The Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 50th anniversary special article series...

The year 2025 marked the 50th anniversary of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance (JEP:HPP). JEP:HPP started as a standalone journal in January 1975 under the editorship of Michael Posner. The semicentennial birthday is a special occasion and warrants a special recognition. To celebrate, the editorial team curated a series of articles that explored the impact, the reach, and the value of research published in JEP: HPP. The articles were published throughout 2025. While scientific journals are often evaluated through metrics like impact factor, our celebratory articles show that the influence of JEP:HPP extends far beyond such simple measures. The 27 articles that made up the celebratory series demonstrated the vast reach and diverse influence of research published in JEP:HPP, crossing millennia from Plato to modern feminism to address questions ranging from perception of beauty (Grzywacz, 2025), music (Prpic, 2025; Sears, 2025), human reasoning (Fischhoff, 2025), and language acquisition (Nazzi, 2025) to attention (Olivers et al., 2025; Sauter, 2025; Zhang et al., 2025), representation of space (Yamamoto & Phillbeck, 2025), mental imagery (Martarelli & Mast, 2025), working memory (Olivers et al., 2025), cognitive (Logan, 2025), and attentional control (Montakhaby Nodeh, 2025), as well as social perception and action (Ferier & Heurley, 2025; Hafri & Papeo, 2025; Oswald, 2025). The anniversary series of articles included seven invited literature reviews, three editorial perspectives, and 17 readers' perspectives. Each contribution gave a window into a finding, a researcher, and a time. We got a peek into research from 50 years ago-the ways in which "subjects" were tested, data were plotted, and graphs were physically printed. The authors shared the story of data, how they came about, and how they continued to "live" in the literature. This capture of time, from 1975 to today, was one of the motivating factors in planning the celebratory series. The idea was to honor not only the journal but also people connected to the journal over those 50 years- those who led the journal, those who published in the journal, and, of course, those who read the journal. Thus, as the series celebrated the contributions of research published in JEP:HPP, it also celebrated the community of researchers making JEP:HPP, the diversity of our research questions, opinions, methods, and data, as well as the unity with which we converge in our keen interest in understanding the human mind. The editorial team received enthusiastic contributions from both established and up-and-coming junior scientists who are just embarking on a career journey similar to that taken by their predecessors. And while the two groups may differ in their training and methodological affinities, they appear to share the same passion and fire for scientific discovery (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).