BJPS Popper Prize
2022

The BJPS Popper Prize is awarded to the article judged to be the best published in that year’s volume of the Journal, as determined by the Editors-in-Chief and the BSPS Committee. The prize includes a £500 award to the winner. More information about the prize and previous winners can be found here.

We are delighted to announce that the winner of this year’s BJPS Popper Prize is Zina B Ward. Below is the citation from the BJPS Editors, as well as the papers the Editors and the Committee felt deserved honorable mentions.

In ‘Registration Pluralism and the Cartographic Approach to Data Aggregation across Brains’, Zina B. Ward tackles a methodological issue of central importance in cognitive neuroscience: how to register data from multiple subjects in a common spatial framework despite significant variation in human brain structure, that is, how to map activity in different subjects’ neural structures onto a single template or into a common representational space. In a typical fMRI-based investigation, experimenters run a series of subjects through a scanner and, if the experiment is fruitful, draw conclusions, from the data collected, about the functional contributions of certain areas of the brain—that, for instance, the ACC regulates emotional responses to pain. Such work presupposes normalization of the images from various subjects, so as to allow experimenters to claim that, across subjects, the same area of the brain exhibited elevated activity during scanning. The requirements of normalization might seem to pose a mere technical problem; perhaps with hard work and ingenuity, neuroscientists can identify the single, correct method for pairing brain areas or regions across subjects. Ward argues against this kind of monism. For principled reasons to do with the extent and nature of variation in neural structure—for example, variation in the location of sulci relative to cytoarchitectonic boundaries—Ward argues that the choice of spatial framework and method of registration must vary, depending on the purpose of a given study. No single method will simultaneously effect all of the correct pairings of relevance to cognitive neuroscience. From a practical standpoint, such methodological pluralism may seem daunting, and it might also seem excessively theory-laden. In response to such concerns, Ward offers and defends a series of constructive proposals concerning how to implement registration pluralism.

For its impressive theoretical and practical contributions to an issue of central importance in cognitive neuroscience, the BJPS Co-Editors-in-Chief and the BSPS Committee judge ‘Registration Pluralism and the Cartographic Approach to Data Aggregation across Brains’ to be worthy of the 2022 BJPS Popper Prize.

—Prof. Wendy Parker & Prof. Robert Rupert

The following three articles received honourable mentions from the Editors and the Committee

Honorable Mentions

Chloé de Canson
Objectivity and the Method of Arbitrary Functions
2022, 73, pp. 663–84

Emily Sullivan
Understanding from Machine Learning Models
2022, 73, pp. 109–33

Isaac Wilhelm
Typical: A Theory of Typicality and Typicality Explanation
2022, 73, pp. 561–81

Many congratulations to the authors of all these papers from the BJPS editors and the BSPS committee.