INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES: Editorial

Abstract

For decades, scientists who study mental processes and behavior (and the neural bases thereof) have largely been divided along these lines-those who focus on central tendencies and those who focus on the deviation from those tendencies. Experimental psychology and correlational psychology, both care deeply about variation among individuals. The difference amounts to whether the variance is treated as data, or as noise. For the most part, experimental psychologists, including the vast majority of cognitive neuroscientists, have done the latter: differences between people (those that cannot be explained by an experimental manipulation) are banished to the denominator of the test statistic, in the realm of "unexplained variance." Some of the studies in this issue have focused on individual differences in perceptual processing and distinct cognitive domains, such as attention and working memory. Others have focused on the nature of fundamental processes such as learning, conditioning and speed of processing. Still others have examined affective and social processes such as reward evaluation, and emotion regulation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)