Julia Strand

Education & Professional History

Washington University, MA; PhD

Julia Strand is a Professor of Psychology at Carleton College. She holds a B.A. in Psychology & English from Tufts University, an M.A. and PhD. from Washington University in St. Louis, program Brain, Behavior, & Cognition, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Laboratory of Sensory Neuroscience and Neuroengineering, Department of Biomedical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research explores how people perceive spoken language.

Open Science

In addition to her empirical work, Julia also writes about open science, meta-science, R, methodology, measurement, and transparency in research. She has served as an Associate Editor at Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science and on the programming committee for the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science. Datasets, stimulus materials, code, and teaching materials are available on her Open Science Framework Page. Her open science course, Psychology’s Credibility Revolution, earned a commendation from the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science and was showcased by the Framework for Reproducible Research Training’s Pedagogies Initiative.

In the news

• Essay in the Association for Psychological Science Observer “How to set up and run an undergraduate research lab“
• Research Highlight in Nature Reviews Psychology “Comprehension in native and non-native English speakers“
• Interview in the APA monitor, “How to teach replicability”
• Interview in Nature magazine, “How to fix your scientific coding errors”
• Interview on Science Friday, “What happens when scientists get it wrong”
• Essay for the Cognitive Science Society, “Building better cockpits: Cognitive Science in airplanes and research labs”
• Article in The Voice, “Questioning Color“
• University Business series on threats to research integrity: Part 1, Part 2

Outreach and beyond

• YouTube channel (featuring course videos, lectures, and more)
• TEDx talk “Color is in the mind of the beholder“
• Bluesky
• Podcast: The Juice and the Squeeze
• What Matters to Me and Why talk, Transparency in Science, Art, and Relationships
• Research talk: Psychonomic Society One World Cognitive Psychology Seminar Series, Beware the Jingle and the Jangle: Cautionary Tales from Research on Listening Effort
• ChatGPT/AI policy

Highlights & Recent Activity

Recent external grants:

• NIH AREA grant R15DC018114-01, 9/1/2019-8/31/2023, “Evaluating the listening effort associated with audiovisual speech,” $404,634.00
• NIH AREA grant R15DC018114-02, 9/1/2023-8/31/2026, “Listening effort and audiovisual speech by L1 (“native”) and LX (“nonnative”) English speakers,” $435,885
• Association for the Advancement of Liberal Arts Colleges support for a workshop on “Teaching and Employing Open Science Practices at Small Liberal Arts Colleges,” conducted 08/2023, $20,000

Strand’s research seeks to understand how humans perceive speech and recognize spoken words. Some research topics include:

• audiovisual integration (i.e., combining information about talking faces with what we hear);
• the influence of expectations and contextual information on spoken word recognition;
• the role of individual difference factors in spoken word recognition abilities,
• quantification and mathematical modeling of the processes underlying spoken word recognition
• measuring the cognitive effort necessary to understand speech

Visit the Perception Lab website for more information

Principles of Psychology (PSYC110)  Syllabus

Sensation & Perception (PSYC220) with lab (PSYC221)  All course materials

We will address the question of how humans acquire information from the world to support action, learning, belief, choice, and the host of additional mental states that comprise the subject matter of psychology. In other words “How do we get the outside inside?” We will initially consider peripheral anatomical structures (e.g. the eye) and proceed through intermediate levels of sensory coding and transmission to cover the brain regions associated with each of the major senses. Readings will include primary sources and a text. In addition to exams and papers, students in the lab will conduct an investigation into an area of personal interest.

Psychology’s Credibility Revolution (PSYC399)  All course materials

In this open science seminar seminar, we  explore the factors that contribute to false positives in the literature, including questionable research practices like p-hacking and selective reporting, flexibility in measurement, publication bias, and the incentive structure of science. For the comps paper, students will choose an area of interest and evaluate it through the lens of this discussion. Along the way, we’ll also discuss the strategies being used to improve the discipline and how to apply them to your own research and consumption of science.

• Course showcased on the Framework for Reproducible Research Training Pedagogies initiative

The Psychology of Spoken Words (PSYC362)  Syllabus

This course explores the cognitive and perceptual processes that allow humans to understand and produce spoken words. We will review major findings on word perception and production, and then focus on specific topics including the perception of accents in speech, language disorders, the links between music and speech, the connection between sounds and meaning, the influence of gesturing on word production, slips of the tongue, bilingualism, tip-of-tongue-states (being temporarily unable to recall a word), and other related issues.

Perceptual & Cognitive Expertise (PSYC372)  Syllabus

Some people are able to play (and win!) a dozen games of chess simultaneously or remember thousands of digits of pi. Most people can effortlessly recognize thousands of faces and easily discriminate between similar speech sounds. How do people develop these levels of expertise? This course will explore the processes underlying perceptual and cognitive expertise. Topics include the development of expertise in music perception and performance, memory, sports, visual processing, and taste perception. We will also discuss how attaining expertise in a given domain changes information processing.

Summer Quantitative Reasoning Institute

Publications and Presentations

Google Scholar page

Open Science Framework page

When she isn’t in the classroom or the lab, Julia likes action movies, cooking, being outside, and cutting up books.