The Early Career Award is given out by the American Psychonomic Society and honors researchers who have made excellent contributions in the field of cognitive psychology within ten years after obtaining their doctorate. Kuhlmann, Professor at the University of Mannheim, receives this year’s award for her research on the interaction between episodic memory, semantic memory and meta cognition in adults. She combines experimental manipulation of behavior and cognitive modeling and shows, for example, that the source memory, which refers to recalling contextual details, e.g., who has said something or where the object was last seen, decreases more than other memories when people get older. In addition, Kuhlmann shows that older adults are able to substantially improve their source memory by mental imagery. From 2015 until 2020, Kuhlmann was a junior professor at the University of Mannheim. Since 2020, she has been holding the chair of Cognitive Psychology and Cognitive Aging.
The Psychonomic Society is a community of more than 4,300 psychologists from more than 60 countries. The society confers the Early Career Award each year upon up to four early-career researchers. The award is endowed with USD 2,500 and is awarded during the annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society in November in Boston. Kuhlmann is the first professor of the University of Mannheim to receive the Early Career Award. She is only the second researcher from Germany to receive the international award.