy ones. This study showed how dynamically people can adapt cognitive control to the structure of a task. It also demonstrated the synergy of Gordon and Jane's collaboration, which continued with several more joint articles in the years to come—a highlight in the early phase of his research career. There is also a historical echo here. John Ridley Stroop did his original research at Peabody College in Nashville, which is now part of Vanderbilt. Fittingly, Gordon was very proud to get his hands on Stroop's original dissertation and some of the original Stroop cards (with the help of Stroop's family), which are displayed in a case on campus—a tangible link between past and present in the study of attention.People can inhibit their thoughts and actions, such as stopping themselves from knocking on someone's door when they see a “please do not knock” sign. But how can the difficulty and latency of this act of inhibitory control be measured, especially when there is no observable response (as is the case when inhibition succeeds)? Gordon answered this question with his friend Bill Cowan in two complementary ways. First, they highlighted the utility of the stop signal procedure, an experimental paradigm that lets researchers manipulate when response inhibition is required and measure how often subjects fail to inhibit their responses, depending on the timing between go and stop signals. Second, they introduced the horse race model, which formally describes the competition between cognitive processes associated with performing the “go” task and inhibiting the task response when a stop signal occurs. A major feature of the model is that it allows estimation of stop signal reaction time, the covert latency of the inhibitory control process. The article provided a solid empirical and theoretical foundation for subsequent research on inhibitory control in the ensuing decades (for a review, see Verbruggen & Logan, 2009), and it is Gordon's second-most-cited publication (more than 3,400 citations). The 10 most cited articles on Gordon's “billboard” of scientific articles include several other stop signal hits—three with him as first author and four as coauthor (collectively garnering more than 10,000 citations)—reflecting the central role of his work in shaping the field's understanding of response inhibition and of cognitive control more generally.Skilled performance often seems fast and effortless, sometimes automatic. Before instance theory, the modal view of automaticity was that a highly practiced task required little or no attentional capacity. Gordon took the field in a new direction by linking automaticity to memory retrieval. According to his instance theory, a novel task is performed via an algorithm that will yield a solution to a problem (e.g., children learning to solve arithmetic problems by counting). With practice, instances of task performance (episodic traces of problems and their solutions) accumulate in memory and can be retrieved. Automatization reflects a transition from algorithm to memory retrieval, such that skilled performance is dominated by rapid retrieval of instances from memory (e.g., children remembering the answers to practiced arithmetic problems). Instance theory was formalized in the article and shown to account quantitatively for the nonlinear speed-up in performance that typically occurs as a task is consistently practiced. The idea that memory retrieval can drive automatic performance was powerful and found widespread applications in cognitive psychology and beyond, resulting in the article becoming Gordon's most cited publication (more than 5,200 citations).Coordinating the performance of two tasks requires executive control of cognition, but the nature of this control is unclear. Gordon, in collaboration with Robert Gordon, proposed the executive control of theory of visual attention model to address this issue, wherein control is realized by programming visual attention and response selection processes to perform different tasks in series or in parallel. The model offers solutions to the binding and serial order problems that confront the cognitive system in dual-task situations (e.g., determining which response goes with which stimulus for each task) and accounts for empirical phenomena such as crosstalk effects (where information from one task influences performance of the other task) and set-switching costs (i.e., people are slower to do two tasks when they have to switch between task sets than when they can use one task set). Besides expanding the theoretical space of models of dual-task performance by articulating how control can be implemented, the article (which has been cited more than 1,000 times) represents a nice example of cumulative progress in theory development (for more examples, see Logan, 2004).Many researchers assume that task switching is another kind of multitasking situation that requires executive control, but that assumption is rarely tested. Gordon, in collaboration with Claus Bundesen, investigated whether an endogenous act of control is needed to account for task-switching performance in the explicit task-cuing procedure (where a cue indicates the relevant task to perform on each target stimulus). In multiple experiments—some involving the innovative use of two cues per task to disentangle task switching from cue switching—they mapped out the time course of explicitly cued performance and found that transition effects could be attributed mostly to cue-encoding processes rather than to control processes associated with task switching. Indeed, formal modeling of the experimental data revealed that the best model was one in which there was no endogenous act of control. The notion that executive control might not need to be invoked to explain task-switching performance (see also Schneider & Logan, 2005) was an important but controversial contribution to the literature, motivating dozens of subsequent studies (the article has been cited more than 650 times) and challenging researchers to think critically about when and how executive control might play a role in task switching.Typewriting is a complex ability that taps into elements of attention, automaticity, skill acquisition, and cognitive control. Consequently, it is not surprising that Gordon has investigated the cognitive processes involved in typewriting for decades (e.g., Logan, 1982, 2018; Logan & Zbrodoff, 1998). This 2011 chapter that Gordon wrote with Matt Crump might be considered a “mini-album” of Gordon's research on typewriting because it integrates the findings from several of his articles to make the compelling argument that typewriting is under hierarchical control, as realized in the two-loop theory of typewriting proposed in the article. Being the most recent entry on our list, it has not yet been cited as often as the other “greatest hits” (more than 190 citations), but it highlights how Gordon has used the domain of typewriting as a useful, convenient, and productive microcosm to investigate how controlled and automatic processes are coordinated together to produce skilled actions.The contributions to this Festschrift celebrate and reflect on the profound and wide-ranging influence that Gordon has had on cognitive psychology and related fields. The articles that follow offer diverse perspectives, each building on or inspired by different aspects of Gordon's influential theories, findings, and mentorship. Although no single collection of articles could comprehensively capture all facets of Gordon's remarkable career, the articles presented here illustrate how his ideas continue to inspire and shape contemporary research. Like musical works that resonate long after the recordings have been made, Gordon's scientific legacy remains vibrant, echoing through the research of his students, collaborators, and countless others influenced by his work.

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