Award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology: Dobromir Rahnev

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 purposes of this award, psychology has been divided into 10 areas: animal learning and behavior, comparative; developmental; health; cognition/human learning; psychopathology; behavioral and cognitive neuroscience; perception/motor performance; social; applied research; and individual differences. Five areas are considered each year, with areas rotated in two-year cycles. The areas considered in 2021 were animal learning and behavior, comparative; developmental; health; cognition/human learning; and psychopathology. Each year, panels are selected for the areas under consideration, and these panels recommend nominees to the Committee on Scientific Awards. The 2021 recipients of the APA Scientific Contribution Awards were recognized by the 2020 Board of Scientific Affairs and selected by the 2020 Committee on Scientific Awards. For outstanding contributions to the fields of perceptual decision making and visual metacognition. Dobromir Rahnev's work has revealed the determinants of subjective evaluation in perceptual tasks, the sources of metacognitive inefficiency, and the neural implementation of the control of perceptual decision making in the prefrontal cortex. Rahnev's research on the suboptimality of perception is beginning to shift the role of optimality in the field. He creatively combines computational modeling, functional neuroimaging, brain stimulation, and psychophysics, while his dedication to the principles of open science has resulted in the creation of large repositories of open data such as the Confidence Database. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).