Dr. Wayne Podrouzek, Evolution in Research Interest and Undergraduate Psychology
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/07/31
Dr. Wayne Podrouzek works as an Instructor for the Psychology Department of University of the Fraser Valley and instructor in the Psychology Department of Kwantlen Polytechnic University. Dr. Podrouzek earned his a Bachelor of Arts in Child Studies and a Bachelor of Science (Honours) from Mount Saint Vincent University, a Master of Arts from Simon Fraser University, and Ph.D. from Simon Fraser University under Dr. Bruce Whittlesea. Here is part 1 of an interview from a few years ago.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What is your current position in the Psychology Faculty?
Dr. Wayne Podrouzek: I’m currently full time faculty and chair of the department.
Jacobsen: Where did you acquire your education? What did you pursue in your studies?
Podrouzek: I did my undergrad work in Nova Scotia at Mount St. Vincent U, although there is (was) an interuniversity agreement there where many courses can be taken at Dalhousie, Saint Mary’s, or the Mount and simply count at the other universities, so I took many courses at the other schools. At Dal and SMU I did quite a bit of philosophy and religious studies, some bio at Dal, some behavioural stuff at SMU, etc. It’s actually quite a good system. All the universities are within about a ½ hour drive of each other, offer diverse courses, and there are a minimum of administrative obstacles.
I got edjamacated ‘cause I was working with children and teenagers with the equivalent of the Ministry of Children and Families and the Provincial Attorney General (with teens who had been incarcerated) in Alberta and realized that to have more influence I would need some university education (I had obtained a diploma). Mt. St. Vincent had one of Canada’s only two programs for working with children (Bachelor of Child Studies – BCS) and so I sent back there to pick up that credential.
Jacobsen: What originally interested you in Psychology? If your interest evolved, how did your interest change over time to the present?
Podrouzek: As part of the BCS, we were required to complete a substantial number of bio and psych courses, and I became interested in psychology, subtype developmental psychology, specifically child language development. I completed my BCS, then did a BSc Honours in Psych (minors in Math/Stats and Biology), and started a Masters in Education (I picked this up in my last year of my Honours as extra courses) and completed all the coursework but not the project. I was subsequently awarded an NSERC, and some other money, and was accepted into the MA at Simon Fraser, so abandoned my MEd to come out here. I kind of wish I had finished the MEd now – but I really just didn’t see the necessity at the time. Because of its emphasis on counselling and testing I could have used it to become registered in BC – it would have opened some doors. Can’t y’all just seem me as a therapist? Hmmm, that’s scary.
At any rate, I originally went to SFU because it was supposed to get some equipment to do acoustical analyses of language (which at the time was about a $60K piece of equipment called a Sonograph, and today you can do the same thing with an A-D board that costs less than $100), and I had done my Honours Project on “An acoustical analysis of pre-lexical child utterances in pragmatically constrained contexts” (or something like that and wanted to continue that work.) However, the equipment fell through, so I switch to perception. I did my MA thesis in perception on the question of the order of visual processing (what do you process first, the global scene and then analyze for the bits, or the bits first and then synthesize them into the whole scene: the Global-Local question).
I began my PhD in perception, but then met Dr. Bruce Whittlesea, and became interested in memory theory, so I switched to that area and completed my PhD in his lab. I did my dissertation on Repetition Blindness in Rapid Serial Visual Presentation Lists (an examination of the phenomenon that you tend not to see repetitions of words in quickly presented word lists).
Since my PhD I have become interested in how the blind spot gets filled in, subjective contours, retrieval induced forgetting, and for a brief time, the science underlying neuropsych testing.
Jacobsen: Since your time as an undergraduate student, what are the major changes in the curriculum? What has changed regarding the conventional ideas?
Podrouzek: Wow, that’s a hard one – so much has happened in so many areas. When I started as an undergrad (back when dinosaurs roamed the earth with people), the areas then are usually considered the “core” areas now. These included methods, stats, measurement theory, bio, social, developmental, cognitive, and behavioural in the experimental areas, and testing, abnormal, and therapy in the clinical areas. We had rat labs in intro – every student got two rats and we ran experiments on the rats and wrote the experiments up in the lab books (something like doing chem labs. Then we got to kill them). Consciousness was not discussed – that was akin to studying magic. Evolutionary Psych did not exist (although its precursor, sociobiology did). Although Kuhn had published his controversial book “The structure of scientific revolutions”, his ideas were discussed but, I think, not taken to heart by most scientists.
Later, with other philosophers of science (e.g., Feyerabend, Lakoff), publishing works that in some ways augmented his, our assumptions and views of even methodologies changed. Of course, change your assumptions, change your methods, and you change your field. Things loosened up considerably. Areas of enquiry and the acceptable methods and what could count as reasonable data become much more encompassing, and thus new areas of psychology emerged. We certainly didn’t have courses on sex, for example, or prejudice, cultural, gender (other than straight up sex differences, other aspects of that field would have been taught in “Women’s Studies”), and the list goes ever on.
When I attended university there were upper level specialty courses in Psycholinguistics (Chomsky) – a brilliant, complex theory of language (particularly, syntax and transformations, and semantics), Piaget and Vygotsky, behaviour, modification (applied behavior analysis), parallel and distributed processing, and other things that are now of historical interest, but at the time were all the rage.
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