Donald Olding Hebb

Personal history

Born in 1904 to two medical doctors, Donald Hebb quickly grew to stand out as a swift learner in his Canadian province of Nova Scotia. By the age of 10, he was already enrolled in the seventh grade, having benefitted from his mother’s Montessori-influenced homeschooling. Yet, he bristled at the more structured academic environment of his new school, a posture that led him to fail the eleventh grade. Still, he muddled through and went on to attend Dalhousie University after graduating secondary school with aspirations of becoming a novelist. His continued hostility towards authority was met with a lackluster record at the university, though he received a B.A. in 1925 and soon started teaching. “D.O.,” as Donald was known to his friends, soon decided his interests were elsewhere and became something of a migrant laborer, finding work where he could across Canada.
An introduction to Sigmund Freud’s work fanned the 23-year-old’s interest in psychology, though he dismissed much of Freud’s research for what he saw as a lack of rigor. Nevertheless, Hebb enrolled in a graduate course in psychology at McGill University, where he studied education and intelligence and taught on the side. Following the death of his first wife on Hebb’s 29th birthday, he left Canada to complete his Ph.D. under the supervision of Karl Lashley, a noted behaviorist remembered for his unrealized quest to pinpoint where in the brain memory traces—or engrams—were stored. Lashley soon moved from the University of Chicago to Harvard University, taking Hebb and two other students with him. There, Hebb studied the effects of sensory deprivation in rats, receiving his Ph.D. in 1936.
A year later, Hebb was remarried to the woman that would mother their two daughters and preparing to work with Wilder Penfield at the Montreal Neurological Institute, where he went on to witness the striking effects of brain damage. From there, he took a teaching position at Queen’s University, eventually moving to Florida for another opportunity to work with Lashley as Hebb began writing what would come to be his landmark book, The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory. Hebb returned to McGill as a professor of psychology in 1947, where he was later named chairman. Four years after the death of his second wife, Hebb married Margaret Doreen Wright. Following his retirement from McGill, Hebb went back to his alma mater in 1980 as a professor emeritus of psychology at Dalhousie University. Hebb died at the age of 81 in Nova Scotia, two years after the death of his third wife.
During his long and illustrious career, Hebb presided over the Canadian, as well as the American Psychological Association—the same organization that awarded him the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award in 1961. Later, in 1966, Hebb was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. The Canadian Psychological Association continues to give out a yearly award in Hebb’s name to distinguished Canadian researchers.

Research

Hebb’s approach to studying thought and behavior centered on the neurons that give rise to them. His basic notion, often summarized as “the neurons that fire together, wire together,” continues to influence our understanding of neurophysiology, psychology, engineering, and computer science to this day. This beautifully simple idea, referred to as Hebb’s learning rule, suggests that repeated co-activations will strengthen associative bonds between the constituent elements, giving rise to cohesive processing units (“cell assemblies”) and, in turn, habits and long-term memories. Indeed, Hebb’s ideas have been borne out in the discovery of long-term potentiation (LTP), given rise to numerous neural network models, and provided a biological rationale for the errorless learning method used to facilitate memory rehabilitation in amnesic patients.
Hebb had numerous other contributions to the field, including the development of the Adult Comprehension Test and the Picture Anomaly Test, designed to measure specific aftereffects of brain surgery, rather than relying on general measures of intelligence. His work with surgical patients produced some of the first evidence that the right temporal lobe was associated with visual recognition, as well as the finding that individuals often maintained the bulk of their cognitive capacity and memory after the resection of large parts of the frontal lobe. Studying the problem-solving abilities of rats across the lifespan using the Hebb-Williams maze, Hebb demonstrated lasting effects of early experience on later abilities, an important principle in developmental psychology.
Hebb’s teaching has directly influenced a great many prominent researchers in the field, including Brenda Milner, Faraneh Vargha-Khadem, Mortimer Mishkin, and James Olds, to name but a few. Moreover, his work has inspired countless others, such as Fergus Craik and Eric Kandel, to dedicate their lives to unlocking the secrets of memory in the brain.

References

Hebb, D. O. (1949). The organization of behavior: A neuropsychological theory. New York: Wiley.
Hebb, D. O. (1958). A textbook of psychology. Philadelphia, PA: Saunders.
Hebb, D. O. (1959). A neuropsychological theory. In S. Koch (ed.), Psychology: A study of a science: study I. conceptual and systematic: volume 1. sensory, perceptual and physiological, 622–643. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
Hebb, D. O., and Penfield, W. (1940). Human behaviour after extensive bilateral removal from the frontal lobes. Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry 44: 421–436.

Research activity 1: chunking

Miller (1956) suggested that what we can remember is not dependent on the number of items, but on the number of meaningful chunks we can create out of those items. Try recalling each of the following sequences of nine letters one by one. Read the letters then close your eyes and try to recall them in the correct order.

NEWSPAPER

SPAWENPER

WNSPPREEA

Presumably you found the first one the easiest to do, followed by the second, then the third?
As most people know the word NEWSPAPER and how to spell it, in the first case you only have to remember one chunk;what the word is. In the second case, although the word is nonsense it could plausibly be an English word. We can therefore break it down into syllables that already exist in the English language, e.g. SPA – WEN – PER. In this example we only need to remember three chunks in the correct order. In the final example the letters do not resemble any structure that we are familiar with in the English language. We therefore need to remember each letter and its position in the sequence individually, i.e. nine items.

Research activity 2: memory span

Below are 12 noun words. Read through them once (out loud), then look away and write down how many you can remember. Once you’ve finished (give yourself no more than a couple of minutes), look at the list again and check how many you have got right.

CAKE
WOOD
BATH
BIKE
CHAIR
PENCIL
COAT
TREE
RADIO
RING
DOLL
CAT

The average memory span for this sort of free recall task is typically between five and nine words. However, also make note of where the words you remembered were in the sequence you read them. Usually people are more likely to remember the first three and last three words. This is known as the primacy–recency effect and is viewed as evidence for long-term and short-term memory components to our memory.

George Armitage Miller

Personal history

George Armitage Miller, born on February 3, 1920, called Charleston, West Virginia home prior to attending George Washington University and then transferring to the University of Alabama, where he received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1940 and his Master’s a year later. At that point, he began a 2-year stint as an Instructor in Psychology at his alma mater before enrolling in Harvard University’s Ph.D. program as a student in the Psycho-Acoustical Laboratory.
At Harvard University, he studied speech production and perception and evaluated radio-telephone systems for the US Army, and, in 1946, he defended his work on speech masking. His subsequent lectures at Harvard formed the basis for his book, Language and Communication. Following this, he studied mathematics at Princeton University and moved to MIT before returning to Harvard in 1955 as an Associate Professor of Psychology. In collaboration with J.S. Bruner, Miller, by then a full professor, helped found the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies in 1960 and was elected to the National Academy of Science 2 years later.
From 1963 to 1964, Miller was a Fulbright Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. After a year as a visiting scholar at the Rockefeller University in New York, Miller decided to accept a position as a Professor of Experimental Psychology there in 1968. A decade following his election as President of the American Psychological Association in 1969, Miller joined the faculty at Princeton University, where he held the position of the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Psychology, Emeritus. Miller founded the Princeton Cognitive Science Laboratory, and, for a time between 1989 and 1994, he served as Program Director of the McDonnell-Pew Program in Cognitive Neuroscience, receiving the National Medal of Science in 1991. He died in 2012, at his home in Plainsboro, New Jersey, of complications of pneumonia and dementia.

Research

Miller’s early research at Harvard was shaped by C.E. Shannon’s mathematical theory of communication, leading Miller to investigate how expectations influence speech perception. His 1951 publication of Language and Communication catapulted the study of psycholinguistics into a full-fledged area of psychology. Miller’s Law states that in order to understand another person’s statement, the listener must assume that the proposition is true and try to imagine what it could be true of, based on presuppositions. His attempt to quantify information and the capacity of short-term memory gave rise to the notion that most adults could remember around seven information chunks, give or take a couple of items. This limitation can be circumvented to some extent by chunking information into larger groups. These ideas were encapsulated in what would become Miller’s most famous paper, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two.”
Miller’s interest in grammar and, later, the lexicon, resulted in a collaboration with P.N. Johnson-Laird, with whom he developed a hypothesis about how words are stored in long-term memory, a topic he later researched in relation to how children acquire language. In 1985 Miller founded WordNet, an English language semantic network that attempts to model how the human mind stores and implements language. Since then he has continued to work on its development and this work has been adopted into machine-based translation services and Internet searches—in fact Simpli, an early search engine designed to parse search queries and scour webpages for relevant keywords, can be credited as the basis for Google’s AdSense technology.

References

Miller, G. A. (1947). The masking of speech. Psychological Bulletin, 44, 104–109.
Miller, G. A. (1951). Language and communication. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Miller, G. A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 63, 81–97.
Miller, G. A. (1995). WordNet: A Lexical Database for English. Communications of the ACM 38(11), 39–41.

Brenda Milner

Personal history

Brenda Milner was born Brenda Langford on July 15, 1918 in Manchester, England. Milner’s father tutored her in mathematics and the arts from an early age, until her father died when Brenda was 8 years old. After attending Withington Girls’ School, she enrolled at Newnham College, Cambridge University, to study mathematics in 1936, with the help of a scholarship and a small grant. After only a year, she switched her concentration to the relatively young and unfamiliar field of psychology, which came as a disappointment to her mother.
While at Cambridge, Dr Oliver Zangwill advised Milner, instilling in her an appreciation for studying the behavioral deficits associated with particular brain lesions in order to understand normal brain functioning. In 1939, with her Bachelor’s degree in the moral sciences, she won a Sarah Smithson Research Studentship from Newnham College, allowing her to continue on at Bartlett’s Cambridge Psychological Laboratory in pursuit of her Master’s degree.
World War II’s outbreak shifted her research topic to the use of aptitude tests to differentially identifying fighter pilots and bomber pilots for the war effort. She would also help with the war effort by working for the Ministry of Supply in Malvern to develop methods for radar operators between 1941 and 1944. In 1944, she met Peter Milner, an electrical engineer. They were soon married, which was followed by a move to Montreal, Quebec in Canada due to a job offer for Peter. Although they only intended to remain there for a year, the move became permanent.
Milner, who needed no time to learn French, landed a position at the Université de Montréal’s Institut de Psychologie. She researched and taught there beginning in 1944. Donald Hebb, then in charge of the department of psychology at McGill University, allowed Milner to attend a weekly seminar in which they discussed his Organization of Behavior, then only in manuscript form. Though she would continue to teach at the Université de Montréal until 1952, Brenda Milner became a graduate student under Hebb in 1949. Thanks to a connection Hebb had with Wilder Penfield’s neurosurgery patients at the Montreal Neurological Institute, three years after graduating with her Ph.D. in experimental psychology in 1952, Milner made the acquaintance of a neurosurgery patient known as HM who had acquired amnesia from medial temporal lobectomy, about whom she would first write in a landmark paper with Scoville in 1957.
She remained at the Montreal Neurological Institute following graduation, and currently holds the title of Dorothy J. Killam Professor of Psychology in the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill University. Following a one-year sabbatical, Milner earned her Doctorate of Science from Cambridge in 1972. Milner is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and of the Royal Societies in both London and Canada. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Milner was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1984 and was promoted to Companion in 2004. The same year she also received the Neuroscience Award from the National Academy of Science in the United States.

Research

Milner, perhaps best known for her work with amnesic patient HM, was a forerunner in the study of the mnemonic effects of medial temporal lobe damage. She described how individuals afflicted with medial temporal lobe amnesic syndrome are unable to acquire new, declarative memories, though other cognitive abilities are generally spared, including motor skill acquisition. Thus, her work served to highlight, for the first time, the existence of multiple memory systems within the brain. Specifically, she linked declarative memories to the cortico-limbic pathways, rather than the cortico-basal ganglia pathways crucial in the acquisition of skills and procedural memories.
Although her early work centered on patients with damage to the medial temporal lobes, she also investigated the role of the frontal lobes in the organization of memories. For instance, she discovered that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is important in ordering memories temporally and that damage to the frontal lobe is associated with perseveration and other types of cognitive inflexibility. Milner’s research not only demonstrated the deficits resulting from damage to particular brain regions, but also convincingly showed that neural processes can be reorganized in the wake of brain damage.
Milner appreciated how different individuals responded differently to brain damage in the same region. For instance, she noted that language in left- and right-handed people (as well as the ambidextrous) is differentially lateralized. The improved understanding of hemispheric lateralization provided by Milner has guided therapy for patients suffering from stroke and Alzheimer’s disease. Given that individuals respond differently to lesions, Milner developed a technique to temporarily disrupt brain activity in selected areas by administering sodium amytal in order to determine the functions associated with that brain region. This method is now commonly used to guide brain surgeries across the globe and has helped reduce the extent of linguistic and cognitive surgical side effects.
More recently, Milner conducted neuroimaging studies with healthy participants to identify brain regions subserving spatial memory and language.
Milner celebrated her 101st birthday in July 2019.

References

Milner, B., Taylor, L., & Sperry, R. W. (1968). Lateralized suppression of dichotically-presented digits after commissural section in man. Science, 161, 184–186.
Scoville, W. B., & Milner, B. (1957). Loss of recent memory after bilateral hippocampal lesions. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, 20, 11–21.
Branch, C., Milner, B., & Rasmussen, T. (1964). Intracarotid sodium amytal for the lateralization of cerebral speech dominance. Journal of Neurosurgery, 21, 399–405.
Köhler, S., Joelle, C., & Milner, B. (2002). Differential contributions of the parahippocampal place area and the anterior hippocampus to human memory for scenes. Hippocampus, 12(6), 718–723.

Steven J. Luck

Personal history

Steve Luck was born in Madison, Wisconsin in 1963 and quickly acquired a penchant for comic books and playing the guitar in rock bands. In 1981, Luck went to Reed College to study psychology, in the hopes of becoming a successful clinical psychologist, who could draw from his interest in philosophy. Professor Allen Neuringer’s introductory psychology class and subsequent methods class piqued his interest in memory and learning research.
In his sophomore year, Luck and another student, Marianne Colgrove, completed a series of experiments on sequence learning in pigeons that would result in a publication in the journal Animal Learning & Behavior. His work required a level of familiarity with the UNIX operating system and the BASIC computer programming language, both of which would prove beneficial in the high-tech field of cognitive neuroscience. At the end of his sophomore year, he was offered a position in Dr Martha Neuringer’s lab at the Oregon. This experience first exposed Luck to electrophysiological recordings that would become central to his later research career.
The following year, Prof Dell Rhodes commissioned Luck to design a computer program for recording ERPs in humans. Rhodes would continue to mentor Luck through his own ERP experiments, leading to Luck’s senior thesis, called “The effects of attention, task-relevance, and sequence variability on cognitive-event related brain potentials.” Luck graduated in 1986, which was followed by a move to the University of California, San Diego to work on visual selective attention in Steve Hillyard’s neuroscience laboratory. While pursuing his Ph.D. with the help of a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship, he visited Bob Desimone’s laboratory at the National Institutes of Health for 7 months from 1992 to 1993 to conduct additional research.
Luck graduated in 1993, though he stayed in Hillyard’s laboratory for another year as a postdoctoral fellow before accepting a position as an assistant professor at the University of Iowa’s Department of Psychology. He remained at the University of Iowa until 2006, reaching full professor status in 2002. Currently he is a Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Davis.
Among other honors, Luck is a recipient of the American Psychological Foundation’s FJ McGuigan young Investigator Prize (2002), the Troland Award in Experimental Psychology from the National Academy of Sciences (2001), and the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology in the area of Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience (1998/1999).

Research

Luck’s work at the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center found evidence for the concern that the lack of omega-3 fatty acids in many commercial infant formulas at the time affects the electrophysiological responses of the retina and the organism’s corresponding visual acuity.
Luck’s subsequent research has been, generally, less applied. In graduate school, Luck studied when and where attention acts on mental processing. Using ERP recordings from his human subjects as they completed psychophysical tasks, Luck demonstrated that under some circumstances, attention influences early, sensory processing. He continued researching this topic during his time in Bob Desimone’s laboratory, this time by recording the electrical activity of individual neurons in monkey visual cortex during visual attention tasks. He found that attention enhanced neural activity in extrastriate visual cortex, compared to activity for ignored stimuli.
A good deal of Luck’s research focuses on the visual search task. In this task, participants have to find a target object in an array of distractor objects. He discovered that there is a particular ERP signature corresponding to the focusing of attention on a target that also helps suppress the activation of competitors. His Ambiguity Resolution Theory of Visual Attention attempts to link behavioral and electrophysiological recordings of attentional processes in humans and monkeys.
Kim Shapiro, Luck’s graduate student named Ed Vogel, and he would also use the ERP technique to study the attentional blink, in which participants fail to detect the second of two targets in a rapid stream of stimuli, provided that they’re presented at a certain lag. Their experiments helped determine that participants are unable to report seeing the target because of a working memory failure, despite having fully identified it. Luck’s research supports the existence of multiple, partially-independent subsystems of attention, operating at different stages of processing. Luck, Vogel, and Geoff Woodman, another graduate student, went on to study the capacity of visual working memory (about three or four items defined by simple features or combinations of features).

References

Luck, S. J., & Vogel, E. K. (1997). The capacity of visual working memory for features and conjunctions. Nature, 390, 279–281.
Woodman, G. F., Vogel, E. K., & Luck, S. J. (2001). Visual search remains efficient when visual working memory is full. Psychological Science, 12,219–224.
Zhang, W., & Luck, S. J. (2008). Discrete fixed-resolution representations in visual working memory. Nature, 453, 233–235.

Martha Farah

Personal history

Martha Farah earned her Bachelor’s degree in Metallurgy and Material Science, as well as Philosophy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1977 before pursuing her Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from Harvard University, which she received in 1983. Her postdoctoral studies were carried out between 1983 and 1985 at MIT and Boston University School of Medicine, where she was trained in neuropsychology. Farah’s first academic appointment was at Carnegie Mellon University, beginning in 1985 and culminating with her promotion to full Professor of Psychology by the time she transitioned to the University of Pennsylvania in 1992.
Currently Farah holds numerous positions at Penn, including being the Walter H. Annenberg Professor in Natural Sciences, Professor of Psychology, Adjunct Professor of Neurology. Additionally, she served as the Director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience from 1999 to 2010 and is now Director of the Center for Neuroscience & Society. In 2008, she received the William James Fellow lifetime achievement award from the Association for Psychological Science. In 2010 she became a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2013 she received a Science Educator Award from the Society for Neuroscience.

Research

Farah’s early research was largely based on her work with neuropsychological patients, examining their specific deficits in the areas of vision, memory, and executive control and relating that back to the underlying brain damage. During this time, she made numerous dissociations between patient groups, such as visual agnosics, who have difficulty identifying objects visually, while their spatial abilities are largely intact.
Her book, Visual Agnosia: Disorders of Object Recognition and What They Tell Us about Normal Vision, remains an important resource in the domain to this day. Additionally, Farah has worked with patients who have profound difficulties recognizing faces, a condition called prosopagnosia, and individuals who tend to neglect one half of the visual field, even though their visual system is in working order. Moreover, she has helped identify the brain region that supports visual imagery—namely the posterior left hemisphere.
Noticing that brain-damaged patients often have selective deficits for living things, rather than nonliving objects, Farah and McClelland (1991) developed a sensory-functional theory of semantic memory, in which objects are categorized in terms of their visual or functional properties. This theory further holds that because living things are primarily distinguished based upon their perceptual, rather than functional, properties, and because there are thought to be more visual units in the semantic system, they are more likely to be damaged, resulting in poorer performance for living objects.
Farah has used modern neuroimaging techniques to examine the neural bases of the cognitive abilities in normal adults with great success; however, in a recent shift, she has turned the primary focus of her attention to neuroethics (i.e., the ethical issues that have arisen during the development of the neuroscience of cognition and emotion) and how socioeconomic factors affect brain development. Additionally, she and her collaborators have been studying the ability to regulate mood and cognition and to engage in decision making.

References

Farah, M. J. (1994). Neuropsychological inference with an interactive brain: A critique of the ‘locality assumption’. Behavioral & Brain Sciences, 17, 43–61.
Farah, M. J., Wilson, K. D., Drain, M., & Tanaka, J. N. (1998). What is ‘special’ about face perception? Psychological Review, 105, 482–498.
Farah, M. J., & Aguirre, G. K. (1999). Imaging visual recognition: PET and fMRI studies of functional anatomy of human visual recognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 3, 179–186.
Farah, M. J. (2002). Emerging ethical issues in neuroscience. Nature Neuroscience, 5, 1123–1129.

Research activity: the phonological loop

Imagine this scenario: You are out with friends one evening and you meet an individual that you like. At the end of the evening they give you their phone number and ask you to ring them the next day, and then disappear into the night.

You’ve forgotten your phone and you don’t have a pen or paper; your friends have wandered off and you’re stuck. What do you do? Your only option is to try to remember the number.

07999 11674

What do you do? What will help you remember?

You’ve probably guessed that the best way to attempt to remember the number until you get home and can write it down is by rehearsal (or repeating it again and again). This will greatly increase your chances of remembering it and meeting this individual again.

When rehearsing the number you are using your phonological loop. This is basically a form of verbal short-term memory, but it also helps information to be stored in our permanent memory store of long-term memory.

Susan E. Gathercole

Personal history

Susan Gathercole was born on August 12, 1958 in Macclesfield, England. She received her honors undergraduate psychology degree at the University of York in 1979 before continuing her studies at City University, where she would receive her Ph.D. for work on short-term memory in 1983. She took a postdoctoral position at the University of Oxford between 1982 and 1984, while she investigated selective attention. In 1984, Gathercole began a 4-year period in which she was a Research Scientist at the MRC Applied Psychology Unit at Cambridge University, facilitating her study of short-term memory and language learning in children.
From there, she moved to Lancaster University in 1988 as a lecturer before becoming a Reader in Psychology at the University of Bristol in 1993, and a professor 2 years later. In 2001, Susan made another move to the University of Durham, where she remained until 2006. She currently is the Head of Psychology at the University of York and is a part of the core staff of the Centre for Working Memory and Learning, along with Alan Baddeley, Graham Hitch, and Tracy Alloway.
Gathercole is a Chartered Psychologist of the British Psychological Society and is the founding editor, with Martin Conway, of the journal Memory. In 1989, Gathercole received the Spearman Medal for Outstanding Early Career Research, which was followed by the President’s Award for Distinguished Contribution to Psychological Knowledge in 2007.

Research

Gathercole has been researching the cognitive processes underlying short-term and working memory, with an eye toward building an understanding of how these two memory systems support language learning and reading during childhood development. She has incorporated eye-tracking technology in her research to study the binocular coordination of eye movements during reading.
Her interest in cognitive plasticity has led her to develop a screening and educational intervention aimed at improving the learning outcomes of children with poor working memory, as well as to other methods of assessing memory and cognitive functioning. In addition to studying healthy participants, Gathercole has worked with special patient populations, for example children with Specific Learning Impairment or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, to assess how their memory and executive functions overlap with those of their peers.

References

Joseph, H., Liversedge, S. P., Blythe, H., White, S., Gathercole, S. E., & Rayner, K. (2008). Children’s and adults’ processing of anomaly and plausibility during reading: Evidence from eye movements. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 61, 708–723.
Archibald, L. M., & Gathercole, S. E. (2007). Nonword repetition in specific language impairment: More than a phonological short-term memory deficit. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 14,919–924.
Alloway, T. P., & Gathercole, S. E. (2006). Working memory in neurodevelopmental conditions. Hove, UK: Psychology Press.
Gathercole, S. E. (1999). Cognitive approaches to the development of short-term memory. Trends in Cognitive Science, 3, 410–418.

Nelson Cowan

Personal history

Nelson Cowan was born March 7, 1951 in Washington, DC and grew up in Wheaton, Maryland. He received his Bachelor’s in 1973 at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, with an independent major in neurosciences - and a Ph.D. in psychology in 1980 at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. After a postdoctoral fellowship at New York University, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), Cowan’s first academic position was at the University of Massachusetts. While there, he was awarded an NIH New Investigator Research Award for research on the development of working memory in children and has since received NIH funding for similar projects through the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD).
In 1985, he moved to the University of Missouri as an assistant professor. He is now Curators’ Professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences. At the university, he has also won the Chancellor’s Award for Outstanding Faculty Research and Creative Activity in the Behavioral and Social Sciences (1998) and the Golden Chalk Award for graduate teaching and education (1999). He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the American Psychological Society, and has served as Associate Editor of three journals. In 2002, he was awarded an honorary doctorate at the University of Helsinki, Finland, and in 2007 he was elected a member of the Society of Experimental Psychologists. He is serving a term as a member of the Governing Board of the Psychonomic Society (2006–2011) and is President of the Experimental Psychology division (Division 3) of the American Psychological Association (2008–2009).

Research

Working memory, broadly defined, is the small amount of information maintained in an especially accessible state to carry out cognitive tasks ranging widely from language comprehension to problem solving.
Early on, Nelson studied aspects of working memory in 6-week-old infants using a procedure in which they sucked on a pacifier to make a stream of vowel sounds change, which is more interesting than the stream staying the same if the changes can be perceived. The sucking rates indicated that infants can use about a half second of uninterrupted silent time to perceive each sound, whereas studies suggest that adults can use only about a quarter second. This suggests that a short-lived, vivid acoustic memory lingers longer in infants than in adults and may compensate for infants’ slower perceptual process. Once the sounds are perceived, a second, longer phase of acoustic memory retains some of the sound properties for a number of seconds.
Nelson and his colleagues, in later work at Missouri, showed that this second phase lasts longer in older children and adults than in first- or second-grade children. They did this by presenting unattended sounds as the children carried out a silent picture-name-rhyming game on the computer. Occasionally, the game would be interrupted by a quiz question on the identities of speech sounds that had been presented some seconds ago. Younger children lost much more of the information about the most recent sound across a period of 5 seconds.
Working memory in young children differs from that in adults in several other ways. One is the use of covert verbal rehearsal of lists to be recalled (saying words to oneself). In studies in which adults are prevented from rehearsing (by having to recite a single word, e.g., “the, the, the…”) it has been found that working memory in adults resembles the pattern ordinarily found in young children.
In several theoretical reviews, Nelson made proposals about the nature of the processing system differing from most prior proposals. The embedded process model resulted. The model provides definitions for some important processes that differ from the ones commonly used. Working memory is seen as the combination of the temporarily activated elements of long-term memory, which are not limited in capacity, and representations of just a few objects in a more integrated and analyzed form in the focus of attention, which includes new links between activated elements. Selective attention is seen as the boosting of relevant activation rather than as the exclusion of irrelevant activation, and it exerts some control of the contents of the focus of attention.
Nelson’s recent work provides an estimation of the capacity of the focus of attention or the central portion of working memory. Studies in which there is information about how items are grouped together indicate that this central working memory capacity is typically limited to three or four groups or unconnected items in ordinary young adults. The number is related to intelligence measures, and it is smaller in children or older adults. It represents items from all modalities and is supplemented by modality-specific sources of memory such as acoustic or visual memory. Individuals with good central capacity tend to be the same ones who can ignore irrelevant information and focus on relevant information.

References

Cowan, N. (2001). The magical number 4 in short-term memory: A reconsideration of mental storage capacity. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24, 87–185.
Cowan, N. (2005). Working memory capacity. Hove, UK: Psychology Press.
Saults, J. S., & Cowan, N. (2007). A central capacity limit to the simultaneous storage of visual and auditory arrays in working memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 136, 663–684.
Cowan, N., & Morey, C. C. (2007). How can dual-task working memory retention limits be investigated? Psychological Science, 18, 686–688.
Chen, Z., & Cowan, N. (2009). Core verbal working memory capacity: The limit in words retained without covert articulation. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.

Randall “Randy” W. Engle

Personal history

Randy Engle remembers the first time he heard the word “psychology.” He was sitting in a freshmen orientation course and the instructor was going around the room having the students tell the group some things about themselves, including their major. A guy Engle had gone to high school with said he was majoring in something called psychology. Engle was the first one on either side of his family to go to college—the first high school graduate on one side. He had little or no idea what college was about. Just going to college was a very big deal in his family. He had great concern as to whether he even belonged there. Now, here was someone majoring in something that he had never heard of. He recalled thinking that he needed to take a course in psychology as soon as he had the opportunity.
At the beginning of his sophomore year he took Leslie Fisher’s Introductory Psychology and almost immediately fell in love with every chapter of Floyd Ruch’s book. To this day, he believes it is the only textbook that he has read cover-to-cover before the course was half over.
He went to West Virginia State College because it was the only school he could afford to attend, but it was one of the transforming experiences of his life. State was a public all-black college prior to 1954. As a consequence, most of his faculty were outstanding scholars who could not get jobs at top universities. One of his psychology professors was a marvelously well-read scholar named Herman G. Canady, a 1929 Ph.D. from Northwestern and one of the first black ABEPs. He worked his way through graduate school as a butler. Engle had a Harvard graduate teach his math courses, a Yale graduate as a drama teacher, and his French teacher was a black female who received her Ph.D. from the Sorbonne. These were impressive people, particularly to a self-described “hillbilly kid” with no idea why you would ever have two forks beside your plate.
Engle graduated with nearly as many hours in zoology and in math as he had in psychology, so it was inevitable that he gravitate to experimental psychology. He applied to only three graduate schools and was very fortunate to be admitted to Ohio State to work with D.D. Wickens (father of psychologists Tom and Chris Wickens). Wickens was a wonderful mentor and was exceedingly patient with a student that wanted to do everything but did not focus on anything long enough to do it well.
The job market was very tough in 1972 and Engle was lucky to land a job at King College in Tennessee. His 2 years there, with 10 classes per year, forged Engle into an outstanding teacher. Fortunately, two of his classes each year were senior research seminars and he used them to conduct experiments. His only equipment was a tape recorder and slide projector, so he started research on modality effects in short-term memory. At the end of 2 years, he had two publications, enough to land a job at the University of South Carolina, where he spent the next 21 years.
In 1995 he accepted an invitation to join the faculty at Georgia Tech where he is now Professor of Psychology.
During his career, he has won the Mortar Board Excellence in Teaching Award twice, once in 1988 and again in1994, as well as the Ace Teacher Award in 1991, the Amoco Award for University Teacher of the Year in 1993, and was a nominee for South Carolina Governor’s Professor of the Year in 1993 and 1994. Engle is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, as well as the Association for Psychological Science. In 2013 the American Psychological Association (Experimental division) presented him with the divisions first lifetime achievement award.

Research

Engle’s Attention and Working Memory Lab focuses on the individual and developmental differences in working memory capacity and what those differences reveal about the underlying causes. Engle, Kane, and Tuholski proposed that working memory capacity reflects the ability to control attention. Thus, it reflects a part of general fluid intelligence. Engle has tied individual differences in working memory capacity to genetically-determined differences in the level of dopamine and other neurotransmitters in the frontal lobes. He also has data to suggest that individual differences in working memory capacity are partially due to differences in the ability to use retrieval cues to define the search space in memory.

References

Unsworth, N., & Engle, R. W. (2008). Speed and accuracy of accessing information in working memory: An individual differences investigation of focus switching. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 34, 616–630.
Heitz, R. P., & Engle, R. W. (2007). Focusing the spotlight: Individual differences in visual attention control. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 136, 217–240.
Unsworth, N., & Engle, R. W. (2007). On the division of short-term and working memory: An examination of simple and complex spans and their relations to higher-order abilities. Psychological Bulletin, 133, 1038–1066.
Engle, R. W., & Kane, M. J. (2004). Executive Attention, Working Memory Capacity, and a Two-Factor Theory of Cognitive Control. In B. Ross (Ed.), The psychology of learning and motivation (Vol. 44, pp. 145–199). New York: Academic Press.
Engle, R. W. (2002). Working memory capacity as executive attention. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 11, 19–23.
Engle, R. W., Kane, M. J., & Tuholski, S. W. (1999). Individual differences in working memory capacity and what they tell us about controlled attention, general fluid intelligence and functions of the prefrontal cortex. In A. Miyake and P. Shah (Eds.), Models of working memory: Mechanisms of active maintenance and executive control (pp.102–134). London: Cambridge Press.

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov

Personal history

Pavlov was born on September 14, 1849 in Ryazan, Russia. Initially, following in the footsteps of his father, the village priest, he attended Ryazan’s church school and subsequently entered the Ryazan Ecclesiastical Seminary.
Pavlov changed directions after being exposed to the work of I.M. Sechenov, the father of Russian physiology, dropping out of the seminary and enrolling at the University of Saint Petersburg to pursue his Ph.D. in the natural sciences in 1870. During his study of physiology, he published a celebrated article with a fellow student about pancreatic nerves, for which they earned gold medal honors at the university. Although he received his research degree in 1875, Pavlov chose to continue his studies at the Academy of Medical Surgery in St. Petersburg where he would eventually earn his M.D. and another gold medal, graduating in 1879. As the Director of the Physiological Laboratory in S.P. Botkin’s clinic, as well as a recipient of a competitive fellowship at the Academy, Pavlov finished his research and presented his doctoral thesis, The Centrifugal Nerves of the Heart.
Beginning a 45-year stint as the Director of the Department of Physiology at the Institute of Experimental Medicine in 1890, Pavlov helped catapult the Institute to prominence. Pavlov simultaneously accepted the post of Professor of Pharmacology at the Military Medical Academy and, in 1895, was appointed to the Chair of Physiology, which he held until 1925. Pavlov’s research, largely conducted at the Institute of Experimental Medicine, which Pavlov directed until his death, formed the basis for a series of lectures in 1895, which were published 2 years later in a collection called Lectures on the Function of the Principal Digestive Glands.
In 1881, Pavlov married a teacher and friend of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, named Seraphima Vasilievna Karchevskaya. She would suffer a miscarriage (rumored to be due to her constant dashing about to keep up with her fast-moving husband) before giving birth to four sons (one of which died suddenly in childhood) and a daughter. Initially, the couple was strained by Pavlov’s limited resources, which forced the two to live apart for awhile, but Pavlov always felt that he owed much to Seraphima’s undying devotion to him and his work.
Elected a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1901, 3 years before he won a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Pavlov would go on to be elected Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1907. In 1915 he was awarded the Order of the Legion of Honor after having received an honorary doctorate at Cambridge University. His accomplishments and contributions to the world of science were publicly celebrated by Lenin in a special government decree, signed in 1921. Despite the special privileges offered by the Soviet government, Pavlov was an outspoken opponent of Communism until the last 2 years of his life when he had a change of heart.
On February 27, 1936, Pavlov died in the city of Leningrad, a process that Pavlov asked one of his students to document so to illuminate the subjective experience of death and dying. His laboratory in St. Petersburg remains a carefully preserved museum.

Research

Pavlov’s groundbreaking work on digestion led to his Nobel Prize in 1904. Specifically, he investigated the importance of digestive organs by surgically removing selected segments from animals and implanting tubes into organs, allowing their contents to be examined (a method developed by his colleague, D.D. Glinskii).
Dividing his nonhuman experimental subjects—mainly dogs—into the four temperament types proposed under Hippocratic theory, namely phlegmatic, choleric, sanguine, and melancholic, Pavlov concluded that all groups emit the same types of responses in the face of stressful stimuli, but go through those responses at different times because their nervous systems are constructed differently. Sanguine and phlegmatic beings, with their strong and relatively balanced nervous system, were shown to be not generally excitable or inhibited. As such, they require higher levels of stress before reaching their breaking point and shutting down (called transmarginal inhibition). Interestingly, those animals with a low stress tolerance were more likely to forget conditioned responses sooner than dogs that were more calm and imperturbable. It is Pavlov’s work on conditional (or conditioned) reflexes for which he is best known.
Pavlov used a fistula, implanted into the salivary glands of dogs, in order to analyze the composition of saliva. He noticed that his dogs began to salivate when they saw the experimenters’ lab coats, even before they actually received the food powder, in what he called a “psychic secretion.” This led him to spend decades trying to characterize under what circumstances the dogs learned to form (and extinguish) conditioned reflexes, such as salivation. While Pavlov’s dogs were often cued to salivate with bells, Pavlov also employed whistles, metronomes, and tuning forks.
At the 14th International Medical Congress in Madrid in 1903, Pavlov presented a paper suggesting that the conditioned reflex is an elementary psychological and physiological phenomenon, responsible for everything from basic reflexes to the complex ways in which humans come to react to their environments. Additionally, Pavlov and his students came to show that the cerebral cortex gave rise to these conditioned reflexes. Toward the end of his life, Pavlov busied himself by attempting to link the development of various neuroses to conditioning.
It’s important to note that Edward Twitmeyer, a Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States, actually reported conditioning in humans a couple of years before Pavlov announced his similar findings while accepting his Nobel. Unfortunately for the relatively unknown Twitmeyer, his dissertation work and subsequent talk at the American Psychological Association Conference in 1904 have been obscured by the notoriety given to Pavlov. Even Pavlov’s work was slow to drive research in the United States, failing to take off until John B. Watson popularized the idea of conditioning, and English translations of Pavlov’s writings became available in 1927.

References

Pavlov, I. P. (1927). Conditioned reflexes. London: Oxford UP.
Pavlov, I. P. (1928). Lectures on conditioned reflexes: Twenty-five years of objective study of the higher nervous ability (behavior) of animals. New York: International Publishers.
Pavlov, I. P. (1957). Experimental psychology and other essays. New York: Philosophical Library.

Daniel L. Schacter

Personal history

Born on June 17, 1952 in Brooklyn, New York, Daniel Schacter moved to the Westchester suburbs with his younger brother and sister, Ken and Jane, where he showed an affinity for baseball, golf, and jazz music. A high school class in psychology guided him to further study in psychology. At the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Schacter focused on clinical and abnormal psychology, as well as the history of the field, eventually receiving his Bachelor’s degree in 1974. In his senior year, Schacter was introduced to experimental psychology, working in Edward Kelly’s psychophysiological laboratory at Duke University.
Before moving to Canada to attend the University of Toronto, where he earned his Master’s degree in 1977, he joined Herbert Crovitz’s perception and memory laboratory at the Durham Veterans Administration Hospital. There he studied and published findings on patients with organic memory disorders, a topic that would become a cornerstone of his future research. After spending a year at Oxford University as a visiting researcher in the department of psychology, Schacter returned to the University of Toronto to pursue his Ph.D. in psychology, under the supervision of Endel Tulving.
He received his Ph.D. in 1981 and quickly became a Research Associate and Assistant professor in the Unit for Memory Disorders and the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto, along with Tulving and Morris Moscovitch. After 6 years there, he became an Associate Professor of psychology at the University of Arizona, where he remained until 1991, then being promoted to a full professor in the Department of Psychology and Cognitive Sciences Program in 1989, the same year he was awarded the Arthur Benton Award from the International Neuropsychological Society.
Schacter moved to Harvard University in 1991, where he is currently the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Psychology, acclaimed for his accessible and engaging writing by the New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year (1996, 2001), the Library Journal Best Science and Technology Books of the Year (1996), Amazon.com’s Best Books (2001), and the American Psychological Association’s William James Book Award (1997, 2003). Between the years of 1995 and 2005, he served as department chair. In addition to being a highly respected (and most frequently cited researcher in psychology between the years of 1986 and 1990, according to the Institute for Scientific Information in 1992) memory researcher and prolific author, Schacter has earned praise for his teaching, receiving the Harvard-Radcliffe Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize in 1997.
He has published over 350 articles and book chapters and is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology in Human Learning and Cognition. Schacter is married to Susan McGlynn, with whom he is raising their two daughters, Hannah and Emily.

Research

Schacter’s Ph.D. work was heavily influenced by his mentor’s investigations of encoding specificity, retrieval processes, and the newly proposed distinction between episodic and semantic memory. His Ph.D. thesis delved into the feeling of knowing, though his fascination with the life and work of German biologist Richard Semon led him to eventually pen a book, Stranger Behind the Engram (later re-released in 2001 under the title, Forgotten Ideas, Neglected Pioneers: Richard Semon and the Story of Memory), about the man that coined the word “engram” and the implications of his theories of memory.
His time at the Unit for Memory Disorders provided him the opportunity to study the dissociations between explicit and implicit memory revealed by patients suffering from organic amnesia, who often have intact implicit memory. In 1985, Schacter and his colleague Peter Graf formally introduced the explicit-implicit distinction to the literature. Working with Elizabeth Glisky, Schacter attempted to develop means to help remediate memory disorders.
In 2001, Schacter delineated The Seven Sins of Memory, dividing them into the sins of omission (transience, or the decreasing accessibility of memory over time; absent-mindedness; and blocking, or the temporary inaccessibility of stored information) and sins of commission (suggestibility, or the incorporation of misinformation due to leading questions; bias, or distortions reflecting current knowledge and beliefs; persistence, or unwanted recollective intrusions that people are unable to forget; and misattribution, or being unable to appropriately attribute a piece of information to its appropriate source). Although these sins aren’t always flaws, he described them as side-effects of the memory machinery upon which we rely.
Adding to Schacter’s previous work with amnesic patients, he is advancing the neuroimaging of memory with fMRI and PET to better understand the neural substrates of correct and false memory, how memory is used to imagine future events, and age-related memory effects.

References

Schacter, D. L. (1982). Stranger behind the engram: Theories of memory and the psychology of science. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Schacter, D. L. (1987). Implicit memory: History and current status. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 13, 501–518.
Sherry, D. F., & Schacter, D. L. (1987). The evolution of multiple memory systems. Psychological Review, 94, 439–454.
Schacter, D. L., Reiman, E., Uecker, A., Polster, M. R., Yun, L. S., & Cooper, L. (1995). Brain regions associated with retrieval of structurally coherent visual information. Nature, 376, 587–590.
Schacter, D. L., Alpert, N. M., Savage, C. R., Rauch, S. L., & Albert, M. S. (1996). Conscious recollection and the human hippocampal formation: Evidence from positron emission tomography. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 93, 321–325.
Schacter, D. L. (1996). Searching for memory: The brain, the mind, and the past. New York: Basic Books.
Schacter, D. L. (2001). The seven sins of memory: How the mind forgets and remembers. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin.
Slotnick, S. D., & Schacter, D. L. (2004). A sensory signature that distinguishes true from false memories. Nature Neuroscience, 7, 664–672.
Dobbins, I. G., Schnyer, D. M., Verfaellie, M., & Schacter, D. L. (2004). Cortical activity reductions during repetition priming can result from rapid response learning. Nature, 428, 316–319.

Eric R. Kandel

Personal history

Born on November 7, 1929 in Vienna, Austria into a middle-class Jewish family, Kandel’s life and research was heavily influenced by his early childhood experiences. When he was only 8 years old, Nazi Germany annexed Austria in March 1938, forcing his family to leave the country in the face of Jewish persecution. A year later, Eric and his older sibling, Ludwig, fled to Brooklyn, where they stayed with their uncle until their parents later made it to the United States.
Trained in Judaic studies by his grandfather, Kandel enrolled in the Yeshivah of Flatbrush and then Erasmus Hall High School where he became sports editor of his school newspaper, played soccer, and was co-captain of his track team. He majored in twentieth-century European history and literature at Harvard University, where he presented his honors dissertation entitled, The Attitude Toward National Socialism of Three German Writers: Carl Zuckmayer, Hans Carossa, and Ernst Jünger. During his undergraduate career—and thanks largely to his relationship with Anna Kris, a daughter of Freudian psychoanalysts—Kandel also became interested in Freudian analysis. Then matriculating at the New York University Medical School in 1952, Kandel initially was intent on becoming a psychoanalyst, but decided to study the biology of memory after taking a course on neurophysiology.
Unable to find a laboratory meeting his interests at NYU, he took an elective period at Columbia University, working with neurobiologist Harry Grundfest. It was at Columbia that Kandel met Denise Brystryn, a French Ph.D. student in medical sociology, whom he would later marry when he gradated with his M.D. in 1956. He interned at Montefiore Hospital while waiting for his wife to graduate before moving to the Laboratory of Neurophysiology at the National Institutes of Health and later a residency in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. In 1962, Kandel visited Paris where Ladislav Tauc introduced him to the Aplysia californica, which would become the primary subject of much of Kandel’s later work.
After accepting the post of staff psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School in 1964, Kandel began a 9-year tenure in the Departments of Physiology and Psychiatry at New York University in 1965. Since 1974, Kandel has been a professor in the Department of Physiology and Psychiatry and the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at Columbia University. During this time, he helped establish the Howard Hughes Medical Research Institute at Columbia, with its mission to explore molecular neural science, where he is currently senior investigator.
In addition to his Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the neural basis of memory storage, awarded in 2000, Kandel has won: the National Medal of Science and a Gold Medal for Scientific Merit, both in 1988; the Charles A. Dana Award for Pioneering Achievement in Health and the Gerard Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Neuroscience, both in 1997; Israel’s Wolf Prize in 1999; and the 2006 Los Angeles Times Book Award for Science and Technology for In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind—to name just a few.

Research

While in medical school, Kandel began working with Harry Grundfest at Columbia University, attempting to record the electrical activity of hippocampal neurons in mammals. This proved a difficult challenge, given the synaptic density of the mammalian brain. Thus, after graduating from medical school, Kandel endeavored to use microelectrodes to obtain intracellular recording of much simpler marine life, such as crayfish. At the National Institutes of Health, he and Alden Spencer managed to record a combination of spontaneous action potentials and recurrent inhibition in hippocampal neurons.
Determined to better understand how modifications in the strength of synaptic connections between neurons might be the basis of Hebbian learning but again frustrated with the inherent complexity of mammalian neural structure, Kandel set about forming an animal model of simple learning processes by studying ganglia from the sea slug, Aplysia. His choice to research an invertebrate became the subject of ridicule by his colleagues who felt that mammalian memory processes could not be understood without studying mammals directly. However, Kandel’s risk eventually paid off. By repeatedly applying an electrical stimulation to two separate ganglion cells, representing the conditioned and unconditioned stimuli in a classical conditioning paradigm, he witnessed gradual changes in the synaptic activity between them that could then be extinguished.
Thus, Kandel had found evidence that short-term memories are formed through the modulation of existing synapses. He then went on to learn that the addition of phosphate groups were responsible for these changes.
Kandel’s work with the Aplysia’s gill-withdrawal reflex, in which the gill tissue recoils in the face of danger, was shown to be influenced both by habituation (in which synaptic connections were lost) and sensitization (in which new connections were made). In the 1990s Kandel extended his findings for short-term and long-term implicit memories in the fear response of mice. This painstaking research helped cement Kandel’s discovery that long-term memories are maintained through the activation of certain genes promoting the synthesis of proteins that create new synaptic connections, and earned him a share of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
More recently he has been studying the episodic (spatial) memory capabilities of genetically modified mice in order to characterize the neural processes responsible for memory impairments related to dementia and other illnesses. This research not only revealed the importance of inhibition, in addition to activation, for effective memory storage, but also continues to yield promising targets for new drugs aimed at helping those afflicted with memory disorders.

References

Kandel, E. R., Schwartz, J., & Jessel, T. (1991). Principles of neural science. New York: Elsevier.
Squire, L. R., & Kandel. E. R. (1999). Memory: From mind to molecules. New York: W. H. Freeman & Co.
Kandel, E. R. (2006). In search of memory: The emergence of a new science of mind. New York: W. W. Norton.

Research activity: encoding, processing, and recall

Read the following list of words out loud, then look away and recall as many as you can in approximately two minutes.

List 1

• Love
• Danger
• Merit
• Turmoil
• Limit
• Possession
• Flash
• Remit
• Purpose
• Stamina
• Creation
• Saturate

Note down how many you get correct.
Do the same for lists 2, 3, and 4

List 2

• Cat
• Pipe
• Road
• Carrot
• Doll
• Pencil
• Stool
• Glass
• Ribbon
• Bath
• Branch
• Cloud

List 3

• Saw
• Nail
• Drill
• Hammer
• Screwdriver
• Pliers
• Sander
• Spanner
• Tapemeasure
• Workbench
• Ratchet
• Bolt    

List 4

• Dog
• Duck
• Dinosaur
• Dragonfly
• Dolphin
• Deer
• Donkey
• Dodo
• Damselfly
• Dingo
• Dormouse
• Dove

When you look at your total recalled for each list, hopefully you should see that it has gradually increased as you’ve progressed through the lists. Look back at the words in the lists. What does this increase in recall tell you about the way in which you encode words?

Frederic Charles Bartlett

Personal history

Born on 20th October, 1886 in the county of Gloucestershire, South West England, Bartlett received his Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy in 1909 from the University of London.
While holding the post of tutor at Cambridge University, Bartlett was awarded a fellowship at St. John’s College in 1913 and earned a first-class degree in moral sciences the next year. Appointed as relief director of Cambridge’s experimental psychology laboratory in 1915, he rose to the rank of reader when he took over the Cambridge laboratory permanently in 1922.
In 1924, Bartlett, now married to Emily Mary Smith, a research collaborator, initiated a 24-year stint as editor of the British Journal of Psychology. In 1933, then the First Professor of Experimental Psychology at Cambridge, Bartlett was made a fellow of the Royal Society the same year his seminal work, Remembering, was published.
Later becoming the director of the Applied Psychology Unit at Cambridge, Bartlett’s prominence in British society and services to the Royal Air Force was acknowledged with an appointment to the order of Commanders of the British Empire (1941), before being knighted in 1948. He died on September 30, 1969.

Research

Bartlett’s early work centered on the psychophysics of sound detection—a topic he studied with his wife. However, the influence of Cambridge cultural and physical anthropologist W.H.R. Rivers sparked Bartlett’s interest in individual differences and social conventions that help determine memory recall and perceptual interpretation.
Rejecting the common practice of studying nonsense syllables, Bartlett commonly employed the method of repeated reproduction (having a single participant repeatedly reproduce a studied story/picture over an extended time span) and the method of serial reproduction (having one participant pass along the story to another participant, who then passes it along to a third participant, etc.) of naturalistic stimuli, such as the Native American folk tale, The War of the Ghosts. Through his research, Bartlett found that memories are reconstructed and conventionalized, with schema helping to fill in the missing details. Thus, memories are not static, but pieces of larger, unconscious mental structures called schemata—an idea he developed, in part due to his extended interactions with Henry Head, a neurologist.
Bartlett’s later career was characterized by a stronger emphasis on applied work, though he had always been interested in this area, writing on the topic of personnel selection and war neuroses related to World War I in 1927. Although Bartlett’s work on schemata failed to fundamentally alter the nature of psychological research during his lifetime, Marvin Minksy’s later work helped revive interest in schemata within the fields of artificial intelligence and human memory, making Remembering the second most cited work in the field of human memory (White, 1983). Bartlett managed to play an indirect role in advancing what would become the information-processing approach to the study of cognition, having had the opportunity to work with Kenneth Craik and influencing Donald Broadbent’s later study at Cambridge University.

References

Bartlett, F. C. (1927). Psychology and the soldier. London: Cambridge University Press.
Bartlett, F. C. (1932; reprint 1964). Remembering: A study in experimental and social psychology. London: Cambridge University Press.
White, M. J. (1983). Prominent publications in cognitive psychology. Memory & Cognition, 11, 423–427.
Harris, A. D., & Zangwill, O. L. (1973). The writings of Sir Frederic Bartlett, C.B.E., F.R.S.: An annotated handlist. British Journal of Psychology, 64, 493–510.

Fergus “Gus” Craik

Personal history

Born on 17th April 1935 in Edinburgh, Scotland, Fergus Craik’s earliest career ambitions were to be a minister or carpenter. That all changed when he encountered the joys of science (especially biology) during high school. His academic motivation led him to enter medical school at the University of Edinburgh. However, the rote memorization necessary for his courses grew tiresome for Craik, who instead became intrigued by neurology. Thus, Craik switched his major to psychology, which was then a new field at Edinburgh.
Professor James Drever introduced Craik to some of the fundamentals of memory research, in assigning Donald Hebb’s The Organization of Behavior, and by the time Craik had to analyze data for his honors thesis, his interest in the subject had grown. One of the participants in his thesis study, which looked at task complexity’s effect on duration judgments, was named Anne—the woman he would eventually marry.
Craik left for the University of Liverpool in 1960 to pursue his Ph.D., after an advertising job fell through. Five years later, he earned his degree. Upon graduating, he accepted a position on the faculty of Birkbeck College at the University of London, where he stayed until 1971, when he was offered a position at the University of Toronto, where he had spent a previous year as visiting professor.
During his illustrious career at Toronto, he was named Editor of the Journal of Verbal Learning and Behavior (1980–1984), as well as a fellow of both the Canadian and American Psychological Associations and the Royal Society of Canada. In addition, he received the Guggenheim and Killam Research Fellowships in the 1980s, the William James Fellow Award from the American Psychological Society (1993), the Hebb Award of the Canadian Society for Brain, Behavior, and Cognitive Science (1998), and the Killam Prize for Science in 2000. Named a University Professor of Psychology in 1997, he also held the Glassman Chair of Neuropsychology from 1996 until he retired in 2000.
A conference was held in May of that year to celebrate his retirement. This gathering yielded a book called Perspectives on Human Memory and Cognitive Aging: Essays in Honor of Fergus Craik. Fergus, now semi-retired but still associated with the Rotman-Baycrest Institute and the psychology department at Toronto, and his wife have two grown children.

Research

Craik is best known for the Levels of Processing model he proposed, along with Robert Lockhart, in 1972. This model countered the longstanding notion that memories are processed in distinct stages for sensory, working, and long-term memories. Instead, Craik suggested that stimulus information is actively processed at multiple levels, in parallel. Moreover, the depth of the level of processing, in combination with the inherent properties of the stimulus, helps to determine the extent of subsequent memory performance. Craik has found that deep processing at encoding can enhance later memory performance by as much as 400%.
His affiliation with the Rotman Institute has allowed him to neuroimage the processes supporting the different levels of processing. From these studies using PET and fMRI, he’s discovered that deep semantic processing is associated with brain activity in the ventral areas of the left prefrontal cortex. Activity in the frontal lobe, which is associated with goal-directed behavior, tends to diminish in old age, in tandem with a decline in the elderly’s ability to self-initiate appropriate mental processing for engaging in successful prospective memory tasks in the laboratory.
Craik continues to investigate the ways in which some mnemonic abilities change (while others, such as item recognition, do not) as individuals age, and how people can learn to overcome the expected deficits. For instance, recognition tests provide external cues that help reinstate the original learning context and, thus, facilitate memory performance in the elderly. Other correlates of higher memory performance under study are continued cardiovascular activity and rigorous mental activities, such as puzzle-solving and lifelong bilingualism.
Attention is another area of cognition sensitive to changes in age. Craik and colleagues have divided the attention of participants from a variety of age groups, having them perform another task, in addition to a primary memory task, in order to study the differences in performance. Not only does recall of actual events vary by age, but the tendency to recall false memories increases with age. Craik endeavors to help mitigate these errors through the application of his research.

References

Luo, L. Craik, F .I. M. (2008). Aging and memory: A cognitive approach. Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, 56(6), 346–353.
Tulving, E., & Craik, F. I. M. (Eds.) (2000). The Oxford handbook of memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Craik, F. I. M., & Salthouse, T. A. (Eds.) (1999). The handbook of aging and cognition (2nd ed). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Craik, F. I. M., & Lockhart, R. S. (1972). Levels of processing: A framework for memory research. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 11, 671–684.

Faraneh Vargha-Khadem

Personal history

Faraneh Vargha-Khadem was born in Tehran, Iran and spent her early years there until the age of 13 when she came to the UK to learn English. She returned to Tehran when she was about 15 and obtained a post as a translator/administrator with a consulting engineering firm. Her role was to translate from Persian into English official contracts relating to offshore oil drilling. In 1967, after about 18 months in this setting, she left her homeland permanently to pursue a university education in Montreal, Canada. In 1970 she obtained a B.A. Honors degree from Concordia University (previously named Sir George Williams University).
Following a brief move to the US with her family, she registered at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst for graduate studies, but returned to Montreal to settle and to continue her graduate studies at McGill University while still maintaining her status at the University of Massachusetts (supported by a Canada Council Doctoral Fellowship).
Vargha-Khadem’s supervisor at McGill University was Professor Michael Corballis, and at the University of Massachusetts, it was Professor Daniel Jordan (now deceased). She completed all her graduate research and course work, including the well-known seminar series offered to graduate students by Donald O. Hebb, at McGill University but obtained her Masters and Doctorate degrees from the University of Massachusetts.
Her postdoctoral training was at the Montreal Children's Hospital, Faculty of Neurology and Neurosurgery at the Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University (supported by a Quebec Government Post Doctoral Fellowship for 2 years). In 1980 she obtained a grant from the Montreal Children's Hospital Research Institute, McGill University, to conduct a study on the consequences of focal lesions on speech and language in children. After completing this project, she moved with her family to London in 1982 and has resided there ever since.
Upon arrival in London, she joined the MRC Unit of Developmental Psychology headed by the late Dr Neil O'Connor. With his encouragement, she applied and obtained a project grant in 1983 from the MRC and joined as a lecturer the Department of Pediatrics at the Institute of Child Health/Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children. She was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 1988 as part of the newly created Neurosciences Unit at the Institute of Child Health, Reader, in 1995, and appointed Professor of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience in 2000.
In 1996, the Dean of the Institute of Child Health, the late Professor Roland Levinsky, created a separate unit under the title of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Unit (DCNU) and appointed Vargha-Khadem as its head, thereby giving recognition to this new field of research. The DCNU comprises an academic arm and a clinical arm with 35 staff members conducting clinical research on children with disease or injury to the brain.
Vargha-Khadem is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (since 2000), a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (since 1998), and has received several awards, including the IPSEN Jean Louis Signoret award for contributions to genetics of behavior (2006), and the Asian Women of Achievement Award for professional achievement (2003). She is a Board Member for United Nations Forum for Women—UNIFEM UK, and on the Executive Board of the charity Gender Justice for Women in Iraq. She is active in raising awareness on Human Rights issues, especially as they relate to the status of women and girls worldwide, and is working to provide access to education for Baha'i students in Iran who are denied this fundamental human right.
Vargha-Khadem is married and has three grown children and four grandchildren.

Research

Vargha-Khadem studies the cognitive and behavioral deficits of children with brain injuries. This work is aimed at understanding how neural systems develop under normal circumstances. By studying different patients, she has been able to document dissociations between episodic and semantic memory, recognition and recall, and familiarity and recollection.
Vargha-Khadem has been following a number of patients with amnesia resulting from hypoxic-ischaemic episodes in childhood that caused bilateral hippocampal damage. In contrast to their devastated episodic memory abilities, their semantic abilities remain largely intact, even when the amnesia-inducing episode occurred at birth. These recent findings have led to a new proposal regarding the functional organization of the medial temporal lobe, namely, that context-free semantic memory depends mainly on the subhippocampal cortices, which link the sensory association areas to the hippocampus, whereas the hippocampus itself, located at the top of the hierarchy, is essential only for the most complex form of memory, namely, for context-rich episodes.
Another area of interest to Vargha-Khadem is the development of executive control capabilities. Word fluency, a form of executive function that is seriously impaired after left prefrontal damage sustained in adulthood, is substantially spared after comparable congenital lesions. However, another form of executive function, namely card sorting, which is severely impaired after prefrontal lesions of either hemisphere in adults, is also impaired after either left or right congenital prefrontal lesions. The latter result is surprising in view of the considerable evidence in the literature indicating that the prefrontal cortex does not reach full functional maturity until late childhood or even adolescence. Her finding highlights the need to examine many different abilities within and across domains in order to understand how the cerebral system underlying each one evolves functionally.
She and her colleagues also research the effects of focal lesions on the organization and lateralization of function in the developing brain. She follows the children and maps out in what ways the young brain is capable of functionally reorganizing.
Moreover, she has been investigating the speech and language disorder related to the FOXP2 gene mutation. By studying three generations of a family afflicted with this form of oromotor dyspraxia, she and her collaborators have identified the phenotype resulting from this mutation, as well as its structural and functional neural correlates. 

References

Vargha-Khadem, F., Gadian, D. C., Watkins, K. E., Connelly, A., Van Paesschen, W., & Mishkin, M. (1997). Differential effects of early hippocampal pathology on episodic and semantic memory. Science, 277, 376–380.
Vargha-Khadem. F., Watkins, K., Alcock, K., Fletcher, P., & Passingham, R. (1995). Cognitive and praxic deficits in a large family with a genetically transmitted speech and language disorder. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 92, 930–933.
Liegeois, F., Baldeweg, T., Connelly, A., Gadian, D. G., Mishkin, M., & Vargha-Khadem, F. (2003). Functional MRI abnormalities during covert speech associated with FOXP2 gene mutation. Nature Neuroscience, 6(11), 1230–1237.
Vargha-Khadem, F., Carr, L. J., Isaacs, E., Brett, E., Adams, C., & Mishkin, M. (1997). Onset of speech after left hemispherectomy in a nine-year-old boy. Brain, 120, 159–182.

Research activity: semantic networks

Try creating your own personalized semantic network, just like in Figure 1. Simply start with an everyday object, say a toaster, and then work your way from the toaster with three or four semantic links; for example, toaster, kitchen, and silver. Then do the same for these semantic nodes. It is an interesting exercise and gives you some insight into the way that you personally store semantic information.

Endel Tulving

Personal history

The son of a judge living in Tartu, Estonia, Endel Tulving was born on May 26, 1927 and attended Hugo Treffner’s Gymnasium, where he developed his enthusiasm for sports, especially track and field. World War II drove the 17-year-old Tulving to Germany to finish schooling, beginning a separation from his parents that lasted 20 years. While Tulving was a stellar student, it was not until a year before graduating that he encountered a subject that truly interested him: psychology.
Prior to moving to Canada in 1949, Tulving spent time teaching, in addition to interpreting for the United States army and studying as a medical student at Heidelberg University for a single year. A year after his arrival, he married his wife, Ruth Mikkelsaar, and soon thereafter earned his B.A., which was immediately followed by a Master of Arts degree from the University of Toronto (1954) and his doctorate in experimental psychology at Harvard University (1957).
After Harvard, Tulving returned to what would become his primary academic home, the University of Toronto. Starting as a lecturer, he was appointed a University Professor in 1985, after having become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1979. During his illustrious career, Tulving spent time teaching at Yale University and won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1987, becoming a William James Fellow of the American Psychological Society in 1990. Two years later, he was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, later winning the Gairdner Foundation International Award for biology and medicine (2005), being made an Officer in the Order of Canada (2006), and being inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame (2007). Now an Emeritus professor at Toronto, Tulving continues to research at the Rotman Research Institute.

Research

Tulving started off as a vision researcher, but, lacking the expensive equipment required to conduct such research, he quickly ventured into the field of memory when he became a lecturer at the University of Toronto. He initially sought to investigate the subjective organization of memory by asking participants to learn words and recall them in any order they chose, dissecting memories into those that are accessible given the current retrieval cues and those that are stored in memory, and thus available, but are temporarily unreachable. This work led to his discovery of the encoding specificity principle: the more similar the cues available at retrieval are to the conditions present at encoding, the more effective the cues will be.
Furthering his efforts to catalog and understand the various types of human memory systems, Tulving famously proposed the distinction between episodic (“remembering,” a uniquely human ability, according to Tulving; however, this has been subsequently questioned) and semantic (“knowing”) memories in 1972, representing a shift away from the standard, unitary theories of long-term memory. Episodic memories, with their autonoetic—or self-knowing—quality, afford the ability to mentally travel in time to recollect prior events.
In addition to purely behavioral research, including his Remember/Know procedure (1985), which sought to dissociate episodic and semantic memories on a subjective level, Tulving studied the deficits associated with different groups of amnesic patients and used neuroimaging techniques. Data from functional imaging studies gave rise to Tulving’s HERA (Hemispheric Encoding and Retrieval Asymmetry) hypothesis, which posits that the encoding of episodic memories involves the left frontal lobe whereas their retrieval depends on right frontal areas.

References

Tulving, E., & Osler, S. (1968). Effectiveness of retrieval cues in memory for words. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 77,593–601.
Tulving, E. (1972). Episodic and semantic memory. In E. Tulving and W. Donaldson (Eds.), Organization of memory (pp. 381–403). New York: Academic Press.
Tulving, E., Kapur, S., Craik, F. I. M., Moscovitch, M., & Houle, S. (1994). Hemispheric encoding/retrieval asymmetry in episodic memory: Positron emission tomography findings. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 91, 2016–2020.
Tulving, E. (2002). Episodic memory: From mind to brain. Annual Review of Psychology, 53, 1–25.

Allan Collins

Personal history

Allan Collins’ broad interests, cutting across the fields of artificial intelligence, semantic memory, and education are readily apparent in his professional pedigree. After receiving his B.B.A. in accounting in 1959, Allan Collins went on to pursue his Master’s degree in communication sciences, and then his Ph.D. in psychology, all at the University of Michigan. Before graduating with his doctorate in 1970, Collins began a long run as a Senior Scientist at the BBN Corporation, becoming Principal Scientist at BBN Technologies in 1982 and remaining there until 2000. Simultaneously, he was a professor of education and social policy at Northwestern University from 1989 until he retired in 2005.
During this time, Collins has also been associated with Boston College, as a Research Professor in the school of education between 1998 and 2002, as well as at Harvard University, first as a visiting scholar between 2001 and 2005, and then as a visiting senior lecturer for a year, beginning in 2005. Between 1991 and 1994, Collins co-directed the Center for Technology in Education with Jan Hawkins, evaluating the use of technology in educational settings.
Collins, the first chair of the Cognitive Science Society, serving from 1979–1980 is also a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, a Guggenheim and Sloan Fellow, and was editor of the journal Cognitive Science between 1976 and 1980.

Research

Collins’ reaction time experiments, along with his colleague M.R. Quillian, at the BBN looked at how long it took individuals to make simple verification judgments about statements of fact. Their results yielded a model of semantic memory, for which Collins is most famous: The Collins & Quillian Semantic Network Model. In this model, the meanings of words are organized into a series of hierarchical networks, with the major concepts represented as nodes. Since information about the properties/features of different concepts is stored as high up the hierarchy as possible, redundancy is minimized. Thus, the model follows the rule of cognitive economy.
Problems with the model quickly became apparent, however. For instance, not all concepts are categorical and the time it took participants to verify statements was related not only to semantic distance, as Collins and Quillian suggested, but also was confounded with the frequency with which two words co-occur in language. Collins and Loftus responded to these criticisms in 1975 with a multidimensional spreading activation model that de-emphasized the hierarchical structure featured in the original model while emphasizing both the strength and distance that linked the nodes together. Not only did the new spreading activation model explain the typicality effect, it also predicted the phenomenon of semantic priming.
Much of Collins’ other work focuses on intelligent tutoring techniques, such as the SCHOLAR CAI system he developed with Jaime Carbonell and the WHY system. Collins has also been active in researching ways in which technology can be effectively utilized in academic and military training settings, with an eye for developing the ideal schools of the future and assessing their effectiveness.

References

Collins, A. M., & Quillian, M. R. (1969). Retrieval time from semantic memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 8(2), 240–248.
Collins, A. M., & Quillian, M. R. (1970). Does category size affect categorization time? Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 9(4), 432–438.
Collins, A. M., & Loftus, E. F. (1975). A spreading activation theory of semantic processing. Psychological Review, 82, 407–428.

Research activity: retrieval processes and mechanisms

1. Critically consider the similarities and differences between mood-dependent, context-dependent, and state-dependent retrieval processes and mechanisms. Drawing on your own experiences and evidence from this chapter, would these types of retrieval play different roles in recall and recognition memory?
2. Drawing on the principles of reconstructive memory and source monitoring, consider the ramifications of these phenomena for acquisition and retrieval of information in the legal, political, and educational sectors. You may find it useful to consider the types of information police, lawyers, politicians, and academics acquire on a daily basis, how this is used to inform policy, and how it is used to influence others. Can you devise any strategies that may safeguard against these effects?

Morris Moscovitch

Personal history

Morris Moscovitch, Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto, holds the Glassman Chair in Neuropsychology and Aging. Born in Bucharest, Romania, in 1945, he moved to Israel when he was 4 and to Canada at 7. He received his B.Sc. at McGill in 1966 while working on memory consolidation with Peter Milner. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania with Paul Rozin where he completed both his M.A. and Ph.D. in 1972 and began his work on human neuropsychology. His dissertation was on hemispheric specialization.
He moved to the University of Toronto, Erindale Campus, in 1971 and to the St. George Campus of the University in 2000. He was also: a post-doctoral fellow at the at the Montreal Neurological Institute from 1973 to 1974 where he worked with Brenda Milner; a visiting professor at the Hebrew University from 1978 to 1979 where he worked with Shlomo Bentin; at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Jerusalem (1985–1986) with Israel Nachshon; at the University of Arizona (1996, 1999–2000) with Lynn Nadel.
Publishing more than 200 papers, Moscovitch was elected a Fellow of Divisions 3 and 6 of APA, of AAAS, and of the Royal Society of Canada, and was honored for promoting neuropsychology in Israel. In 2007, he received the D.O. Hebb Award for lifetime contributions to research, which is awarded annually by the Brain, Behavior, and Cognitive Science Society of Canada. He was the 2008 recipient of the William James Award for lifetime contributions to experimental psychology by the American Psychological Society. In 2012 he was honored by the International Neuropsychological Society, receiving a Distinguished Career Award. In the same year he also received a Distinguished Career Contribution Award from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society.
He serves on the editorial board of a number of journals including Cognitive Neuropsychology, Cognitive Brain Research, and Cortex. He was Co-Editor-in Chief with David Milner of Neuropsychologia, and is now the Reviews Editor for the journal. He is also Director of Graduate Studies of the Department of Psychology, University of Toronto.
Moscovitch’s clinical duties include consultant on memory and aging at the Department of Psychology, Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care, and as a supervisor at the University of Toronto’s clinical extension program. In the early 1980s, he was one of the principal members of a task force that developed and drafted the guidelines for the Canadian Psychological Association to give Clinical Psychology specialty designation. Most recently, he serves on the Committee for Graduate Training for the College of Psychologists of Ontario, which helps draft procedures for training and certification.

Research

Morris Moscovitch studies memory and cognition from a neuropsychological perspective. By using behavior and neuroimaging to investigate memory in younger and older adults, and in people with brain pathology, he has gained insights into the nature of memory that may not have been possible if he examined only a single population. His work has shown that memory is not unitary, but consists of different types, each operating according to different principles, mediated by different brain structures, and affected differently by aging.
Recently, his focus has been on distinguishing between memory for particular autobiographical events, which entails the ability to re-experience the past, and memory for the past that entails only a sense of familiarity with it or knowledge about it, such as facts one knows about oneself and the world. In collaboration with Gordon Winocur, Lynn Nadel, and their students and post-doctoral fellows, he has challenged the idea that old memories are more resilient than recent ones. They have shown that remembering and re-experiencing the past vividly depends on the hippocampus, no matter how long ago the event occurred, whereas simple familiarity or knowledge of the past and facts about the world or oneself depend on the hippocampus only temporarily.
Currently, Moscovitch is interested in how these rich memories are formed, how autobiographical memories interact with general knowledge, what role attention plays in memory formation and retrieval, how memories are distorted, and what brain structures, particularly the medial temporal lobes and prefrontal cortex, are implicated in all these processes.
In addition to studying memory, he also is concerned with face recognition. Are there neural mechanisms and processes that are specialized for recognition of faces as opposed to that of other complex visual objects? His work has identified two processes: one holistic and special for faces, and one analytic, and common to other faces and objects. His current research addresses the problem of how these different types of information interact to support normal face recognition.

References

Moscovitch, M. (1992). Memory and working with memory: A component process model based on modules and central systems. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 4, 257–267.
Moscovitch, M., Winocur, G., & Behrmann, M. (1997). What makes face recognition special? Evidence from a person with visual object agnosia and dyslexia but normal face recognition. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 9, 555–604.
Nadel, L., & Moscovitch, M. (1997). Memory consolidation, retrograde amnesia and the hippocampal complex. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 7, 217–227.
Moscovitch, M., Rosenbaum, R. S., Gilboa, A., Addis, D. R., Westmacott, R., Grady, C. L., McAndrews, M. P., Winocur, G., & Nadel, L. (2005). Functional neuroanatomy of remote episodic (autobiographical), semantic and spatial memory in humans as determined by lesion and functional neuroimaging studies: A unified account based on Multiple Trace Theory. Journal of Anatomy, 207, 35–66.
Moscovitch, M. (2008). The hippocampus as a “stupid,” domain-specific module: Implications for theories of recent and remote memory. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 62, 62–79.

Larry Jacoby

Personal history

Larry Jacoby was born on March 11, 1944 in El Dorado, Kansas. Much of his childhood was spent in Smileyburg, Kansas, which had a population of 12, including his older brother, Larry, and his parents. He received his undergraduate degree from Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas, in 1966. He started undergraduate school on a football scholarship, joined a fraternity, and, as he says, discovered strong drink along with women. It was not until his last year and a half of undergraduate school that he discovered academics. At that time, he became interested in the psychology of learning, and served as a research assistant in a learning lab, running rats. He received his Ph.D. at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale in 1970.
Against the backdrop of his early undergraduate days, he was pleased recently to be given a distinguished alumnus award by Washburn University. Another point of pride is that he has been invited to give a colloquium at each of the several universities that rejected his application for graduate school.
Jacoby started graduate school doing research on animal learning in the Spence/Hull tradition, working with James McHose, who is a Spence Ph.D. After becoming disenchanted with animal research, he changed to research on human memory under the supervision of Robert Radtke. His first job was at Iowa State University. During his time there, he took a leave of absence to spend a year with F.I.M. Craik at the University of Toronto. Interactions with Craik, Endel Tulving, Paul Kolers, and others in the Toronto group had a large impact on his thinking. In 1975, he moved to McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.
With a few short stops elsewhere, he remained at McMaster until 2000 when he moved to Washington University in St. Louis. The memory group at Washington University is an incredibly strong one, including excellent cognitive researchers (e.g., Roddy Roediger, Mark McDaniel, and Dave Balota) as well as outstanding neural imaging researchers (e.g., Todd Braver, Ian Dobbins, and Steve Petersen). Jacoby is sure he will remain at Washington University for the rest of his career.

Research

Among his best-known publications is an article by Jacoby and Dallas that appeared in 1981. Results reported in that article showed that manipulating levels of processing had a large effect on recognition memory, replicating results of prior experiments. In contrast, earlier presentation of a word greatly enhanced participants’ ability to later identify the word when it was briefly flashed under perceptually difficult conditions, but this effect was as large for words that had been shallowly processed as for those that had been deeply processed. That is, the effect of levels on recognition memory was dissociated from its lack of an effect on perceptual identification performance. Dissociations of this sort are also found with amnesiacs, and came to be known as dissociations between explicit and implicit memory. Jacoby resisted the term “implicit memory” in favor of a distinction between automatic and cognitively controlled processing. His preference for the automatic/controlled distinction reflects the longer history of that distinction along with its emphasis on awareness.
Direct tests of memory (e.g., recognition memory) assess awareness of previously studying an item whereas indirect tests (e.g., a perceptual-identification test) can reflect memory for prior study, although participants are unaware of having engaged in that prior study. Dissociations between performances on the two types of test raise questions regarding the bases of awareness. Jacoby and colleagues’ answer to that question has been to argue that awareness can rely on an attribution process that reflects relative fluency. In that vein, Jacoby has shown effects of memory that occur without awareness can make a background noise seem less loud, a nonfamous name seem famous, and a misspelled word appear to be correctly spelled as well as other effects of the same sort. A chapter by Jacoby, Kelley, and Dywan (1989) provides a summary of early experiments showing such memory misattributions.
Jacoby and his colleagues developed process-dissociation procedures that are designed to separate the contributions of automatic and consciously controlled processes to overall performance of a task. Such procedures are necessary because tasks are seldom process pure. Their procedures make use of a very simple quantitative model that provides estimates of the contribution of processes to reveal dissociations. For example, both dividing attention and requiring fast responding have been shown to influence estimated recollection (a cognitively controlled use of memory) while leaving estimated automatic influences of memory unchanged as do age-related differences in memory.
The model underlying the process-dissociation procedures was, as Jacoby puts it, ideally positioned to annoy almost everybody—too complex for those who are largely unfamiliar with quantitative models and too simple for those who are experts with such models. Most controversial is the assumption that cognitively controlled and automatic influences independently contribute to performance. However, there is strong evidence to suggest that the assumption sometimes holds. For example, Jacoby, Bishara, Hessels, and Hughes (2007) showed convergence of estimates across procedures as support for the independence assumption in the context of an investigation of retroactive interference.
A simple quantitative model holds advantages over more complex models for purposes of investigating individual differences as well as differences between populations. Much of Jacoby’s recent work has used the distinction between automatic and cognitively controlled processes to investigate age-related differences in memory. The automatic/controlled distinction has shown promise for both diagnosis and treatment of memory deficits. Work in this vein has been briefly summarized by Jacoby and Rhodes (2006).

References

Jacoby, L. L., & Dallas, M. (1981). On the relationship between autobiographical memory and perceptual learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 3, 306–340.
Jacoby, L. L., Kelley, C. M., & Dywan, J. (1989). Memory attributions. In H.L. Roediger & F.I.M. Craik (Eds.), Varieties of memory and consciousness: Essays in honor of Endel Tulving (pp. 391–422). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Jacoby, L. L., & Rhodes, M. G. (2006). False remembering in the aged. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 15(2), 49–53.

Marcia K. Johnson

Personal history

Marcia K. Johnson was born and raised in California. She earned her B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1965, having conducted her first psychological experiment with the guidance of Geoffrey Keppel and Dan Slobin. In 1966, Johnson enrolled in Berkeley’s Ph.D. program under the mentorship of Leo Postman and set about investigating organizational processes in memory. During this period, until she received her Ph.D. in experimental psychology in 1971, she held a fellowship at Berkeley’s Institute of Human Learning. She was Assistant, Associate, and Professor of Psychology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook from 1970 to 1985 and Professor of Psychology at Princeton University from 1985 to 2000, where she was instrumental in initiating and advancing their neuroimaging resources.
She moved to Yale University in 2000, where she is the Sterling Professor of Psychology and Chair, Department of Psychology.
Johnson has received a number of awards (William James Award from the Association for Psychological Science; Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association; Master Mentor Award from APA’s Division 20; Yale University Graduate School Mentorship Award; Guggenheim Fellowship; Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences; Cattell Fellowship; Visiting Scientist, Memory Disorders Research Center at the Boston Veterans Affairs Medical Center) and grants (National Science Foundation; National Institutes of Mental Health; National Institute on Aging, including a MERIT award), has served on the editorial boards of various journals, is past Chair of the Psychonomic Society, and is a Trustee of the Cattell Foundation. In 2014 she was elected to be a member of the National Academy of Sciences, in recognition of her distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.

Research

Johnson is a leader in the field of research on human memory and cognition. Her early work focused on the relation between comprehension and memory, especially constructive and reconstructive mental processes. She developed this constructivist approach in collaboration with John Bransford, a new Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota who arrived at Stony Brook the same year she did. For example, Bransford and Johnson showed that understanding depends on having an appropriate mental context or schema activated. At the same time, such contexts or schemas can be the source of errors in memory.
Johnson's laboratory pioneered in the systematic study of the mechanisms of memory distortion, with Carol Raye, Steve Lindsay, Shahin Hashtroudi, Karen Mitchell, and many other collaborators. For example, Johnson and colleagues' work on reality monitoring has investigated how the memory representations of perception and thought (inferences, imaginations) are alike and how they are different, how they are discriminated, and why they are sometimes confused. They have investigated source monitoring more generally, including how individual features of experience (e.g., color, shape, location, emotion) are bound together to create complex memories.
Johnson and colleagues’ theoretical approach to understanding the encoding, retrieval, and evaluation of true and false memories, the Source Monitoring Framework, has been widely influential; for example, it has been used as a basis for explaining unconscious plagiarism, hallucinations and delusions in psychopathology, distortions in eyewitness testimony, children’s reports of sexual abuse, and reports of recovery of repressed memories. The ideas and results from Johnson’s and other labs investigating source memory have influenced not only other cognitive psychologists, but also developmental, social, and clinical psychologists and neuroscientists.
Johnson has also proposed a conceptual framework—a Multiple-Entry Modular (MEM) model for analyzing and synthesizing cognitive findings. The MEM architecture organizes component processes of cognition into functional subsystems (perceptual and reflective) and component processes of these subsystems. Reflective processes allow us to foreground, sustain, organize, manipulate, and revive information. In the context of this model, she has discussed the relation between cognition and consciousness, cognition and emotion, and the disruption of cognition associated with brain damage and normal aging.
Her lab also uses neuroimaging to identify brain regions associated with monitoring the origin of information, to explore component processes of cognition, the relation between cognition and emotion, and to identify areas showing age-related dysfunction in component processes of cognition.

References

Johnson, M. K. (2006). Memory and reality. American Psychologist, 61, 760–771.
Johnson, M. K. (2007). Memory systems: A cognitive construct for analysis and synthesis. In H. L. Roediger, Y. Dudai, and S. M. Fitzpatrick, (Eds.), Science of memory: Concepts (pp. 353–357). New York: Oxford University Press.
Johnson, M. K., Raye, C. L., Mitchell, K. J., Greene, E. J., Cunningham, W. A., & Sanislow, C. A. (2005). Using fMRI to investigate a component process of reflection: Prefrontal correlates of refreshing a just-activated representation. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 5, 339–361.
Bransford, J. D., & Johnson, M. K. (l973). Considerations of some problems of comprehension. In W. Chase (Ed.), Visual information processing (pp. 383–438). New York: Academic Press.
Johnson, M. K., & Raye, C. L. (l98l). Reality monitoring. Psychological Review, 88, 67–85.
Johnson, M. K., Hashtroudi, S., & Lindsay, D. S. (1993). Source monitoring. Psychological Bulletin, 114, 3–28.
Johnson, M. K., & Hirst, W. (1993). MEM: Memory subsystems as processes. In A. F. Collins, S. E. Gathercole, M. A. Conway, and P. E. Morris (Eds.), Theories of memory (pp. 241–286). Hove, UK: Psychology Press.

Research activities: factors affecting retrieval

Activity 1

Research has demonstrated that contextual fluctuations that occur between encoding and retrieval of information significantly alter individuals’ ability to retrieve memories. Think about times when you have encountered this problem and what realistic revision strategies you could use to minimize these effects.

Activity 2

Consider the possible implications of collaborative inhibition for the successful outcomes of group assignments, political decisions, and brainstorming. How could you reduce the impact of this phenomenon on your productivity and still be involved in group processes?

Hermann Ebbinghaus

Personal history

Hermann Ebbinghaus was born on January 24, 1850 in Barmen, Germany to a merchant family. His early studies included history and philology, though he settled on philosophy while at the University of Bonn. His studies there were interrupted by his service in the Prussian army during the Franco–Prussian War. Returning to the University of Bonn to receive his Ph.D. in 1873 upon completion of his dissertation, On Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Unconscious, Ebbinghaus moved to Berlin.
After a few years, he ventured to France and then England, where he briefly taught at a couple of small English schools and discovered Gustav Fechner’s Elements of Psychophysics. Reading the used copy of Fechner’s book helped inspire Ebbinghaus’s interest in the quantitative study of memory, as he had already developed a desire to better understand the process of forgetting.
In 1885, after Ebbinghaus was hired as a professor at the University of Berlin and subsequently founded a new journal called (in English) The Psychology and Physiology of the Sense of Organs. Although Ebbinghaus was considered an inspiring teacher by many and founded two psychological laboratories while in Germany, his sparse publication record stymied his career in Berlin, prompting his move to the University of Breslau, where he became a full professor in 1894. In 1905, Ebbinghaus made what would become his last move, this time to the University of Halle. It was there, 59 years after his birth on February 26, that Ebbinghaus succumbed to pneumonia. Poetry left a substantial mark on Ebbinghaus’s life, having enjoyed it so thoroughly that some of his experimental techniques involved memorizing passages of famous works.

Research

Although Ebbinghaus would occasionally employ meaningful stimuli, such as poetry, in his memory experiments, he preferred a technique he developed that would become the standard for numerous researchers to follow. In order to avoid the potential confound created by the use of meaningful words with pre-existing semantic associations, he created over 2000 consonant–vowel–consonant combinations, forming nonsense syllables.
Ebbinghaus famously used himself as his sole subject for his tedious studies, drawing a random selection of the syllables, repeating them at a constant rate (thanks to a metronome) and later recalling them, repeating the process until he was able to get the list correct twice in a row.
Other measures of retention included recall (either free recall or serial recall), item recognition, and savings—the reduction in the amount of time necessary to relearn material to criterion after having studied it previously, indicating that memories often remain available even if they’re not consciously accessible at the time. Consciousness also was a factor in Ebbinghaus’s distinction between involuntary retrieval, when memories pop into mind spontaneously, and voluntary memory, which requires a willful attempt to bring a specific memory to mind. His sentence completion test not only became a standard implicit measure of memory, it became incorporated into the Binet–Simon intelligence scale.
Ebbinghaus’s experiments, which carefully controlled for factors like the time of day and even food intake, produced the learning and forgetting curves that would forever be attributed to the German researcher. As described in his 1885 monograph, Über das Gedächtnis (“On Memory”), memory increases with additional study repetitions, with the greatest amount of learning occurring on the early repetitions. Plotting memory as a function of the delay between learning and recall revealed an exponential forgetting curve, with the steepest declines occurring early on but eventually flattening out. Overtraining items (i.e., continuing to study pairs beyond the point of recallability), reduces the likelihood of forgetting and produces a shallower forgetting curve.
Ebbinghaus analyzed his recall data in a novel way, indicating the probability of recall based on when in a study list the item is presented. The resulting U-shaped serial position curve revealed primacy and recency effects (i.e., higher recall probabilities for items early and late in the list, respectively).
The rigorous methodology and analysis techniques advanced by Ebbinghaus, though criticized as literally meaningless by some, inspired enormous growth in memory research across the globe, especially in the United States. While he was not the first to study psychology empirically, he standardized the reporting of results, dividing his publication into an introductory section, followed by sections on the results, methods, and discussion. Generations of German students were influenced by his textbook on general psychology, translated as The Foundations of Psychology, and the follow-up that was published after his death. The Ebbinghaus Illusion, an optical illusion of relative size perception, also lives on in contemporary cognitive psychology research.

References

Ebbinghaus, H. (1885). Über das gedächtnis: Untersuchungen zur experimentellen psychologie. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot.
Ebbinghaus, H. (1902). Grundzüge der psychologie. 1. Band, 2. Theil. Leipzig: Veit & Co.
Ebbinghaus, H. (1913). Grundzüge der psychologie. 1.-3. Auflage, fortgeführt von E. Dürr. Leipzig: Veit & Co.

Leo Joseph Postman

Personal history

Leo Postman was born on June 7, 1918 in St. Petersburg, Russia. He would soon move to New York City and eventually enroll in the College of the City of New York, where he earned his Bachelor of Science degree in 1943. From there, he enrolled in Harvard University’s doctoral program. During his time in graduate school, he was a teaching assistant, helping to grade undergraduates’ psychology papers, including that of his future wife. He earned his Ph.D. in 1946 and taught until 1950, save for a year at Indiana University. In that year, he moved to the University of California, Berkeley, where both he and his wife, Dorothy Lerman Postman, would work for many years. Quickly after arriving, he was named chair of the department of psychology.
He founded the Institute of Human Learning at Berkeley in 1961, later renamed the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences. He headed the Institute until 1977 and retired from teaching in 1987. In between, Postman founded the Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, editing it from 1962 to 1968, when he was elected president of the Western Psychological Association. In 1974 he won the Warren Medal of the Society of Experimental Psychologists. In 2002, the Review of General Psychology listed Postman as a member of the 100 most eminent psychologists of the century. Postman’s wife died following a long illness a year before Postman himself was to pass away of heart failure in Marblehead, Massachusetts on April 22, 2004 at the age of 85.

Research

After World War II, Postman helped lead psychology’s transition from the more theoretical to the experimental, producing, with the help of James Egan, one of the fundamental textbooks of the new field called Experimental Psychology: An Introduction. In 1947 his book, co-authored with Gordon Allport, called The Psychology of Rumor, systematically investigated how rumors are created and spread, a hot topic during the stressful period following the War. At Berkeley, Postman’s work largely focused on perception and its interaction with motivation and emotion, though he would shift his emphasis to incidental learning and forgetting.
Postman has been credited as constructing modern interference theory, which posits that forgetting is mainly a result of a combination of retroactive and proactive interference, as well as various aspects of the current mnemonic landscape. Postman’s view of forgetting—specifically his response-set suppression hypothesis—made an early reference to a possible inhibitory mechanism, in which an executive control selector mechanism was thought to simultaneously strengthen currently relevant information while suppressing outdated material. In many ways, this theory could be seen as related to the mechanisms thought to underlie retrieval-induced forgetting.
Though he will be remembered for his forgetting research and closing out the classical interference era, he spent the last years of his life investigating methods to minimize interference and preserve memories.

References

Allport, G. W., & Postman, L. (1947). The psychology of rumor. New York: Holt.
Postman, L. (1962). Psychology in the making: Histories of selected research problems. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Postman, L. (1961). The present status of interference theory. In C. N. Cofer (Ed.), Verbal learning and verbal behavior (pp. 152–179). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
Postman, L., Bruner, J. S., & McGinnies, E. (1948). Personal values as selective factors in perception. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 43, 142–154.
Postman, L., Stark, K., & Fraser, J. (1968). Temporal changes in interference. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 7, 672–694.
Postman, L., & Underwood, B. J. (1973). Critical issues in interference theory. Memory & Cognition, 1, 19–40.

John A. McGeoch

Personal history

Born on October 9, 1897, John A. McGeoch was trained as a functionalist under Harvey A. Carr. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1926 after having defended his dissertation called A study in the Psychology of Testimony. He accepted a position at Washington University in St. Louis. There he encountered and mentored Arthur Melton before moving to the University of Arkansas in 1928. He would make three other academic moves in his life: to the University of Missouri, where he was chairman of the Psychology Department; then to Wesleyan University; and finally the University of Iowa, where he held the equivalent position. Tragically, McGeoch died of a stroke just before his 45th birthday in 1942.
McGeoch’s seminal work, The Psychology of Human Learning: An Introduction, was published posthumously that same year. Originally, McGeoch had planned to publish the work contained in this textbook as part of a two-volume compendium of human learning research. However, McGeoch’s ill health and multiple moves eventually forced him to attempt to rewrite his draft as a briefer summary, intended as a textbook.

Research

McGeoch has been heavily criticized for focusing on contrived, basic research with little to no practical outlets. However, this reputation stands in contrast to much of his earlier research. For instance, McGeoch’s dissertation was based on fieldwork he carried out with children in their East St. Louis classrooms. He was interested in the relationship between memory accuracy for staged eyewitness events, for instance, and intelligence (based on either background or the Army Alpha test—a short answer test designed to measure the general intelligence of new recruits). Additionally, McGeoch tested memory for real-world stimuli such as poetry, attempted to measure emotions, and better understand how juvenile delinquency affects suggestibility.
It was only later in his career that McGeoch took to carefully controlled experimental studies conducted within the confines of the laboratory. McGeoch’s laboratory studies, which propelled him to fame in the verbal learning arena, also tapped memory phenomena that have profound influences on our everyday lives.
McGeoch broke away from the then common assumption that most forgetting occurs simply as a function of passing time, as memories passively decay. Instead, McGeoch argued in his 1932 paper, Forgetting and the Law of Disuse, that interference created by the addition of new memories actually causes the difficulties in recalling older information. For McGeoch, this retroactive inhibition results from response competition between old and new memories arising during recall. He then methodically set out to characterize retroactive interference, trying to let the data speak for itself, rather than reaching to create a grand theory.

References

McGeoch, J. A. (1928b). Intelligence and the ability to report. American Journal of Psychology, 40, 596–599.
McGeoch, J. A. (1928c). The relation between different measures of the ability to report. American Journal of Psychology, 40, 592–596.
McGeoch, J. A. (1932). Forgetting and the law of disuse. Psychological Review, 39, 352–370.
McGeoch, J. A. (1942). The psychology of human learning. New York: Longmans, Green.

Arthur Weever Melton

Personal history

Born on August 13, 1906 in Fayetteville, Arkansas, Arthur Melton began his career in psychology as an undergraduate at Washington University at the age of 18. A year after graduating, in 1928, Melton’s first paper, with his undergraduate mentor, John A. McGeoch, called The Comparative Retention Value of Maze Habits and of Nonsense Syllables was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. In it, Melton laid out his functional approach to the study of human behavior. McGeoch’s early theory of forgetting laid the seed for Melton’s contribution to interference theory, but that was to come following his Ph.D. studies at Yale University, beginning in 1928 under the supervision of Edward S. Robinson, another functionalist interested in verbal learning.
While in graduate school, Melton worked on a project investigating how museumgoers behaved and which methods of instructing children in science museums were most effective. After receiving his Ph.D. in 1932, he continued to teach at Yale until 1935 before becoming the Chair of Psychology at the University of Missouri, a position held up to that time by McGeoch. In the wake of World War II, Melton joined the faculty at Ohio State University, where he stayed for 3 years until he was appointed director of the Air Force’s Human Resources Research Center in 1951 (he was a brigadier general in the Air Force Reserve). Following his 12-year tenure at the Research Center, he moved to the University of Michigan, remaining there until his retirement in 1974.
Beyond Melton’s numerous empirical findings and informative theories, he left a legacy as a strong advocate for rigorous experimental designs that avoided the many pitfalls facing researchers, such as confounds, while attempting to more fully understand effects by testing multiple levels of factors whenever possible. As editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology for 12 years and as chief editorial advisor to the American Psychological Association, he used every opportunity to encourage researchers to subscribe to these goals. Melton was recognized by the American Psychological Association with a Gold Medal Award for his lifetime achievements in the experimental study of human learning in 1976. Previously, he had also been elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1969. Melton died on November 5, 1978.

Research

While conducting his museum studies at Yale, Melton used dwell time (i.e., the length of time that visitors spend in front of museum displays) as his dependent measure, looking at how it varied as a function of season, among other factors. He concluded that museums attract different types of people with different goals and competing interests. These studies typified Melton’s drive to use systematic naturalistic observations to better understand the functional relationships underlying the generalizations culled from the data.
In his later work, McGeoch importantly added a second component to the model of forgetting advanced by McGeoch. To explain forgetting (and retroactive interference, specifically), McGeoch emphasized response competition between old and newly learned associations when people are recalling information. Melton and his collaborator, Irwin, proposed a second factor, X—a form of unlearning, which also contributed to retroactive interference by weakening the older associative bonds during the learning of new information. The resulting two-factor theory of interference, explicated in a 1940 paper, helped shape the research in the classical interference era and continues to impact on research to this day. At Michigan, Melton employed the Brown–Peterson paradigm to study short-term memory.
In Melton’s landmark 1963 paper, Implications of Short-Term Memory for a General Theory of Memory, he made the case that short-term memory, rather than being an entirely distinct entity from long-term memory, could be incorporated into a general theory of memory. The free recall effect commonly called the Melton Lag Effect describes his finding that the recall probability is related to the number of items separating the two items in the study list. Thus, it is more likely that, after recalling a particular item, people will next recall an item that had appeared near the recalled item during learning.

References

Melton, A. W., & Irwin, J. M. (1940). The influence of degree of interpolated learning on retroactive inhibition and the overt transfer of specific responses. American Journal of Psychology,53,173–203.
Melton, A. W., & McGeoch, J. A. (1929). The comparative retention values of maze habits and nonsense syllables. Journal of Experimental Psychology,12, 392–414.
Melton, A. W. (1963). Implications of short-term memory for a general theory of memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 2, 1–21.
Melton, A. W. (1936). The methodology of experimental studies of human learning and retention. I. The functions of a methodology and the available criteria for evaluating different experimental methods. Psychological Bulletin,33, 305–94.
Melton, A. W. (1967). Repetition and retrieval from memory. Science,158, 232.

Research activities: motivated forgetting

Activity 1

Critically review the cases of recovered memories presented in this chapter under the following headings: “Assessment and methodological issues”; “Possible roles of the therapist”; and “Possible motivations of the client”. Where do you stand in the debate concerning the validity of recovered memories?

Activity 2

Think about times when you have tried to forget an unpleasant experience. Did you use motivated context shifts and/or retrieval suppression as strategies, and if so how successful were these in both the short and long term? Are there any other strategies that were useful to you that are not covered?

Sigmund Freud

Personal history

Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Shlomo Freud, was born on May 6, 1856 in the Austrian Empire’s Freiberg, Moravia, which is now known as Príbor in the Czech Republic. Freud’s parents, his father being a wool merchant with a third wife half his age, had little in the way of money, though they realized the young Freud’s obvious intellect and would let nothing (not even the seven siblings that followed) stand in the way of ensuring that Sigmund received a fitting education. When his father, Jacob, lost his business in the economic crisis of 1857, the family moved out of the one room apartment they lived in on the first floor of a blacksmith’s house to Vienna, by way of Leipzig, under the new political rights afforded to the Jews.
There, Sigmund attended the Leopoldstädter Kommunal-Realgymnasium for high school, beginning in 1865. Receiving top marks, he graduated in 1873 with honors. In that year Freud went on to study medicine at the University of Vienna, at the same time conducting physiological and histological research under the supervision of Ernst Brüke for 6 years. Freud studied nerves and brain anatomy/pathology in everything from the Petromyzon, a primitive fish species, all the way up to the human medulla oblongata during his time with Brüke. Within this period, Brüke was developing his idea of “psychodynamics,” that is, the concept that living organisms are essentially ever changing systems under the direct influence of the laws of chemistry and physics.
Freud served in the military between 1897–1880, but soon returned to finish his medical degree in 1881, after which point he took a temporary post in Brüke’s laboratory. As he worked toward establishing his own clinical practice, he courted Martha Bernays, who would become his wife, after an extended engagement during which he wrote nearly 1000 letters to her. Simultaneously, Freud began his residency at the Viennese General Hospital, where he did some early research on the effects of cocaine, occasionally using himself as a research subject.
In 1885, he traveled to the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris to study under Jean-Martin Charcot, a renowned neurologist who taught Freud the importance of uncovering the root causes of neurosis through observation, rather than simply focusing on the physical manifestations of the underlying problem. Freud returned to Vienna to pass along his new perspective, speaking to the Vienna Medical Society about hypnosis, which was received with great skepticism. Freud would then establish his clinical psychopathology practice, earning enough money to marry Martha on September 18, 1886 and support the six children they had together. Soon thereafter, he accepted an appointment as director of neurology at the Institute for Children’s Diseases.
Over time, Freud began to lose faith in hypnosis as a treatment for neuroses, but became intrigued by a cathartic method, also called the “talking cure,” developed by Freud’s friend, Dr Josef Breuer, as he was treating a patient named Annie O. Freud adopted Breuer’s methodology and developed it into what he would come to call psychoanalysis in 1896. Patients were encouraged to free associate, saying whatever came to mind, bypassing psychological defenses. Through his patient work, Freud became convinced that hysteria was primarily rooted in sexual abuses (real or imagined) from childhood.
Anna Freud, Martha and Sigmund’s last daughter, was born in 1895, the same year Freud set out to develop an integrated model of “Scientific Psychology” which, he hoped, would explain both mental and physical phenomena. Sadly, this project ended in frustration, as did a number of close friendships, including that of his protégé Carl Jung, who disagreed with Freud’s focus on sexuality.
Driven into an intense period of work following his father’s death resulted in the publication of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900, which first introduced the notion of the Oedipus complex and slowly began to amass an interested reading public. Following the release of another book a year later, the Psychology of Everyday Life popularized the Freudian slips. A year later Freud would accept the post of associate professor at the University of Vienna.
In 1908, he established the Psychoanalytic Society in Vienna and, later, the International Psychoanalytic Association, which would be headed by his close associate, Carl Jung. In 1920, Freud’s daughter Sophie died, prompting him to write Beyond the Pleasure Principle and, later, The Ego and the Id, which formally laid out his structural theory of the mind. In 1924, Freud was appointed “Citizen of Vienna” and, in recognition of his accessible writing style, was awarded the Goethe Prize for Literature. However, he suffered a blow when he lost his mother in 1930.
Freud initially refused to move out of Austria, despite being annexed by the Nazis in 1938 and the public burning of his books in Berlin. The final straw came after his daughter Anna was arrested by the Gestapo. He called up his friends to enable him to move, with his wife, daughter, and dog, to London in June, 1938. Freud continued to smoke cigars until his death, despite having 30 surgeries to contain the jaw cancer that would lead to his demise. Though he continued to write and engage in some limited clinical work during his recurring battle with cancer, Freud gave up his practice 7 weeks before he was to die, helped along by his personal physician who, per agreement, administered a lethal injection of morphine on September 23, 1939 in Freud’s study. Freud’s ashes are kept in a Middlesex crematorium, inside one of his favorite Greek urns.

Research

Although Freud published several medical papers on the neurological basis of cerebral palsy, he is best know for his title as the father of Psychoanalysis, having developed both a theory of the human mind and clinical methods for treating neurotic individuals. In contrast to the dominant psychological movement at the time, positivism, which claimed that people act in voluntary, rational ways, Freud emphasized the unconscious processes that drive human behavior. Specifically, Freud proposed that there are levels of consciousness, with most thoughts existing below the surface and only the tip of the iceberg being exposed to direct awareness. There are routes to tap the unconscious, according to Freud, especially through dreams and the more directly accessible preconscious level separating the conscious from the truly unconscious.
Freud believed the unconscious mind served as a refuge for thoughts and feelings regarded as too painful for the patient. Although these memories cannot be eliminated from the mind entirely, people could intentionally or unintentionally engage the defense mechanism called repression (or suppression) to send them into exile in the unconscious mind. Unfortunately, the repressed memories would fester and seep out through dreams or undesirable behaviors.
Freud’s revolutionary proposal that the mind was not homogenous went beyond a simple division between the three levels of consciousness. He believed that the unconscious could be further divided, in Freud’s view: the id (German, “es”; Latin for “it”) that houses the mind’s primitive need for gratification, including Eros (the libidinal, life instinct) and Thanatos (the death instinct); the self-critical superego (German, “überich”; Latin for “that”) that reflects the social standards and morals adopted from one’s superiors; and the ego (German, “ich”; Latin for “I”) that rationally arbitrates between one’s primitive drives and morals and provides a sense of personal identity as well as a passageway to the conscious mind. The dynamic between these subdivisions was of primary interest to Freud and his followers, arguing that the relative hierarchy is in a constant state of flux, depending on the situation.
Freud offered a developmental scheme to his theories, arguing that people fixate on particular objects as they progress through psychosexual development, moving from oral to anal, to phallic, to latency, to genital. If an individual’s needs are frustrated or overindulged at a particular stage, a significant amount of psychic energy would remain locked in that phase, affecting their personality in predictable ways.
The psychoanalytic technique Freud developed, based on Breuer’s earlier work, sought to pinpoint the repressions that disrupt normal psychosexual development and result in neuroses, bringing them into the light of consciousness, and resolving them directly through the ego. Through this process, it was thought, the ego would also be strengthened in order to handle future conflicts. Typically, this was accomplished by permitting the patient to free-associate and discuss their dreams and the earliest occurrences of the symptoms.
The reclined position (on Freud’s famous couch) served to minimize sensory stimulation, remove the analyst from the patient’s view, and mute the superego’s filter (in much the same way as sleep was thought to do), allowing the repressed material to surface. The analyst filled a background role, primarily there to encourage the patient to talk and to help the patient recognize and overcome their obstacles to treatment. The onus was on the patient to work to uncover their unresolved conflicts and, in turn, cure themselves.
Freud methodically documented nearly every aspect of his own thoughts, those of his patients, and indeed even the development of his children. He considered his psychoanalytic theory a new science that could explain almost any aspect of human behavior. For this reason, however, his theory suffered the flaw of being largely untestable, unable to be falsified, and often circular. Though his work has suffered great criticism for its lack of empirical substantiation, in recent years, evidence for the ability to suppress unwanted memories has been documented by Anderson and colleagues using the Think/No-Think paradigm. Furthermore, though their numbers are dwindling, analysts do continue to treat patients and guide their self-discovery.

References

Freud, S. (1933). New introductory lectures on psycho-analysis. London: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1924). Beyond the pleasure principle. New York: Boni and Liveright.
Freud, S. (1954). The interpretation of dreams. J. Strachey (Ed.). London: Allen & Unwin.
Freud, S. (1966). The psychopathology of everyday life. London: Benn.

Michael Kopelman

Personal history

Michael Kopelman was born in London, England on February 8, 1950 and received his Bachelor’s degree in psychology and economics, with honors, from Keele University in 1972. In 1978, he received his M.B. B.S. from the University of London. In 1988, Kopelman became a Chartered Psychologist in the same year he received his Ph.D. from the University of London’s Institute of Psychiatry. He was elected a Fellow of the British Psychological Society in 1990 and of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in 1993. Following a number of lectureships, Kopelman became a Reader in Neuropsychiatry at the United Medical and Dental Schools of Guy’s and St. Thomas’s.
He is currently a Professor of Neuropsychiatry, at Kings College London’s Institute of Psychiatry and an honorary Consultant Neuropsychiatrist for the National Health Service, based at St. Thomas’s Hospital, where he runs a psychiatry and memory disorders clinic. Kopelman has served as President of the British Neuropsychological Society between 2004 and 2006, is a founding member of the Memory Disorders Research Society, and is currently President-Elect of the International Neuropsychiatric Association.

Research

Professor Kopelman’s career as a neuropsychologist has led him to investigate the theoretical aspects of memory and other cognitive disorders. His early work was concerned with forgetting rates in Alzheimer-type dementia and Korsakoff’s syndrome. In contrast to then current thinking, Kopelman demonstrated that the primary deficit in these populations related to encoding and consolidation, rather than a long-term storage problem. This work led him to study cholinergic depletion and extent of retrograde amnesia associated with these diagnoses. During the course of this work, he developed the Autobiographical Memory Interview, and differentiated spontaneous and provoked types of confabulation common in amnesic patients.
Kopelman was on the cutting edge of using structural magnetic resonance imaging to quantify the extent of brain damage in his patients, and how that related to the degree of their deficits on neuropsychological measures. This level of detailed analysis permitted Kopelman to map the relationship between focal hippocampal damage and anterograde recollective abilities, as well as between extra-hippocampal damage and familiarity-based recognition. He, together with Eleanor Maguire, has also employed functional MRI in order to follow semantic dementia patients longitudinally, over a 3-year period, to track the disease’s progression.
Recently, Kopelman has been working with Brian Butterworth and Marinella Cappelletti to distinguish between numerical and language-based semantics. Along with Jackie Masterson and Judit Druks, Kopelman has further identified symptoms that differentiate Alzheimer’s disease from semantic dementia.
Kopelman has served as an expert witness in numerous human rights, homicide, and appeals cases, weighing in on the overturning of convictions, death row, and extradition cases, as well as several Belmarsh and Guantanamo Bay detainees.

References

Kopelman, M. D. (2002). Disorders of memory. Brain, 125, 2152–2190.
Kopelman, M. D., Lasserson, D., Kingsley, D. R., Bello, F., Rush, C., Stanhope, N., Stevens, T. G., Goodman, G., Buckman, J. R., Heilpern, G., Kendall, B. E., & Colchester, A. C. F. (2003). Retrograde amnesia and the volume of critical brain structures. Hippocampus, 13(8), 879–891.
Kopelman, M. D., Bright, P., Buckman, J., Fradera, A., Yoshimasu, H., Jacobson, C., & Colchester, A. C. F. (2007). Recall and recognition memory in amnesia: Patients with hippocampal, medial temporal, temporal lobe or frontal pathology. Neuropsychologia, 45, 1232–1246         
Baddeley, A. D., Kopelman, M. D., & Wilson, B. (Eds.) (2002). Handbook of Memory Disorders (2nd ed). Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Co.
Young, S., Gudjonsson, G., & Kopelman, M. D. (2009). Forensic neuropsychology Oxford: Oxford University Press.
David, A., Fleminger, S., Kopelman, M. D., Lovestone, S., & Mellors, J. (2009). Lishman’s organic psychiatry (4th ed), Oxford: Blackwell Press.

Robert Bjork

Personal history

The last of four boys born to his Norwegian mother and Swedish father, Robert Bjork was born in Minnesota on January 30, 1939, just as the Great Depression was winding down and World War II was gearing up. He grew up in the Lake Minnetonka area of Minnesota and spent much of his nonacademic time playing sports, going to church, and working as a caddy at a local golf course, an experience that led to a life-long interest in golf and to his being supported by an Evans (caddy) Scholarship during his undergraduate years at the University of Minnesota.
Inspired by a gifted high-school chemistry teacher, he began his undergraduate career at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, which had an outstanding undergraduate program in chemistry. After his freshman year, however, during which he won St. Olaf’s freshman award in mathematics, he was forced—by financial difficulties (and by St. Olaf’s uncivilized practice of having Saturday classes)—to transfer to the University of Minnesota, to which he commuted from his parents’ home before, happily, being awarded an Evans Scholarship and moving to the Evans Scholar House on the Minnesota campus.
At the University of Minnesota, Bjork switched to Physics and did well enough to earn Phi Beta Kappa and other honors, but in his senior year he became disenchanted with physics, in part owing to its equipment-intensive nature, and intrigued with psychology. On the advice a counselor, he switched his major to mathematics and met with Professor David LaBerge to discuss what the field of mathematical psychology might be all about. He was captivated by LaBerge’s enthusiasm and spent a graduate year at Minnesota before transferring to Stanford University, which LaBerge considered the place to be for an aspiring young mathematical psychologist.
At Stanford—supported by National Defense Education Act and National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowships—Bjork spent his graduate career surrounded by wonderful mentors (especially William Estes, Gordon Bower, Richard Atkinson, and Patrick Suppes) and exceptional graduate-student colleagues during a period when there was great excitement about the potential of mathematical and computer models to capture the dynamics of human learning and memory.
On completing his Ph.D., Bjork was hired by the University of Michigan where he then spent the first 8 years of his research career before moving to his long-term academic home, the University of California, Los Angeles, where he is currently Distinguished Professor. At Michigan, Bjork joined the Human Performance Center, directed by Arthur Melton, an intellectually vibrant place with an exceptional record of its graduate students moving on to be leaders in the field. It was at Michigan, too, that Bjork met one Elizabeth Ligon, who became his wife and collaborator. They were married in 1969 in New York City, where Elizabeth was a research associate and lecturer at Rockefeller University.
Across his career, Bjork has served the field of psychological science with unusual distinction. He has served as: Editor of Memory & Cognition; Editor of Psychological Review; Co-editor of Psychological Science in the Public Interest; and Chair of a National Research Council Committee on Techniques for the Enhancement of Human Performance. His positions of leadership include President of the Association for Psychological Science, President of the Western Psychological Association, Chair of the Psychonomic Society, Chair of the Society of Experimental Psychologists, Chair of the Council of Editors of the American Psychological Association (APA), and Chair of the Council of Graduate Departments of Psychology.
He is a recipient of UCLA's Distinguished Teaching Award and both the Distinguished Scientist Lecturer Award and the Distinguished Service to Psychological Science Award from the American Psychological Association. In 2011 (with Elizabeth L. Bjork) he was honored by the Federation of Associations in Brain & Behavioral Sciences. He has also received the Norman Anderson Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Experimental Psychologists (2012) and in 2013 became a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Research

As a graduate student, in an attempt to control for memory load, Bjork introduced cues to participants saying that they could forget some of what they had studied, that they would not be tested on those items. To his and others’ surprise, such an instruction eliminated the proactive interference from those items in the recall of subsequent to-be-remembered items. That finding lead to a career-long interest in directed—that is, intentional—forgetting, the dynamics of which have been of strong interest not only to cognitive psychologists, but also to clinical psychologists, social psychologists, and neuroscientists. His research on directed forgetting eventually implicated inhibitory processes and led him to argue that retrieval inhibition and the loss of access to information in memory—that is, forgetting—play a broadly adaptive role in the functioning of human memory, including keeping our memories current.
Bjork also played a key role in clarifying the dynamics of retrieval processes in human memory, especially by demonstrating that the act of retrieval is a “memory modifier,” in the sense that retrieved information becomes more recallable in the future than it would have been otherwise, and competing information associated with the same cue or configuration of cues becomes less recallable. From a theoretical standpoint, Bjork and his collaborators were among the first to emphasize that using our memories shapes our memories, not only by making retrieved information more recallable in the future, but also via retrieval-induced forgetting of competing information. From a practical standpoint, Bjork was among the first to argue that the potency of retrieval as a learning event has broad implications for the optimization of instruction.
Finally, Bjork’s research on how people think they learn, versus actually learn, has demonstrated that our mental models of ourselves as learners and rememberers are faulty in some fundamental ways, which, among other things, means that optimizing instruction requires unintuitive innovations, including introducing desirable difficulties for the learner.

References

Bjork, R. A. (1989). Retrieval inhibition as an adaptive mechanism in human memory. In H. L. Roediger and F. I. M. Craik (Eds.), Varieties of memory and consciousness: Essays in honor of Endel Tulving (pp. 309-330). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Anderson, M. C., Bjork, R. A., & Bjork, E. L. (1994). Remembering can cause forgetting: Retrieval dynamics in long-term memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 20, 1063–1087.
Bjork, R. A. (1999). Assessing our own competence: Heuristics and illusions. In D. Gopher and A. Koriat (Eds.), Attention and performance XVII. Cognitive regulation of performance: Interaction of theory and application (pp. 435–459). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Dunlosky, J., & Bjork, R. A. (Eds.). (2008). A handbook of metamemory and memory: Essays in Honor of Thomas O. Nelson. New York: Psychology Press.

Elizabeth Bjork

Personal history

Elizabeth Ligon Bjork, the last child and only daughter in the family, was born in China during World War II, where her parents were medical missionaries. Immediately upon her birth, her mother was forced to flee to America with Elizabeth and her older brothers on a Japanese passenger ship, while her father remained behind to serve with the Red Cross. When the ship reached the coast of California, it was refused permission to dock, but the Coast Guard sent smaller boats out to bring Elizabeth, her mother, and her brothers to shore.
After living in California as “displaced persons” for several months, they were eventually allowed to move to Pennsylvania, the home state of Elizabeth’s mother. Her father, who was imprisoned by the Japanese, but eventually released in a prisoner exchange, was united with the family after the war and joined the Public Health Service. The family took up residence in Oklahoma, expecting to return to China some day—but that day never arrived—and they remained in Oklahoma for many years until eventually moving to New York City.
Growing up in Oklahoma, Elizabeth learned to love the outdoors, horseback riding, and many sports, especially college football, which verged on a religion in Oklahoma at that time. She was inspired by a gifted teacher to pursue a career in mathematics and eventually earned a bachelors degree in mathematics from the University of Florida, where she graduated with honors and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She discovered psychology somewhat by accident—when, during her senior year, she took introductory psychology to fulfill a general-education requirement—an experience that led her to apply to graduate programs in both mathematics and mathematical psychology.
After being accepted by the University of Michigan in both programs, she spent her first 2 years at Michigan studying in both departments, eventually deciding to focus on psychology and the study of memory. She had the good fortune to be mentored by Arthur Melton, a distinguished scientist and editor who had played an important role in establishing psychology as a science, distinct from philosophy and education.
Upon completing her Ph.D., during which time she was supported by NIH pre-doctoral fellowships, Elizabeth accepted a position as a Research Associate and Lecturer at the Rockefeller University in New York City, joining the Mathematical Psychology Laboratory, headed by William K. Estes. After marrying Robert A. Bjork in 1969, she returned to the University of Michigan, where he was a member of the faculty, and was appointed Assistant Professor in 1972. In 1974 she moved to what has since been her professional home, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where the Bjorks were one of the first couples in the University of California system to both hold professorial positions in the same department.
Across her years at UCLA, her professional achievements have been accompanied by nonprofessional achievements, including being the mother to three sons and earning age- and gender-group awards in distance running, including competing in three marathons. The paperback edition of the Handbook of Perception and Cognition, written by Elizabeth and Robert, was selected as a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book for 1997. In 2011 (with Robert Bjork) she was honored by the Federation of Associations in Brain & Behavioral Sciences.

Research

At the time Elizabeth and Robert Bjork were hired by UCLA, it remained the case that couples in the same department were obligated to work and teach in different areas—which accounts, in part, for many of Elizabeth Bjork’s early publications being in fields such as visual cognition (e.g., on the nature of input channels in visual processing, Psychological Review, 1977) and cognitive development (e.g., infants’ visual-spatial search errors, Memory & Cognition, 1984). Only about two decades later did the Bjorks feel free to collaborate on research: Their first joint publication—other than a brief conference publication in 1988—appeared 23 years after their marriage (Bjork & Bjork, 1992). Since that time, Elizabeth Bjork’s research focus has returned to what drew her to cognitive psychology: trying to understand the dynamics of human learning and memory.
Elizabeth Bjork has made key contributions to both basic and applied research on human memory. Her research on varieties of goal-directed forgetting, both intentional and unintentional, and on the adaptive role that inhibitory processes play in an efficient and adaptive memory system, has helped to clarify the competitive dynamics in human memory and how competition is resolved in the interests of keeping our memories current. Her basic and applied research on the implications of the science of memory for the optimization of instruction has also had a major impact, especially in clarifying the distinction and interaction between two dimensions of stored representations in memory: retrieval strength (the current ease of access to a representation) and storage strength (the degree to which a representation is inter-associated with related representations in memory).
Across her career, Elizabeth Bjork has served the field in multiple ways, including serving on editorial and grant-review panels. She has held a variety of administrative positions, including serving as Chair of UCLA’s Academic Senate. For her programmatic contributions to undergraduate teaching, including creating a research-methods course that every year provides hundreds of undergraduates with hands-on experience in how to conduct research—and has been a model for a number of other such courses at Universities in the United States—she was awarded UCLA’s Distinguished Teaching Award. She also originated and continues to oversee the Psychology Undergraduate Research Conference, which annually provides hundreds of undergraduates from UCLA and other colleges and universities the opportunity to present their research in a professional forum.

References

Bjork, R. A., & Bjork, E. L. (1992). A new theory of disuse and an old theory of stimulus fluctuation. In A. F. Healy, S. M. Kosslyn, and R. M. Shiffrin (Eds.), From learning processes to cognitive processes: Essays in honor of William K. Estes, (Vol. 2, pp. 35–67). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Bjork, E. L., & Bjork, R. A. (1996). Memory (Volume 10). In E. C. Carterette and M. P. Friedman (Eds.), Handbook of perception and cognition. New York: Academic Press.
Bjork, E. L., Bjork, R. A., & Anderson, M. C. (1998). Varieties of goal directed forgetting. In J. M. Golding and C. M. MacLeod (Eds.), Intentional forgetting: Interdisciplinary approaches (pp. 103–137). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Bjork, E. L., & Bjork, R. A. (2003). Intentional forgetting can increase, not decrease, the residual influence of to-be-forgotten information. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and, Cognition, 29, 524–531. (Featured, Science in Brief, Monitor on Psychology, 2003, September: “Study finds a dark side to forgetting false information,” E. Bensen.)
Bjork, E. L., deWinstanley, P. A., & Storm, B. C. (2007). Learning how to learn: Can experiencing the outcome of different encoding strategies enhance subsequent encoding? Psychological Bulletin & Review, 14, 207–211.

Research activity: the diary method

To better understand the diary method, record two to four events each day (including who/what/where/when) for the next five days. Record how meaningful each event is to you on a 7-point ascending scale (1 = arbitrary, 7 = extremely salient). On the sixth day try to recall as much detail as possible from each day without looking at your notes. Do you see any correspondence between your meaningfulness rating and the accuracy/vividness of your recall? What are the strengths and limitations of this technique?

Sir Francis Galton

Personal history

Perhaps it is no surprise that Francis Galton would lead an extraordinary life, being the half-cousin of Charles Darwin, with whom he shared many commonalities. Born on February 15, 1822 in Birmingham, England, to a family of wealthy gun manufacturers and bankers, it was said that he had learned to read by the age of 2 and was able to perform long division by 5. At the age of 8, he was sent to study French in Boulogne before joining the King’s Edward School in Birmingham at 14. Recognizing his many talents, his parents encouraged him to pursue a profession in medicine, which led to his enrollment (at the age of 16) at the Birmingham General Hospital and King’s College, London Medical School.
Feeling the desire to travel, he took a leave of absence from his studies, only to return to Trinity College at Cambridge to study mathematics from 1840 to 1844. Facing his upcoming honors exams, he suffered a nervous breakdown. Thus, he graduated with only a B.A. (without honors) around the time that his father died in 1844. With his father’s money and his subsequent Master’s degree, awarded in 1847, in hand, he opted out of his medical studies and, instead, took off for Africa and the Middle East.
During his extensive travels, Galton was known for measuring, and counted nearly everything he encountered, with a special fondness for geography and meteorology. Three years after joining the Royal Geographical Society in 1850, he won the Society’s gold medal, while continuing to write travel guides and books retelling his experiences. Galton became the general secretary of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, where he was a frequent presenter, from 1863 to 1867, as well as president of the anthropological and geographical contingents at separate times. He was made a fellow of the Royal Society in 1860, later receiving the prestigious Copley Medal and was knighted in 1909.
During his life, Galton, whose IQ has been estimated at around 200, produced over 340 papers and books, including an unpublished novel he wrote at the very end of his life. Galton’s death on January 17, 1911 brought with it an endowment to fund a chair of Eugenics at the University of London, which would go first to Karl Pearson, of statistical fame.

Research

Galton was a true jack-of-all-trades. Aside from being credited as creating the first weather map in 1875, he coined the term eugenics. He was a staunch advocate for eugenics and established the Eugenics Society of Great Britain in 1980 to drive the field of hereditary improvement. He also named and popularized the “nature versus nurture” debate over intelligence (strongly believing in heritability—in no small part due to his reading Darwin’s Origin of Species). In 1882 he discovered that fingerprints uniquely identify individuals and prompted Scotland Yard to implement a fingerprint database. He initiated the use of surveys as a means to collect data, and formulated the statistical concepts of correlation and regression to the mean.
Galton’s methods were detailed and inventive. For instance, he combed newspaper obituaries to trace people’s intelligence back through the generations for his book, Hereditary Genius, published in 1869. He termed measuring and documenting mental capacities and processes psychometry in his famous 1879 article, Psychometric Experiments. In carrying out these types of studies, he noted that psychological attributes, such as intelligence, fall along a normal distribution, thus permitting the use of percentile scores to rank people’s abilities—something the world’s first mental testing center he founded would attempt to do based largely on physical measurements as well as sensory acuity and behavioral reaction times.
Given Galton’s belief that people’s abilities are passed down through nature, he ignited the eugenics movement, suggesting that the “feeble-minded” should be prevented from breeding in order to improve society’s makeup. Moreover, he developed a technique that is used to this day to study the heritability of traits: looking at the differences between monozygotic (identical) and dizygotic (nonidentical) twins. 
Importantly for the study of memory, Galton developed a way to probe personal memories with a cue word. He was said to walk along Pall Mall in London and attempt to call up a memory based on the objects he would encounter along the way. He adopted a similar cue-association technique in the laboratory, making a list of words and then presenting them one-by-one to extract memories (of any type—semantic or otherwise), which he would carefully record and attempt to determine the age of. Crovitz and Schiffman in 1974 would adapt Galton’s general cueing technique in order to probe specifically for autobiographical, episodic memories.

References

Galton, F. R. S. (1869/1892/1962). Hereditary genius: An inquiry into its laws and consequences. London: Macmillan/Fontana.
Galton, F. R. S. (1883/1907/1973). Inquiries into human faculty and its development. New York: AMS Press.
Galton, F. R. S. (1879). Psychometric experiments. Brain, 2, 149–162.

Martin Conway

Personal history

Martin A. Conway left school when he was 15 years old and, after several jobs in factories, took a position as an apprentice boilersmith. Not the most promising start for a future academic. Fortunately, he was saved by the 1960s and abandoned his apprenticeship to become a hippie and go on the “hippie trail.” Kerouac’s Dharma Bums remains one of his favorite novels. Some years later he worked as a train driver at London’s King’s Cross station and then went to night classes in Holland Park where he obtained 3 A-levels in 3 years. Quite by chance his final A-level was in Psychology: a course taken by default when his History A-level course folded due to lack of students. It turned out that Psychology was his subject, not English Literature as he had always thought.
He then attended University College London as a “mature” student. He read Psychology and gained an upper second-class honors degree. During his degree he became particularly interested in the problem of how knowledge is represented in long-term memory and went on to take a Ph.D. place on a full time SSRC scholarship at the Open University.
The Ph.D. was a success and Conway then had a major stroke of luck: He was offered, by Alan Baddeley, and accepted a postdoctoral research position at the Medical Research Council’s Applied Psychology Unit (APU) in Cambridge. He knew nothing about Cambridge and the MRC, nor did he know that the APU was one of the world’s leading psychological research centers. The next 4 years (1983–1987) were momentous and he met most of the leading researchers of the day and developed a productive line of research into the then uninvestigated area of autobiographical memory: an area in which he was to establish an international reputation.
After Cambridge he worked as a Senior Lecturer (1987–1988) at Hatfield Polytechnic (now the University of Hertfordshire) and later as a lecturer at the University of Lancaster (1988–1993). In 1993 he was appointed Professor at the University of Bristol and became Head of Department in 1994, a post he held until 2001 when he left Bristol for a Professorship at the University of Durham, subsequently becoming Head of Department there. In 2004 he was awarded a prestigious 3-year ESRC Professorial Fellowship, and moved to the University of Leeds, Institute of Psychological Sciences, where he later became Director and at the same time founded the Leeds Memory Group.
He has authored and edited several books on human memory, regularly publishes in international memory journals (with over 150 journal publications to date), and co-edits the journal Memory, which he co-founded in 1993 with his wife Professor Susan Gathercole (the journal was, in fact, Sue’s idea). In 2008 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Liege: a great honor and one he remains particularly proud of.

Research

The approach Conway takes to research is one of “converging methodologies.” In order to eventually understand human memory and the nature of knowledge representation, there is no one single approach or method that will lead us to the deep theoretical understanding we seek. He has, therefore, conducted his research using experimental behavioral methods, survey methods, neuropsychology, clinical psychology, and neuroimaging. He has used these in the study of autobiographical memory, very long-term retention of knowledge, executive control of long-term memory, and consciousness and memory. He is also strongly committed to the public communication of science and has taken part in many media and SciArt projects.
Conway has reported many empirical findings in this area but he regards his main contribution as being theoretical. The overall framework he developed (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000) for conceptualizing autobiographical memory has been highly influential, as have further refinements of the framework. He has emphasized the role of goals and motivations in controlling what is encoded, stored, and retrieved. Central to this framework is the nature of the self. Perhaps his main contribution has been to draw to the attention of the field that the self and memory are intertwined.
In the 1990s, Conway studied the very long-term retention of knowledge, establishing that knowledge of psychology and works of literature studied at university can be retained over very long periods (12 years and more). He also established that there is what he terms an “R-to-K” shift during protracted learning. That is, a shift from remembering to knowing, and this can be tracked by studying the type of consciousness that occurs when a person accesses their knowledge.
In an effort to investigate the executive control of long-term memory, he has conducted a series of projects into inhibitory processes in human memory and how these can be used to shape the accessibility of memory details. He and his colleagues developed the notion of episodic inhibition, which proposes that during retrieval of a memory a pattern of activation/inhibition is configured over the contents of memory, making some details highly accessible and others inaccessible.
Several lines of Conway’s research have examined the role of different types of memory awareness and the nature of recollective experience. More recently in a theoretical paper he has suggested that states of memory awareness occur in what he terms the “remembering–imaging window.” The remembering part of the window refers to the detailed record of the recent past, which we all have and which stretches back in time several days, gradually decreasing in the number of specific memories and becoming more general. The imagining part of the window refers to our expectations and plans for the future, which are highly detailed for moments close in time, e.g., tomorrow, but gradually reduce in number and become less specific several days ahead. It is in this window that remembering and states of memory awareness occur—for both the past and the future.
Conway is particularly proud of his long-standing collaboration with video and installation artist Shona Illingworth. They have completed a series of projects together using art to express scientific ideas about memory. He has also been able to take part in and help create several English television and radio programs on memory including a BBC 2 Horizon program on Memory and the Self.

References

Conway, M. A., & Bekerian, D. A. (1987). Organization in autobiographical memory. Memory & Cognition, 15(2), 119–132.
Conway, M. A., Cohen, G., & Stanhope, N. (1991). On the very long-term retention of knowledge acquired through formal education: Twelve years of cognitive psychology. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 120(4), 1–22.
Conway, M. A., & Tacchi, P. C. (1996). Motivated confabulation. Neurocase, 2, 325–339.
Conway, M. A., & Pleydell-Pearce, C. W. (2000). The construction of autobiographical memories in the self memory system. Psychological Review, 107, 261–288.
Wang, Q., & Conway, M. A. (2004). The stories we keep: autobiographical memory in American and Chinese middle-aged adults. Journal of Personality, 73, 19–24.
Conway, M. A. (2008). Autobiographical memory and consciousness. In W. Banks (Ed.) The encyclopedia of consciousness (in press). The Netherlands: Elsevier.

David C. Rubin

Personal history

David Rubin began his studies at Carnegie-Mellon University, earning his B.S. in physics and psychology in 1968. He was a special student in psychology for a year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology while he served as an aerospace engineer for NASA, doing research and development in optics. In 1970, he enrolled in Harvard University’s Ph.D. program, graduating 4 years later. He started his academic career at Lawrence University, as an Assistant Professor of Psychology immediately after graduating, a position he would hold at Duke University, beginning in 1978. In 1987, Rubin was promoted to full Professor of Psychology, of Experimental Psychology, and is currently the Juanita M. Kreps Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience.
He has also spent time as a visiting scientist at the Medical Research Council’s Applied Psychology Unit in Cambridge, and at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, in addition to various fellowships and visiting professorships in the Netherlands, New Zealand, and Denmark. He is a Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development at the Duke University Medical Center and is a member of the affiliated faculty at Duke’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience.
Rubin’s book, Memory in Oral Traditions, has garnered numerous awards, including the American Association of Publishers' Best New Professional/Scholarly Book in Psychology for 1995. Additionally, Rubin has been honored with the William James Award from American Psychological Association.

Research

Rubin has been investigating the topic of human long-term memory for complex, real-world stimuli, especially oral traditions and autobiographical memories. In addition to developing a comprehensive theory of how cultures preserve oral traditions, he has also reported on the reminiscence bump in autobiographical memory. He has used memory materials ranging from paired-nonsense syllables, epic poems, and children’s rhymes. Rubin strives to focus on real-world situations, which has attracted interdisciplinary attention from psychologists and academics in the humanities, for instance. His broad, yet exacting, perspective has implications for numerous applied problems, such as neuropsychological damage and psychopathology.
With the publication of his 1986 book, Autobiographical Memory, Rubin is credited with defining the field interested in the empirical study of this subtype of memories, which was previously confined to the clinical domain, primarily. Since the early 1980s, Rubin had attempted to study the topic from the vantage point of a cognitive, rather than clinical, psychologist. His autobiographical memory research has led him to study bilingual populations, clinical patients, and the neuroimaging results from normal individuals. Ambitiously, Rubin is constructing a unified approach to, and theory of, human memory.

References

Rubin, D. C. (Ed.) (1986). Autobiographical memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Paperback edition, 1988.)
Rubin, D. C. (1995). Memory in oral traditions: The cognitive psychology of epic, ballads, and counting-out rhymes. New York: Oxford University Press.  (Paperback edition, 1997.)
Rubin, D. C., & Wenzel, A. E. (1996). One hundred years of forgetting: A quantitative description of retention. Psychological Review, 103, 734–760. 
Rubin, D. C., Berntsen, D., & Bohni, M. K. (2008). A mnemonic model of posttraumatic stress disorder: Evaluating basic assumptions underlying the PTSD diagnosis. Psychological Review, 115(4), 1084–1098.

Research activity: should experts on eyewitness testimony be called to give evidence?

Imagine you have been given the task of deciding whether experts should be brought to the stand to talk about the weaknesses of eyewitness testimony in any case that involves this kind of evidence. Review the evidence and decide whether you are going to advocate eyewitness testimony experts being called or not. Why have you made this decision? Are there any circumstances where you would advocate a different response? What kind of things do you think the expert witness should bring to the jurors’ attention?

Ronald P. Fisher

Personal history

Dr. Ronald Fisher was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1947. He earned a B.A. degree in Psychology from Queens College (1968), and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Experimental Psychology from The Ohio State University (1971, 1973). Shortly after completing his formal education, he worked as a post-doctoral fellow with F. Craik at the University of Toronto (1975–1977) and was a Visiting Scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles (1980–1983). He has been a member of the Psychology Department at Florida International University (FIU) since 1983 as Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and Professor. During that time, he spent a sabbatical year at the University of Haifa, Israel (1990–1991) where he co-authored his book (with Ed Geiselman) on the Cognitive Interview (Fisher & Geiselman, 1992). He currently serves as the Chair of the Legal Psychology doctoral program at FIU.
Professor Fisher served on the U.S. Department of Justice committee (National Institute of Justice) to establish national guidelines for collecting eyewitness evidence (1998–1999). He has also served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied and Legal and Criminological Psychology. He was recognized for his research and teaching by the Professorial Excellence Program of FIU (1999) and was given the Prix Honorifique (2008) at the Third International Conference on Investigative Interviewing. His research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (US), the National Institute of Justice (US), the National Institutes of Health (US), the British Academy, the Australian Research Council, the Economic and Social Research Council (UK), and the Ministry of Defence (UK).

Research

Professor Fisher’s research career can be divided into three overlapping phases, marked by his initial theoretical interests in cognition (1973–1985), his work to develop the Cognitive Interview (1983–2005), and, most recently, his work to examine other cognitively based behaviors related to the law (1995–present).
The earliest phase of his career focused primarily on theoretical issues of cognition, ranging from issues of divided attention, retrieval operations in recall and recognition, and the relation between encoding and retrieval operations in memory. Much of this research revealed common underlying processes across mental tasks (e.g., encoding and retrieval; recognition and cued recall; classification and recognition). His theoretical interest in retrieval operations underlying memory formed the basis for the next stage of his research career: developing more effective retrieval cues to retrieve real-world recollections.
The middle phase of Professor Fisher’s career revolved around his work with colleague Ed Geiselman to develop the Cognitive Interview (CI) technique to enhance witness memory. This endeavor began simply as an effort to develop more efficient retrieval strategies for witnesses, but soon evolved into a more complex interviewing protocol that takes into account not only the witness’s cognitive processes but also those of the interviewer. Later revisions of the CI also incorporate a much wider range of cognitive principles in addition to principles of social psychology, and communication. Validity tests show that the CI elicits considerably more information than do conventional interview procedures (ca. 30%–50% increase) and at comparable levels of accuracy.
In the last few years, Professor Fisher has adapted the CI to a variety of investigative domains, and has conducted training programs on the CI with major law enforcement, military, scientific, and investigative agencies, (e.g., FBI, British Police, Israeli Air Force, NASA, National Transportation Safety Board).
In the last few years, Dr Fisher has expanded his research to examine other applications of cognitive psychology to the law. One such area of research is the relation between consistency and accuracy of eyewitness recall. Recent findings challenge some long-standing legal assumptions about the role of consistency in assessing the accuracy of eyewitness testimony. A second area of research examines the cognitive underpinnings of deception. This research has revealed several theory-driven techniques that can improve investigators’ abilities to discriminate between liars and truth-tellers.
One common element that marks Dr Fisher’s research career has been the excellent co-researchers he has worked with, including, among others: Gus Craik, (University of Toronto), Ed Geiselman (UCLA), Brian Cutler (FIU), Neil Brewer (Flinders University), and Aldert Vrij (University of Portsmouth). Life at home is also sweeter with an excellent partner (Eva Fisher). Working and living with talented, devoted, reliable, caring people is always more enjoyable and successful.

References

Fisher, R. P. & Craik, F. I. M. (1977). Interaction between encoding and retrieval operations in cued recall. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 3, 701–711.
Fisher, R. P. & Geiselman, R. E. (1992). Memory-enhancing techniques in investigative interviewing: The cognitive interview. Springfield, IL: C.C. Thomas.
Vrij, A., Fisher, R., Mann, S., & Leal, S. (2006). Detecting deception by manipulating cognitive load. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10, 141–142.
Fisher, R. P., Brewer, N., & Mitchell, G. (2009). Relation between consistency and accuracy of eyewitness testimony: Legal versus cognitive explanations. In T. Williamson, R. Bull, and T. Valentine (Eds.), Handbook of psychology of investigative interviewing: Current developments and future directions. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons.

D. Stephen Lindsay

Personal history

D. Stephen Lindsay was born in Toronto, Canada, on May 6, 1958. Lindsay left Canada in 1967 and did most of his schooling in the US. He attended high schools in Utah, Nebraska, and Alaska, where he graduated from East Benson High School in 1976. A lackluster student in high school, he began postsecondary studies at Anchorage Community College, where he took some excellent psych classes from Ron Mosher. He transferred to Reed College, where in 1981 he completed an honors thesis on Piagetian conservation under the supervision of Carol Creedon.
Leaving Reed, Lindsay had no intention of pursuing further education, preferring to fish and carry lumber in Alaska, but a year later he accepted an invitation from Carol Creedon to return to Portland to do an independent research project in the summer of 1982. With Carol’s encouragement, he spent his evenings the following fall using his dad’s IBM Selectric typewriter to complete applications to grad schools.
He did a Masters degree with Susan Sugarman, then his doctoral work under the supervision of Marcia Johnson, both at Princeton University. Lindsay’s first post was at Williams College, a small liberal arts school in Massachusetts, where he struck up a collaboration with Colleen Kelley (who had just done a sabbatical with Larry Jacoby). He subsequently spent a fascinating year in Jacoby’s lab at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. In 1991 he left McMaster to take an Assistant Professorship at the University of Victoria, where he has remained except for a 2-year stint as Unilever Senior Research Fellow at the University of Wales, Bangor (1995–1997). He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1994 and to Professor in 1997.
Professor Lindsay received the American Psychological Association’s 1995 Young Investigator Award in Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. He served as Editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General from 2002 to 2007. He was honored by the University of Victoria's Faculty of Social Sciences’ Teaching Excellence Award (2006), and made a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science in 2005.

Research

Lindsay is best known for his contributions, in collaboration with Marcia Johnson, to the development of the “source-monitoring framework.” This is an evolving collection of ideas intended to explain how people attribute mental events (thoughts, images, feelings) to particular origins (e.g., memory, fantasy, inference) at varying degrees of specificity (e.g., a thought may simply be categorized as “a memory of something I once heard someone say” or as “a memory of what Moira said at the breakfast table yesterday morning”).
In terms of wider significance, Lindsay’s most important work is probably the 1994 article he and good friend Don Read wrote on the controversy regarding “recovered-memory experiences,” in which an individual comes to believe that s/he has recovered memories of a long-forgotten history of childhood sexual abuse. Their work on this topic helped convince clinicians that there are grounds for concern about highly suggestive approaches to trauma–memory-oriented psychotherapy, while helping critics of such therapies appreciate clinicians’ perspective on the debate. Lindsay has also applied the SM framework to a variety of other issues such as the eyewitness misinformation effect (suggestibility) in children and in adults, the relationship between confidence and accuracy in eyewitness suspect identifications, studies of how people judge whether or not they had previously recollected a particular past event, and the subjective experience of various kinds of reconstructive memory errors.

References

Lindsay, D. S. (2008). Source monitoring. In H. L. Roediger, III (Ed.) Cognitive psychology of memory. Vol. 2 of Learning and memory: A comprehensive reference (4 vols.) (J. Byrne, Editor) (pp. 325–347). Oxford: Elsevier.
Lindsay, D. S., Hagen, L., Read, J. D., Wade, K. A., & Garry, M. (2004). True photographs and false memories. Psychological Science, 15, 149–154.
Gruppuso, V., Lindsay, D. S., & Kelley, C. M. (1997). The process dissociation procedure and similarity: Defining and estimating recollection and familiarity in recognition memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 23, 2259–2278.
Lindsay, D. S., & Read, J. D. (1994). Psychotherapy and memories of childhood sexual abuse: A cognitive perspective. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 8, 281–338.
Lindsay, D. S. (1990). Misleading suggestions can impair eyewitnesses' ability to remember event details. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 16, 1077–1083.

R. Edward Geiselman

Personal history

Born on May 12, 1949, Ralph Edward Geiselman, a Chicago Cubs fan, grew up in Culver, Indiana—a small town with fewer residents than there are psychology majors at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he is currently a Professor of Psychology. He earned his Bachelors degree from Purdue University in 1972 where he studied engineering and psychology. Subsequently, he earned both Masters and Ph.D. degrees from Ohio University in experimental psychology. He joined the faculty at UCLA, where he is now Professor, in 1979. He has published over 100 research papers in peer-reviewed social science journals and police science journals. He is the author of five books including The Psychology of Murder, Intersections of Psychology, Psychiatry, and Law (Volumes 1, 2, and 3), Eyewitness Expert Testimony, and Memory Enhancing Techniques for Investigative Interviewing: The Cognitive Interview. He received the LASD Mary Ellen McCormick Award in 2013.
Dr Geiselman served on the Los Angeles Superior Court Expert Witness Panel for 20 years (1991–2011), offering expert testimony in hundreds of criminal trials for both federal and state courts. He has served as a consultant to numerous federal, state, and local law-enforcement agencies including the FBI, Secret Service, Homeland Security, Los Angeles Police Department, Los Angeles MTA, Chicago Multi-regional Training Center, and the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. He also has conducted investigative interviews for local police departments on cold cases in several states.
Dr Geiselman, a member of the Florida Bar Association, has been honored with a British Academy Fellowship and the Ohio University Significant Achievement Award. He lives with his wife, Cindy, and their two children in Conejo Valley.

Research

Dr Geiselman’s research centers on various aspects related to eyewitness testimony, including how eyewitnesses are interviewed and asked to identify suspects, how juries are instructed to handle the testimony, and how they go about deliberating verdicts. After realizing that police were given surprisingly little training in interviewing techniques for cooperative witnesses, he and Ronald P. Fisher, along with MacKinnon and Holland, developed the cognitive interview, which was aimed at extracting the greatest amount of reliable information from the memory of eyewitnesses.
This interviewing method has dramatically altered the way in which police interviews are conducted, emphasizing context reinstatement, the importance of retrieving any and all information—even if it seems insignificant, attempts to recall the event in several orders and from different viewpoints. In 1987, Fisher and Geiselman, along with their colleagues, enhanced the cognitive interview, with additional suggestions to minimize distractions and anxiety, encouraging the witness to speak slowly, with a pause between responses and the next question, and an interpretive comment following each response that avoids judgmental and personal remarks. Geiselman et al. went on to test the cognitive interview against other techniques, including hypnosis, finding that the cognitive interview yielded the most veridical statements fro witnesses.

References

Geiselman, R. E., Fisher, R. P., MacKinnon, D. P., & Holland, H. L. (1985). Eyewitness memory enhancement in the police interview: Cognitive retrieval mnemonics versus hypnosis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 70, 401–412.
Fisher, R. P., & Geiselman, R. E. (1992). Memory enhancement techniques for investigative interviews: The cognitive interview. Springfield, Illinois: Charles C. Thomas Publishers.
Geiselman, R. E. (1994). Providing eyewitness expert testimony in Los Angeles. Expert Evidence, 3, 9–15.
Geiselman, R. E. & Fisher, R. P. (1997). Ten years of cognitive interviewing. In D. Payne & F. Conrad (Eds.), Intersections in basic and applied memory research (pp. 291–310). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum.
Geiselman, R. E., Schroppel, T., Tubridy, A., Konishi, T., & Rodriguez, V. (2000). Objectivity bias in eyewitness performance. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 14, 323–332.
Geiselman, R. E., Putman, C., Korte, R., & Jachimowicz, G. (2002). Eyewitness expert testimony and juror decisions. American Journal of Forensic Psychology, 20, 1–16.
Geiselman, R. E., Keesler, M., Emrani, M., & Yu, J. (2008). Juror verdict predicted from a four-item voir-dire question battery. American Journal of Forensic Psychology, 29, 1–14.

Research activity: assess your prospective memory

Test your prospective memory! Make a list of all the things you need to remember to do over the course of a week and try to remember to do those things without the use of external aids, e.g. diaries, memo boards, reminders from other people. If there aren’t many things you have to remember try creating some, e.g. phone a friend at a specific time on a certain day. At the end of the week count up the number of things you remembered to do. Are there things that you forgot to do? Is there a pattern to the things you forget?

R. Key Dismukes

Personal history

Robert Key Dismukes was born on June 21, 1943 in Dhlonega, Georgia. In his early teens, while an indifferent student, two influences shaped what was to become a career that cuts across traditional boundaries. He became an amateur radio operator, which forced Dismukes to study and drew him to major in physics at the local small college. While serving in the Army after his Master’s degree, he had time to read and explore other domains and became interested in questions about the human mind and in issues concerning the interaction of science and technology with society.
The other influence in high school was a teacher who encouraged him to think of himself as a writer. Part of his work in each of the fields in which he has conducted research is to write about science in ways accessible to the general public. This writing also addresses ethical and social questions such as, “What are the responsibilities of scientists for the uses to which their research is put?”
After his tour of military duty, Dismukes went to Penn State for his Ph.D. in biophysics and then did a postdoctoral fellowship with Sol Snyder in neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. During this period he also wrote a series of “news and views” articles about neuroscience for Nature. He continued doing neuroscience research for several more years but was increasingly drawn to work at the interface of science and society. He received a fellowship to spend six months at the Institute for Society, Ethics, and the Life Sciences and was deeply influenced by the incisive way the philosophers there parsed complicated issues. He began the series of articles he has written over the years about the interaction of science and society in areas ranging from molecular biology to cognitive science.
Dismukes took a job as the study director for the Committee on Vision at the National Academy of Sciences—National Research Council, which gave him a chance to work with scientists from diverse disciplines on socio-technical issues such as the effect of prolonged video viewing on workers. From there he was drawn into jobs managing research organizations for another 8 years, but he discovered that he missed the excitement of doing research himself, so Dismukes decided to retool by combining his long-term love of aviation with what he had learned reading cognitive psychology in recent years.
He was the 2005 recipient of the NASA Honors Award, Exceptional Achievement Medal, the 2003 AMES Honor Award for mentorship, and the 2000 AMES Group Achievement Award.

Research

Dismuke’s experiences as a pilot—he is a sailplane instructor and holds airline transport pilot ratings—made him realize that the cockpit is an ideal setting for studying cognition in the wild. Flying is even more demanding of cognitive skills than of sensory-motor skills. Pilots must maintain an accurate mental model of dynamic situations, balance competing goals, make appropriate decisions, and perform procedural tasks with little margin for error. However, it is not possible to understand the skilled performance of expert operators using any single research approach. Thus, Dismukes and his colleagues combine several approaches: ethnographic field observations and interviews (which require deep domain expertise on the part of the observers), analysis of accident reports, well-controlled laboratory studies, and flight simulation.
Although many might consider this “applied” research, Dismukes has discovered that studying skilled performance in real-world settings uncovers fundamental questions that are not identified if one is confined to laboratory settings. For example, his analysis of accident reports revealed that inadvertent forgetting to perform a flight-critical task has contributed to many catastrophic accidents. His research group was already studying prospective memory, an exciting field that has mushroomed in recent years. However, existing research has focused heavily on two types of prospective memory—event-based and time-based—and laboratory studies have mainly studied performance of unfamiliar tasks.
His research group’s ethnographic research revealed that interruptions, frequent in real-world tasks, often result in expert operators forgetting to resume interrupted tasks after the end of the interruption. They theorized reasons for these prospective memory failures and designed a laboratory paradigm to test their ideas. Among their findings was that conventional laboratory paradigms fail to capture a frequent characteristic of real-world prospective memory situations: failure to fully encode an explicit intention to complete a deferred task. In the case of interruptions, this seems to be because attention is abruptly diverted to the source of the interruption.
Dismukes finds that moving back and forth among diverse research approaches both raises fundamental questions that might otherwise be missed and makes research more relevant to real-world issues. In some sense he sees himself as a dilettante, moving from topic to topic, but he rather likes the appellation (in the sense of a lover of an art or science), and this approach serves his goals of having fun and provoking scientists to think about their fields in new ways.

References

Dismukes, R. K., Berman, B. A., & Loukopoulos, L. D. (2007). The limits of expertise: Rethinking pilot error and the causes of airline accidents. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Dodhia, R. D., & Dismukes, R. K. (2009). Interruptions create prospective memory tasks. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 23(1), 73–89.
Dismukes, R. K. (2007). Prospective memory in aviation and everyday settings. In M. Kliegel, M. A. McDaniel, and G. O. Einstein (Eds.), Prospective memory: Cognitive, neuroscience, developmental, and applied perspectives. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Dismukes, R. K. (1979). What should society expect from scientists? Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, 35(9), 19–21. Reprinted in Current (1980) 220:23.

Marc McDaniel

Personal history

Mark McDaniel was born in Lafayette, Indiana. He received a Bachelor’s degree in mathematics and psychology from Oberlin College (in Ohio) in 1974, his Master’s in 1978 and his Doctorate in experimental psychology with a quantitative psychology minor in 1980, both from the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado. For a year he was a member of the technical staff at Bell Laboratories before joining the faculty at the University of Notre Dame in 1981. In 1987, he accepted a position at Purdue University as an Associate Professor. After 7 years he moved to the University of New Mexico, where he served for 2 years as chair of the department, until being recruited to Washington University in St. Louis in 2004. Since 2011 he has been Co-Director of the Center for Integrative Research on Cognition, Learning, and Education.
McDaniel, a fellow of the American Psychological Association, won the Heyers-Bowers Industrial Psychology Award in 1978, in addition to multiple other honors. In 2008 he was made a Fellow of the Society of Experimental Psychologists. Since 2012 he has been President, American Psychological Association, Division 3.

Research

McDaniel’s goal is to work at the intersection between theoretical and applied considerations in the field of memory. McDaniel is probably best known for his work in the realm of prospective memory. A common and pervasive memory task in daily activities is remembering to perform some intended action at a particular point in the future (termed prospective memory in the literature). Despite the widely recognized importance of prospective memory in everyday life, this topic was virtually ignored by memory researchers as recently as 20 years ago. The paucity of research was in part due to an absence of theoretical frameworks to guide prospective memory research and a lack of laboratory paradigms for investigating prospective memory.
In the past 18 years, he and Gilles Einstein have developed several fruitful laboratory paradigms to study prospective memory. Their findings have differentiated and identified different types of prospective memory, illuminated basic dynamics of retrieval that support prospective memory, demonstrated the importance of encoding processes in prospective remembering, documented counterintuitive effects of reminders, and revealed surprising effects of aging. His investigations of prospective memory and aging have recently examined neuropsychological and genetic (APOE polymorphisms) influences.
McDaniel also has a long-standing interest in the kinds of encoding processes that mediate memory, beginning with a paper he published in graduate school with Mike Masson. The foundation of much of his work in this area is the theoretical view that recall of the elements of an event is supported both by rich encoding of the individual features of the elements and by encoding relationships among elements. For instance, he has formulated and tested theoretical accounts of the effects of bizarreness on memory, the word frequency effect in recall, the generation effect, hypermnesia, and encoding difficulty effects (memory for items that require more effortful processing to comprehend).
His interests include extending the basic work outlined above to educationally relevant materials and tasks. Expanding his work on encoding difficulty, McDaniel and colleagues developed a more general framework, the Material Appropriate Processing (MAP) framework, that helps anticipate and understand the effects of various study activities on different types of prose materials. For example, he has applied the MAP framework to the mnemonic effects of outlining/embedded questions and illustrations. More recently he has addressed how encoding difficulty can enhance recall for low-ability readers and interact with one’s interest in a text passage to modulate recall. Other educationally relevant work includes a series of studies on elaborative study techniques, such as the keyword method and elaborative interrogation, and on associative learning dynamics for acquiring coding schemes for speech protheses.
Synchronous with the above work are his efforts in understanding the retrieval processes, especially those involved in recall. This research includes the development of a relational/item specific account of hypermnesia in free recall. Some of his work in this area has focused on the effects of retrieval on subsequent retention. Currently, in funded projects with Roediger and McDermott, he is extending this basic work to educational and classroom applications (test-enhanced learning project).
In collaboration with Jerry Busemeyer, McDaniel is focusing on human conceptual learning that extends beyond the traditional work on categorization of stimuli based on concrete perceptual features.

References

McDaniel, M. A., Einstein, G. O., & Jacoby, L. L. (2008). New considerations in aging and memory: The glass may be half full. In F. Craik and T. Salthouse (Eds.), The handbook of aging and cognition (3rd ed.) (pp. 251–310). Hove, UK: Psychology Press.
McDaniel, M. A., & Einstein, G. O. (2007). Prospective memory: An overview and synthesisof an emerging field. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
McDaniel, M. A., Roediger, H. L. III, & McDermott, K. B. (2007). Generalizing test-enhanced learning from the laboratory to the classroom. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 14, 200–206.
McDaniel, M. A., & Busemeyer, J. R. (2005). The conceptual basis of function learning and extrapolation: Comparison of rule and associative based models. Psychonomic Bulletin &Review, 12, 24–42.
McDaniel, M. A., & Einstein, G. O. (2005). Material appropriate difficulty: A framework for determining when difficulty is desirable for improving learning. In A. F. Healy (Ed.), Experimental cognitive psychology and its applications (pp. 73–85). Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association.

Gilles O. Einstein

Personal history

Born in Clermont-Ferrand, France, Gil Einstein moved to the United States at the age of 4 where he grew up in New Jersey. He became an American citizen in October, 2004. After receiving his Bachelor’s degree from Lafayette College, (a small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania) in 1972, he pursued his Doctorate in psychology from the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado, which he received in 1977. He interrupted his graduate studies for a year’s leave of absence skiing in Crested Butte, Colorado. A season of working as a ski-lift operator convinced him to return to graduate school and finish his degree. He was heavily influenced both by his mentor at Lafayette College, Burt Cohen, and his supervisor at the University of Colorado, Bill Battig.
In 1977, Einstein joined the faculty at Furman University, where he received the Meritorious teaching Award in 1985 and the first annual Excellence in Teaching Award in 2006. In 2014 he was awarded an Association for Psychological Science Mentor Award. He is a general experimental psychologist with special interests in memory and cognition.
Einstein is a Fellow of Divisions 2, 3, and 20 of the American Psychological Association, on the governing board of Division 3, past president of Southeastern Workers in Memory, and he has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Memory Cognition, and Psychology and Aging. He is the author or co-author of over 75 articles, book chapters, and books, and 31 of his co-authors are Furman students. He and Mark McDaniel are authors of two recent books: Memory Fitness: A Guide for Successful Aging (2004) and Prospective Memory: An Overview and Synthesis of an Emerging Field (2007).
Einstein believes strongly that research is an excellent learning experience for undergraduates. His commitment to undergraduate research is reflected in his involvement in national organizations that support and promote research activities for undergraduates. He chaired the Furman Advantage Program for 14 years.
Dr. Einstein and his wife Patty, who graduated from the University of Colorado in psychology and is a retired realtor, have two daughters named Julie and Alex. They love sports, especially surfing, skiing, soccer, and basketball.

Research

Along with his long-time friend and collaborator (and graduate school buddy), Mark McDaniel, Einstein studies prospective memory (memory for actions to be performed in the future, like remembering to take medication). In contrast to the relatively well-studied retrospective memory (memory for past events), prospective memory necessitates recalling what one must do without an external agent. Einstein’s work supports the notion that to successfully retrieve prospective memories, individuals engage in both automatic and consciously controlled processes. Over the past 15 years, Einstein and his colleagues have attempted to determine the particular processes that support prospective memory, their limitations in real-world situations, and how the ability changes over the lifespan.
Currently he is endeavoring to develop an intervention encouraging patients to better adhere to their anti-hypertensive medication schedule by shifting the burden of remembering from self-initiated processes dependent on working memory to environmentally-supported associative processes, which occur much more automatically—even in the elderly.
More broadly, he and Mark McDaniel seek to identify easy-to-use strategies that can be used to improve all types of memory in everyday settings and exercises (both physical and mental), as well as drugs and nutritional supplements, that might be able to preserve and enhance memory abilities. He and his collaborators also study the symptoms and risk factors related to Alzheimer’s disease in an effort to help sufferers, and their caretakers, cope with the cognitive and mnemonic deficits.

References

Einstein, G. O., & McDaniel, M. A. (1990). Normal aging and prospective memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 16, 717–726.
Einstein, G. O., & McDaniel, M. A. (2004). Memory fitness: A guide for successful aging. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Einstein, G. O., McDaniel, M. A., Thomas, R., Mayfield, S., Shank, H., Morrisette, N., & Breneiser, J. (2005). Multiple processes in prospective memory retrieval: Factors determining monitoring versus spontaneous retrieval. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 134, 327–342.

Rebekah Smith

Personal history

Rebekah Elizabeth Smith was born in Beirut, Lebanon, on December 24, 1965. She and her brothers, Christopher and Gabriel, grew up in New Orleans where her father, Marcus, is a member of the English faculty at Loyola University and where her mother, Sarah, is currently director of the Academic Enrichment Program and Disability Services, also at Loyola University.
Rebekah received her B.S. in mathematics from Tulane University in 1988 before entering the graduate program in mathematics at Brown University. When Rebekah began to question whether life as a mathematician was really the right path for her, a roommate recommended that Rebekah consider a career in psychology, as this was a way to use her analytic skills in a more directly applied venue. Rebekah returned to New Orleans and enrolled in an Introductory Psychology class at Loyola. Reading the chapter on memory in the psychology text was all that was needed; she was hooked.
After taking additional psychology courses at Loyola, Rebekah moved to North Carolina and entered the graduate program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Following completion of her Master’s degree, Rebekah spent a year working as a research coordinator on a project investigating aging and prospective memory that was being conducted by Gilles Einstein at Furman University. Prospective memory, which involves remembering to perform an action in the future, became a central focus in Rebekah’s research when she returned to UNC-G. Rebekah received a Graduate Research Scholarship in 1998 from the American Psychological Foundation and the Councils of Graduate Departments of Psychology to support her dissertation research, which proposed an alternative explanation for how we complete prospective memory tasks.
Rebekah completed her Ph.D. in 1999 in cognitive psychology under the direction of R. Reed Hunt and went on to a postdoctoral position in the labs of Randall Engle and Christopher Hertzog at the Georgia Institute of Technology, during which time she was invited to participate in the Summer Institute on Aging Research conducted by the National Institute on Aging and the Brookdale Foundation in 2000.
When the opportunity arose to apply her mathematical background in a postdoctoral position focusing on cognitive aging and mathematical modeling with Ute Johanna Bayen at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Rebekah returned to North Carolina. After her first year as a postdoctoral associate at UNC-CH, Rebekah was awarded an Individual National Research Service award from the National Institute on Aging at the National Institutes of Health. Rebekah also received the Gordon H. DeFriese award from the UNC-CH Institute on Aging. Following completion of her postdoctoral training, Rebekah joined the research faculty at UNC-CH. In January 2006, Rebekah and Reed, now married, moved to Texas where they were both on the faculty at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Rebekah is currently Chair and Professor of Psychology at the University of Mississippi.

Research

During the year that Rebekah worked with Gil Einstein, they conducted several experiments investigating the relationship between aging, capacity, and prospective memory performance. While working on this research Rebekah noticed that the older adults were much less likely than younger adults to have any "free moments" during which they were not actively dealing with the ongoing tasks. Reflecting on her own prospective memory failures, she noticed that she was more likely to forget intended actions when she was particularly busy. These observations led to her to consider that prospective memory requires capacity, a conclusion that would not shock the layperson or many researchers in the area of prospective memory. However, extant theories of prospective memory at the time did not include a sufficient role for capacity determinants of performance.
Eventually, Rebekah proposed a new theory of prospective memory in which capacity is required for preparatory attentional processes that must be engaged in order to successfully perform the prospective memory task (Smith, 2003, 2008). According to the Preparatory Attentional and Memory Processes (PAM) theory, these required preparatory attentional processes are resource demanding and, while they can involve explicit strategic monitoring for the target event, the preparatory processes may sometimes involve much more subtle processes needed for maintaining the intention. In addition, capacity is required for the performance or scheduling of actions after the task has been brought to mind by an external signal. In collaboration with Ute Bayen, Rebekah developed a mathematical model based upon the PAM theory (Smith & Bayen, 2004) and has applied the model to begin investigating how factors such as cognitive aging and individual differences in working memory capacity influence the cognitive processes involved in prospective memory.
In addition to her primary line of research, Rebekah, in collaboration with Reed Hunt, has pursued several issues concerning the role of organizational and distinctive processing in memory. One of the projects involved the false memory effect obtained in the Deese/ Roediger and McDermott paradigm. Rebekah discovered that presenting visual study presentation reduced false memories relative to auditory study presentation. Rebekah went on to explain this modality effect in the context of organizational and distinctive processing and demonstrated that the principles of organizational and distinctive processing offer a general explanation of the high rate of intrusions in the paradigm (Smith & Hunt, 1998). In addition, Rebekah has investigated the role of organization and distinctiveness in autobiographical memory, retrieval-induced forgetting, indirect memory tests, and aging.

References

Smith, R. E. (2003). The cost of remembering to remember in event-based prospective memory: Investigating the capacity demands of delayed intention performance. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 29, 347–361.
Smith, R. E. (2008). Connecting the past and the future: Attention, memory, and delayed intentions. In M. Kliegel, M. A. McDaniel, and G. O. Einstein (Eds.), Prospective memory: Cognitive, neuroscience, developmental, and applied perspectives (pp. 27–50). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
Smith, R. E., & Bayen, U. J. (2004). A multinomial model of event-based prospective memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 30, 756–777.
Smith, R. E., & Hunt, R. R. (1998). Presentation modality affects false memory. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 5, 710–715.

Research activity: childhood memories

Think of a poignant event in your early childhood. It may be the birth of a brother or sister, the loss of a family member, getting or losing a pet, the first day at school, or some other significant event. How old were you when this event occurred? What details can you remember? What was the order of events? Who else was there? Does your memory seem complete?

If you can, ask someone else who was present at the event whether your recollections are correct. This person ideally should be someone who was an adult at the time of the event. How much of what you recalled was correct? Is there anything that you recalled incorrectly? Is there anything that you failed to remember?

Carolyn Rovee-Collier

Personal history

Born in 1942 in Nashville, Tennessee, Carolyn Rovee-Collier grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and attended Louisiana State University (1959–1962), where her father was a Distinguished Professor of Anatomy and Physiology. She became enamored with learning in her sophomore year and volunteered to “run rats” in magnitude of reward studies for her professor. In 1961 and 1962, she received NSF Predoctoral Summer Fellowships from Roscoe B. Jackson ("JAX") Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, to study learning by newborn puppies with Walt Stanley. This experience was formative.
In graduate school at Brown (1962–1966), she studied experimental psychology with Schlosberg (perception), Riggs (sensory scaling, quantitative methods), Pfaffmann (physiological), Blough (operant discrimination), Lipsitt (experimental child), Church (punishment), Engen (psychophysics), Shrier (comparative), Kling (positive reinforcement), and Millward (learning theory). Engen directed her dissertation on olfactory psychophysics with infants in Lipsitt’s Newborn Sensory and Conditioning Laboratory at the Providence Lying-in Hospital. Her training in psychophysics shaped her thinking, leading her to view a stimulus as the “subjective stimulus” and to regard individual learning and retention data as sensory functions, which are expressed in logs (ratios) rather than in absolute values.
In 1965, her first academic appointment was at Trenton State College, in New Jersey. In 1970, she moved to Rutgers University, New Brunswick, where she was Professor of Psychology. For two decades, she performed studies on diet selection, antipredator behavior, and thermoregulation with 1- to 21-day-old. Her investigation of learning and memory abilities in 2- to 18-month-old infants has appeared in more than 200 publications, including a book (with Hayne and Colombo) entitled, The development of implicit and explicit memory (John Benjamins/Amsterdam, 2001).
In 2003, Dr Rovee-Collier received the highly coveted Howard Crosby Warren Medal (Society of Experimental Psychologists), awarded for the most outstanding research in experimental psychology in the USA or Canada in the preceding 5 years. She has also received the 2001 Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award (Society for Research in Child Psychology), the 2007 Senior Scientist Award (International Society for Developmental Psychobiology), the 2003 Distinguished Achievement Medal (Graduate School, Brown University), a James McKeen Cattell Fellowship, a MERIT Award and two Research Scientist Awards (NIMH), and was named a 2007 William James Distinguished Lecturer (Association of Psychological Science). Her transcribed autobiography is in the SRCD National Archives as part of its Oral History Project.
She was particularly proud of the many dedicated undergraduate and graduate students who have contributed to her research. Most are co-authors on publications, and some have received national and international recognition (two ISIS and three ISDP Dissertation Awards; four National Psi Chi Undergraduate Research Awards—three first place and one third place).
Dr. Rovee-Collier served as the Editor of Infant Behavior and Development (1981–1998) and the Co-Editor (with Lipsitt) of Advances in Infancy Research (vols. 4–12). She was President of ISIS, ISDP, and the Eastern Psychological Association, and the Secretary-Treasurer (executive officer) of SEP.
Dr. Rovee-Collier sadly passed away on October 2, 2014 after a period of illness.

Research

During her highly productive career, Rovee-Collier has made numerous contributions to the study of development and memory. She is perhaps best known for her fortuitous discovery of mobile conjugate reinforcement—a procedure that promotes rapid learning and high response rates throughout an extended session and over multiple sessions. The operant conditioning this paradigm relies upon is inherently interesting to young infants, reducing the likelihood that infants will underperform due to a simple lack of motivation. Through her work using this and other paradigms, she found evidence that a forgotten memory can often be re-activated, or primed, by briefly exposing the subject to an isolated aspect of the original event (a reminder). The reminder completely recovers the memory, which is then re-forgotten at the same rate it was originally forgotten.
Her work has demonstrated that there is a limited period (“time window”) after an event occurs within which a succeeding event can be integrated with its retrieved memory but after which it cannot. A time window progressively widens with each retrieval of the memory, thereby increasing the opportunity for integrating a future event with it. Retrieval later in the time window yields a larger retention benefit.
Rovee-Collier also found that young infants readily associate stimuli they merely see together, with no reinforcement for doing so. These new associations can remain latent for weeks—perhaps months. Because younger infants are less selective than adults in what aspects of events they attend, they learn more than adults about the same event. In effect, young infants’ “problem” is that they learn too much and must shed associations that are extraneous.
Additionally, she has provided evidence that all of the independent variables that produce functional memory dissociations on indirect and direct tests with amnesiacs also produce functional memory dissociations on reactivation and delayed recognition tests, respectively, with 2- to 6-month-old infants. These data indicate that if there are two memory systems, then they develop simultaneously from very early in infancy, not hierarchically.

References

Sullivan, M. W., Rovee-Collier, C., & Tynes, D. M. (1979). A conditioning analysis of infant long-term memory. Child Development, 50, 152–162.
Rovee-Collier, C. (1995). Time windows in cognitive development. Developmental Psychology, 31, 147–169.
Rovee-Collier, C. (1997). Dissociations in infant memory: Rethinking the development of implicit and explicit memory. Psychological Review, 104, 467–498.
Barr, R., Vieira, A., & Rovee-Collier, C. (2001). Mediated imitation in 6-month-olds: Remembering by association. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 79, 229–252.
Campanella, J. L., & Rovee-Collier, C. (2005). Latent learning and deferred imitation at 3 months. Infancy, 7, 243–262
Barr, R., Rovee-Collier, C., & Campanella, J. (2005). Retrieval facilitates retrieval: Protracting deferred imitation by 6-month-olds. Infancy, 7, 263–283.
Cuevas, K., Rovee-Collier, C., & Learmonth, A. E. (2006). Infants form associations between memory representations of stimuli that are absent. Psychological Science, 17, 543–549.
Rovee-Collier, C., & Cuevas, K. (2009, January). Multiple memory systems are unnecessary to account for infant memory development: An ecological model. Developmental Psychology, Special Section (A. Diamond, Ed.): The interplay between biology and the environment.

Robyn Fivush

Personal history

Robyn Fivush was born and grew up in New York City and attended college directly out of high school, going first to Hunter College of the City University of New York and then to State University of New York at Stony Brook, where she graduated with a B.A. in psychology in 1975. She then went straight into a Master's program at the New School for Social Research, completing that in 1977 before completing her Ph.D. at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 1983. She became an instructor in 1980 at Baruch College of the City University of New York. During her time there, she also became a research coordinator at the Developmental Psychology Program, at the City University of New York.
Her 2-year post-doctoral fellowship at the Center for Human Information Processing at the University of California, San Diego began in 1982. Following this, she became an Assistant Professor at Emory University, and was promoted to Associate Professor in 1990, and to full Professor in 1996, at which point she became Director of the Institute for Women’s Studies. In 2001, she became the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Psychology at Emory University.
Fivush was awarded the Lilly Post-doctoral Teaching Award for the time between 1985 and 1986. She was William Evans Fellow at the University of Otago, New Zealand in Spring, 2000. She is also a fellow of the American Psychological Society.

Research

Fivush has been investigating how life stories, or narratives, are developed through social interaction and how they help shape people’s self-identity. For example, the stories families share with each other about their past experiences serve to create a family history, bond the family members, and instill in children how they should relate to other people.
One topic of primary interest to Fivush and her lab has been the ways in which parents and children reminisce. While some parents are more elaborative, including detail, emotion, and evaluation in their narratives, others are less so. These differences hold implications for the type, number, and depth of childhood memories that are retained. These findings have led to the development of the socio-cultural approach to autobiographical memory development, which highlights the role language and culture in advancing the ability to express one’s autobiographical memories in a coherent narrative.
Fivush has been interested in how the emotional qualities of events change the way they are remembered. For instance, negative, stressful experiences tend to produce longer and more thought/emotion-centered narratives, compared to narratives of positive events. These differences may be important to one’s self-understanding and emotional wellbeing.
Fivush is involved in the Emory Asthma Project, which examines how children with chronic asthma cope. The Project has been finding that mothers who encourage more explanatory and emotionally expressive narratives about stressful events relating to the asthma have children with better coping skills and higher levels of emotional wellbeing. Acute, traumatic events, such as hurricanes and tornados, result in characteristically less-detailed and emotional narratives for individuals who experienced more stress. Following these individuals over time, longitudinally, Fivush and colleagues have found that children who had difficulties providing a detailed, emotionally regulated narrative of the trauma in its immediate aftermath were the ones to show the most stress-related symptoms years after the original event took place.
Additionally, Fivush has discovered that, unlike adults, young children who cannot create coherent and emotionally-regulated narratives of stressful events do not benefit from expressive writing (e.g., in diaries). Thus, these children may require the guidance of an adult to help shape the narrative into a more coherent and emotionally regulated work.

References

Fivush, R., & Nelson, K. (2004). Culture and language in the emergence of autobiographical memory. Psychological Science, 15, 586–590
Fivush, R., Haden, C. A., & Reese, E. (2006). Elaborating on elaborations: Maternal reminiscing style and children's socioemotional outcome. Child Development, 77, 1568–1588
Fivush, R. (2008). Remembering and reminiscing: How individual lives are constructed in family narratives. Memory Studies, 1, 45–54.

Research activity: aging and prospective memory

How good are you at remembering to do things in the future, for example posting a letter or making a call at a certain time? Remembering things that you need to do is known as prospective memory, and some studies have shown that it declines with age. If you can, ask an older friend or relative how easy they find it to perform prospective memory tasks. Are they able to remember to do certain things more easily than others? Do they use any external memory aids to help to remember to do things in the future? Compare their answers with your own and assess whether there are any differences.

Timothy A. Salthouse

Personal history

Timothy Salthouse earned his Bachelor’s degree in 1969 from the University of California at Santa Barbara. He went on to receive his Master’s degree in 1971 and his Ph.D. 3 years later, both from the University of Michigan. Salthouse spent the next decade, beginning in 1976, at the University of Missouri, working his way from Assistant Professor to Professor. Between the years of 1986 and 2000, he served as Professor, then Regents Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Currently, Salthouse is the Brown-Forman Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, and the Gerontological Society of America.
Salthouse has received numerous honors and awards, including the American Psychological Association’s Division 20 Distinguished Contribution Award (1995), a William James Fellowship from the Association for Psychological Science (1998), and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for Intelligence Research (2012). Between the years of 1991 and 1996, he edited the journal Psychology and Aging. Salthouse’s paper, The processing speed theory of adult age differences in cognition, was named one of the ten most-cited articles between 1995 and 2005 in the fields of Psychology and Psychiatry.

Research

Salthouse has been investigating how the normal aging process affects cognitive functioning. His research emphasizes both the gains (e.g., knowledge/acquired information) and the declines (e.g., processing efficiency under testing conditions) associated with aging. His lab seeks to determine which facets of cognitive functioning are compromised in old age, leading to the measured deficits, how those factors are organized, and what factors can mitigate the declines.
Importantly, Salthouse points out that the age-related influences on different cognitive variables (e.g., memory performance or reasoning abilities) likely share a common cause. He has found that one major influence on age-related changes is processing speed, which was a key tenet of his speed of processing theory of adult age differences in cognition, published in 1996.
Salthouse proposed two possible mechanisms that could result in the speed-related cognitive impairments. He suggested that certain cognitive processes are truncated midstream when processing speed is slow and time is limited. Another, non-mutually-exclusive possibility is that slow processing disrupts the synchronicity of the numerous, ongoing, cognitive operations that feed off of each other. In either case, Salthouse has provided convincing evidence that processing speed is a likely mediator through which adult age differences affect cognitive functioning. However, he recognizes that it is almost definitely not the only factor. Therefore, he recommends using a multivariate approach in order to better understand how all these factors combined affect cognitive abilities.
In the future Salthouse expects that neurobiological variables such as estimates of the volumes of brain regions from MRI, of regional brain activation patterns from functional neuroimaging, of neurotransmitter quantity, and of myelin integrity will be combined with cognitive variables to allow more comprehensive analyses of the interrelations of age-related influences on different aspects of cognitive functioning (e.g., memory or reasoning).

References

Salthouse, T. A. (1996). The processing speed theory of adult age differences in cognition. Psychological Review, 103, 403–428.
 Salthouse, T. A. (1991). Theoretical perspectives on cognitive aging. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Salthouse, T. A., & Babcock, R. L. (1991). Decomposing adult age differences in working memory. Developmental Psychology, 27, 763–776.
Salthouse, T. A., Atkinson, T. M., & Berish, D. E. (2003). Executive functioning as a potential mediator of age-related cognitive decline in normal adults. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 132, 566–594.

Lars Bäckman

Personal history

Lars Bäckman was born on April 1, in Umeå, Sweden. He was educated at the University of Umeå for both his undergraduate and graduate degrees. His postdoctoral fellowship was completed between 1985 and 1986 at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Education in Berlin. After holding a position as a research scientist at the University of Umeå’s Department of Psychology for over a year, he was named a researcher in the Department of Clinical Neuroscience and Family Medicine at the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm in the geriatrics section in 1988. He was simultaneously named Director of the Stockholm Gerontology Research Center, a position he holds to this day. He has since been a member of faculty at Göteborg and Uppsala Universities and is currently Professor of Psychology and Aging at the Aging Research Center of the Karolinksa Institute in Stockholm.
Bäckman is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the European Academy of Sciences. He has published several books and close to 300 papers in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes.

Research

Bäckman’s primary research area is cognition in normal and pathological aging, with a special focus on memory. His research activities range from large-scale epidemiological studies to experimental brain-imaging work. Major current themes include the transition from normal aging to dementia, the neural basis for cognitive plasticity across the life span, and the role of dopamine functions in cognitive aging. He has worked on the Betula Study—a prospective cohort study of memory, health, and aging—which indicated that higher levels of systolic blood pressure and pulse pressure are indicative of a greater chance of a future dementia diagnosis.
Other data collected by Bäckman and others indicate that, within demented individuals, age, gender, education, digit span, and dementia etiology surprisingly do not predict the rate of memory, visuospatial, or verbal declines. Further work has investigated the genetic effects on executive functioning and working memory.
In healthy adults, semantic memory shows minor longitudinal improvements until age 55, at which point it begins to decline, on average, though less so than does episodic memory. Further substantiating differences in the age-related trajectories of semantic and episodic memories, other studies in which Bäckman was involved, demonstrated that after controlling for background factors, age predicts episodic but not semantic memory performance.
Bäckman found, separately, that while both old and young adults benefit from working memory training, only the young group demonstrated the ability to transfer these skills to another test that taps memory updating. In this study, Bäckman used fMRI to examine functional differences between pre- and post-training on various tasks of interest, as well as control conditions. Results indicated that transfer occurs when both the trained and nontrained task recruit overlapping brain regions—in this case, the striatum.
In addition to studying the ways in which the elderly are disadvantaged, Bäckman has been investigating how individuals are able to compensate for sensory handicaps, cognitive impairments, interpersonal losses, and brain injury.

References

Bäckman, L., & Dixon, R. A. (1992). Psychological compensation: A theoretical framework. Psychological Bulletin, 112, 259–283.
Dahlin, E., Stigsdotter-Neely, A., Larsson, A., Bäckman, L., & Nyberg, L. (2008). Transfer of learning after updating training mediated by the striatum. Science, 320, 1510–1512.
Nilsson, L.-G., Adolfsson, R., Bäckman, L., Molander, B., & Nyberg, L. (2004). Betula: A prospective study on memory, health, and aging. Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, 11, 134–148.
Nyberg, L., Bäckman, L., Nilsson, L. -G., Erngrund, K., & Olofsson, U. (1996). Age differences in episodic memory, semantic memory, and priming: Relationships to demographic, intellectual, and biological factors. Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, 51, 234–240.
Rönnlund, M., Nyberg, L., Bäckman, L., & Nilsson, L. -G. (2005). Stability, improvement, and decline in adult life-span development of declarative memory: Cross-sectional and longitudinal data from a population-based study. Psychology and Aging, 20, 3–18.
Small, B. J., & Bäckman, L. (1998). Predictors of longitudinal changes in memory, visuospatial, and verbal performance in very old demented adults. Dementia and Geriatric Cognitive Disorders, 9, 258–266.

Moshe Naveh-Benjamin

Personal history

Moshe Naveh-Benjamin was born in Jerusalem, Israel. He received his B.A. in 1976 in psychology and economics from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and his Ph.D. in experimental-cognitive psychology in 1981 from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Naveh-Benjamin joined Ben-Gurion University in Israel as a lecturer in 1981 and was promoted up to a full professor. In 2002, he joined the University of Missouri, where he serves now as a professor of psychology. He was a visiting professor at the University of Michigan (1996–1997, and summers of 1982–1997), the University of Toronto (1992–1994 and 1999–2001), the Rotman research Institute in Toronto (1999–2001), and the Max Planck Institute in Berlin (spring of 2007 and summer of 2008).
He has served as a reviewer and editorial consultant for numerous journals, as well as a guest editor for the journal Memory. He is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, and has received the 2008 University of Missouri Chancellor’s Award for Outstanding Research and Creative Activity in the Social and Behavioral Sciences.

Research

Naveh-Benjamin has been researching human memory processes and structures both in the laboratory and in real-world settings, looking at how attention contributes to encoding and retrieval processes. Additionally, he has been investigating how episodic memory abilities change in old age.
Naveh-Benjamin’s early work concentrated on how focused attention at the time of encoding can dramatically improve retention. His later work has revealed a surprising dissociation. Specifically, he found that dividing attention at retrieval doesn’t have nearly the same damaging effect it does at the time of encoding. Thus, his evidence suggests that attentional resources crucial at encoding are less necessary during retrieval. The relatively small deficit seen at retrieval when attention is divided, however, demonstrates that memory retrieval is not completely automatic.
The associative deficit framework Naveh-Benjamin proposed attempts to explain age-related changes in episodic memory, largely by the difficulties experienced by older adults in creating and retrieving associations between memories, despite having near-normal abilities in remembering the individual pieces of information. He and the members of his lab are actively engaged in testing the predictions of this hypothesis against other, competing explanations.
In order to isolate the basic components of encoding and retrieval, Naveh-Benjamin has employed online performance measures. Secondary tracking tasks permit this type of temporal micro-level analysis, as the errors on this task can then be used to predict how vulnerable memories from the primary task are to disruption (by divided attention, for instance).
Naveh-Benjamin has also been active in attempting to apply his work to educational and other real-life settings. The knowledge assessments he and his collaborators have developed allow them to track how knowledge structures change over time, depending on environmental factors and individual differences.

References

Naveh-Benjamin, M. (1987). Coding of spatial location information—an automatic process? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 13, 595–605.
Naveh-Benjamin, M., & Guez Y. (2000). The effects of divided attention on encoding and retrieval processes: Assessment of attentional costs and a componential analysis. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 26, 1461–1482.
Naveh-Benjamin, M. (2000). Adult-age differences in memory performance: Tests of an associative deficit hypothesis. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 26, 1170–1187.
Naveh-Benjamin, M., Craik, F. I. M., Guez, J., & Kreuger, S. (2005). Divided attention in younger and older adults: Effects of strategy and relatedness on memory performance and secondary task costs. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 32, 520–537.

Research activity: amnesia in popular fiction

Amnesia is a common theme in popular fiction, particularly in movies and on television. How many examples of amnesia in popular fiction can you come up with, and what type of amnesia was the character suffering from?

Larry R. Squire

Personal history

In high school, Larry Squire was asked to publicly present a lecture to the student body. His chosen topic, hypnosis, started Squire on the career path for which he seemed destined. Squire did his undergraduate work at Oberlin College where, studying memory, his fascination of the complexities of the mind met his fondness for quantitative and controlled research. Most of his early work involved rodents, as he initially shied away from the complications of studying human subjects. After graduating in 1963, he attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for his Ph.D. training, ending in 1968. After completing his postdoctoral fellowship at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, he moved to the University of California, San Diego, where he currently holds the title of Professor of Psychiatry, Neurosciences, and Psychology.
In 1971, he read the work on amnesia by Elizabeth Warrington and Helen Sanders, which had the effect of convincing him to study memory and amnesia in humans. In the late 1970s, his collaboration with Stuart Zola led him to incorporate yet another subject population: monkeys. Additionally, he has an appointment as a Research Career Scientist at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in the city. During his illustrious career, he served as President of the Society for Neuroscience between 1993 and 1994, in addition to gaining membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Institute of Medicine.
Squire, a William James Fellow of the American Psychological Society, has received numerous awards, including the society’s Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, the William Middleton Award from the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Charles A. Dana Award for Pioneering Achievements in Health and Education, the McGovern Award, the Karl Lashley Prize, the Metropolitan Life Foundation Award for Medical Research, and the Howard Crosby Warren Medal from the Society of Experimental Psychologists. Squire has published well over 400 research articles, not to mention numerous books and textbooks covering both memory and neuroscience.

Research

Beginning with his research in mice and rats, Squire set about pinpointing the neurological foundations of memory. His earliest work explored the pharmacology of memory and, later, the role of protein synthesis in the formation of long-term memory. Since then, his scope has expanded to include nonhuman primates, human neurological patients (including amnesiacs), and normally functioning adults, who participate in standard behavioral and neuroimaging studies.
Based upon his work with psychiatric patients whose treatment of electroconvulsive shock therapy resulted in severe memory impairments, Squire and his colleagues developed a number of retrospective memory tests to help map the extent of their retrograde amnesia. One famous test involved asking patients to recall information about television shows that only aired for a single season in order to determine if they could remember that particular time period. His work spans almost every possible level of study, from cellular and molecular plasticity to neuropsychological consultation.

References

Squire, L. R., & Kandel. E. R. (1999). Memory: From mind to molecules. New York: W.H. Freeman & Co.
Teng, E., & Squire, L. R. (1999). Memory for places learned long ago is intact after hippocampal damage. Nature, 400, 675–677.
Kandel, E. R., & Squire, L. R. (2000). Neuroscience: Breaking down scientific barriers to the study of brain and mind. Science, 290, 1113–1120.
Manns, J. R., & Squire, L. R. (2002). The medial temporal lobe and memory for facts and events. In A. Baddeley, B. Wilson, and M. Kopelman (Eds.), Handbook of memory disorders (2nd ed) (pp.81–99). New York: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Clark, R. E, Manns, J. R., & Squire, L. R. (2002). Classical Conditioning, Awareness, and Brain Systems. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6, 524–531.
Squire, L. R. (1987). Memory and brain. Oxford: Oxford UP.
Milner, B., Squire, L. R., & Kandel, E. R. (1998). Cognitive neuroscience and the study of memory. Neuron, 20, 445–468.
Rempelclower, N. L., Zola, S. M., Squire, L. R., & Amaral, D.G. (1996). Three cases of enduring memory impairment after bilateral damage limited to the hippocampal formation. Journal of Neuroscience, 16, 5233–5255.

Elizabeth K. Warrington

Personal history

Elizabeth Warrington received her Ph.D. on the topic of the visual completion effect from the Institute of Neurology in London. Warrington joined the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in 1954, where she would remain until her retirement. In 1960 she was charged with helping assess neurological patients. She was instrumental in establishing a separate department of Clinical Neuropsychology in 1982. She became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1986, recognizing her contributions to the field of human neuropsychology. In 1996, Warrington retired from her post as the head of the department of Clinical Neurology at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery. She continues her work at the National Hospital and St. Mary’s Hospital’s Dementia Research Team.

Research

In her Ph.D. research, Warrington investigated reports from parietal lobe patients who were blind to one half of the visual field that they perceived an intact geometric figure, despite part of it being presented in the blind half of the field. Warrington, along with her colleague Lawrence Weiskrantz, later discovered blindsight—the ability for neuropsychological patients with a partial scotoma due to damage to the primary visual cortex to respond appropriately to visual stimuli they report being unable to perceive. This phenomenon is due to a secondary pathway from the retina to cortex.
Warrington’s profound contributions to the clinical realm can, in many ways, be traced back to her drive to develop and improve the accuracy of neuropsychological tests to diagnose and guide the treatment of conditions ranging from strokes to Alzheimer’s disease. For instance, her work helped dissociate the symptoms of stroke from dementia. Stroke patients tend to have difficulty accessing memories, whereas dementia patients are suffering from a storage failure—the information is simply not available. She has contributed to the design of the perceptual Unusual Views Test, face/word recognition tests, a naming skills test, a word comprehension test, and a test to assess the extent of retrograde amnesia. In this latter test, patients are asked to recognize public figures from different periods of time to formally identify the point at which they begin to remember life events.
By studying the specific deficits that different groups of neuropsychological patients have (e.g., difficulties identifying either animate or inanimate objects; an inability to either read or speak a word; semantic or episodic memory deficits), Warrington has shed light on the processes supported by different regions of the brain. For instance, Warrington identified a neurodegenerative disorder, which would later be named semantic dementia, in which patients lose the meanings of words. She has also helped disambiguate the neural basis of long- and short-term memory, providing evidence that the two systems operate in parallel.

References

McCarthy R. A., & Warrington E. K. (1992). Actors but not scripts: the dissociation of people and events in retrograde amnesia. Neuropsychologia, 30(7), 633–644.
McCarthy R. A., & Warrington E. K. (1987). Understanding: a function of short-term memory? Brain, 110(6), 1565–1578.
Warrington E. K., & Duchen L. W. (1992). A re-appraisal of a case of persistent global amnesia following right temporal lobectomy: a clinico-pathological study. Neuropsychologia, 30(5), 437–450.
Warrington E. K., & McCarthy R. A. (1988). The fractionation of retrograde amnesia. Brain & Cognition, 7(2), 184–200.
Warrington E. K. (1975). The selective impairment of semantic memory. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 27(4), 635–57.

Barbara Wilson

Personal history

Barbara Wilson was born in 1941 in Tunbridge Wells, England, where her family resided during the War, in which her father was fighting. Her mother moved back to South London when she was 3 weeks old. She grew up in South London (in Brixton and Camberwell) and went to Charles Edward Brooke School in Camberwell. She married early to her husband of over 46 years and had three children within 3 years. She went to Reading University in 1972 at the age of 30 when her youngest child started school. She obtained a first class honors in Psychology at Reading and then went to the Institute of Psychiatry in London to do her clinical training (1975–1977). She didn't get her Ph.D. until 1984, as she was working full-time at Rivermead Rehabilitation Centre in Oxford.
She qualified as a clinical psychologist in 1977. Since 1979 she has worked in Brain Injury Rehabilitation, first at Rivermead Rehabilitation Centre, then at Charing Cross Hospital, London, and at The University of Southampton Medical School, until her retirement in 2007. Since 1990, she has been employed as a senior scientist by The Medical Research Council’s Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge. In 1996, she established the Oliver Zangwill Centre for Neuropsychological Rehabilitation in Ely, a partnership between the local NHS Trust and The Medical Research Council, in which she directed the research. She was visiting Professor of Rehabilitation Studies at the University of Southampton. She holds and has held several grants to look at new assessment and treatment procedures for people with nonprogressive brain injury.
She has published over 16 books, eight widely used neuropsychological tests, and over 260 journal articles and chapters, mostly on rehabilitation. She is editor-in-chief of the journal Neuropsychological Rehabilitation (established in 1991) and sits on several national committees and has been on the governing board of The International Neuropsychological Society, of which she was president from 2006–2007. She is also chair of the World Federation of Neuro Rehabilitation’s Special Interest Group in Neuropsychological Rehabilitation and on the management committee of the WFNR.
In 1984, Wilson was awarded the May Davidson award for outstanding contributions to Clinical Psychology within 10 years of qualification. In 1998 she was awarded an O.B.E. in the Queen’s New Year’s Honors List for services to medical rehabilitation. In 2000, she was awarded a distinguished scientist award from the British Psychological Society. In 2002 she was awarded “Professional of the Year” award by The Encephalitis Society, and, in 2003, she won The British Psychological Society’s annual book of the year award for Case Studies in Neuropsychological Rehabilitation. In 2006 she was awarded the Robert L. Moody prize from the University of Texas for outstanding contributions to rehabilitation. In October 2007, she became president of the Encephalitis Society. In 2008, she became Vice President of the Academy for Multidisciplinary Neurotraumatology. Also in 2008 she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the British Psychological Society (Professional Practice Board). She received another Lifetime Achievement award in 2009 – from the International Neurological Society. In 2011 she received the Ramon y Cahal Award from the International Neuropsychiatric Association. In 2012 and 2013 she received three Honorary Professorships – from the University of Hong Kong, the University of East Anglia, and the University of Sydney.
She is on the management committee of the World Federation of Neurorehabilitation and chair of the WFNR special interest group in Neuropsychological Rehabilitation. A new rehabilitation centre in Quito, Ecuador is named after Wilson, who is also a Fellow of the British Psychological Society, the Academy of Medical Sciences, and the Academy of Social Sciences.

Research

Wilson sees herself as, primarily, a clinical psychologist, having specialized in brain injury rehabilitation since the late 1970s. Her goal is to try to help brain injury patients become more independent. In the course of doing so, she finds opportunities to conduct research that can inform the rehabilitation of other patients and better understand the way brain and behavior interact. She feels strongly that research should always have an applied component.
Although she has done a great deal of work characterizing the deficits, preserved abilities, and prognoses associated with different types of brain damage, she introduced the idea of errorless learning. This approach ensures that learners are prevented from making mistakes on which they could otherwise perseverate. For example, the experimenter could provide the answer to the question before requiring a response. External help is gradually lessened, as shaping takes hold, and the patients tend to learn more on their own. Wilson applied this technique to amnesic patients, who, in every case, would learn more than their counterparts who were allowed to make errors.
Being that Wilson is interested in helping her research subjects, she tries to shape her paradigms around her patients’ goals, using errorless learning for topics they’re interested in (e.g., learning people’s names). The success of errorless learning may arise through implicit learning or whatever explicit abilities remain in the patient. Errorless learning has been applied far and wide, including in the treatment of individuals with Alzheimer’s Disease.
Wilson has also been active in the NeuroPage project, developed by the father of a brain injury patient. The system involves having software operated out of the Oliver Zangwill Centre interact with a pager, worn on the belt. When the pager goes off, the user is to look at the screen on the pager, which offers a reminder. In effect, it offers the user a “prosthetic memory.” Operators at the Centre consult with the family and patients on a weekly basis to program the appropriate reminders, which can vary from 40 messages a day to as few as two or three, depending on the severity of the memory impairment. The technology has shown the potential to dramatically improve completion rates of behaviors, such as taking one’s medication, and is being developed for children and learning-impaired populations.

References

Wilson, B. A. (2002). Cognitive rehabilitation in the 21st century. Neurorehabilitation and Neural Repair, 16(2), 207–210.
Wilson, B. A. (2008). Neuropsychological rehabilitation. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 4, 142–162.
Page, M., Wilson, B. A. Shiel, A., et al. (2006). What is the locus of the errorless-learning advantage? Neuropsychologia, 44(1), 90–100.
Wilson, B. A. (1999). Case studies in neuropsychological rehabilitation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Evans, J. J., Wilson, B. A., Needham, P., et al. (2003). Who makes good use of memory aids? Results of a survey of people with acquired brain injury. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, 9(6), 925–935.

Research activity 1: verbal mnemonics

In 1849 Reverend Brayshaw published a book entitled Metrical mnemonics applied to geography, astronomy and chronology,which contained hundreds of rhymes incorporating significant dates in the relevant subject areas.

Brayshaw’s technique involved substituting numbers for consonants, then making words from those consonants. His code was as follows:

To create words from strings of numbers select one of the appropriate consonants for each digit and insert the necessary vowels.

For example, 25/12/08 could form the words FUEL BAD WAR by selecting the consonants FLBDWR to represent each of the six digits. To remember these words as meaning Christmas 2008 you could combine them into a rhyme or other meaningful sentence. For example, we fuel bad war in the trenches no more, as 2008 is 90 years after the end of the First World War.

Try this technique with dates that are important to you. You might try remembering dates of exams that you have to take, friends’ or family birthdays, or the date when you have to pay a bill by. First try creating the words, then making a rhyme.

Do you find this technique useful? Are there any downsides to the technique? Can you think of any adjustments you could make to make it more useful to you?

Research activity 2: improve your study skills

Using the information contained in Chapter 17, create a study plan for a course you are taking. You should think about the mnemonic techniques and study skills described as well as goal-setting techniques. Your plan should contain a detailed timetable of activities that you intend to do, and the techniques that you are going to use to achieve your goals. Compare your plan with your usual study techniques. Are there any key similarities or differences? Do you think the plan would improve your performance? Once you have followed the plan, evaluate whether you think the techniques you used had an effect on your performance.

Henry L. “Roddy” Roediger, III

Personal history

Henry L. Roediger, III was born on July 24, 1947 in Roanoke, Virginia. A nurse in the maternity ward, mispronouncing the newborn’s surname as “Roddy-ger,” unwittingly inspired the nickname, “Roddy,” which has stuck with Roediger to this day. Growing up in Danville, Virginia, Roediger suffered the untimely loss of his mother, May Wertz Roediger, when he was 5 years old. The desire to preserve the memories of his late mother sparked his interest in the field of human memory. At the age of 14, Roediger enrolled at the Riverside Military Academy in Gainesville, Georgia, from which he graduated as valedictorian and commander of the cadet corps in 1965.
Roediger went on to attend Washington and Lee University in Lexington. During his time there he received a National Science Foundation Undergraduate Research Fellowship for summer study. He graduated magna cum laude with his B.A. in 1969 and quickly moved on to Yale University where he pursued his Ph.D. research on “Inhibition in recall from cueing with recall targets,” under the supervision of Robert G. Crowder. After receiving his doctorate in 1973, Roediger was hired as an assistant professor at Purdue University, where he would spend the next 15 years, broken only by stints as visiting professor at the University of Toronto from 1976–1978 and again between 1981–1982, by which point he had been promoted to full Professor at Purdue.
In 1988, Roediger moved to Houston, beginning an 8-year tenure as the Lynette S. Autrey Professor of Psychology at Rice University. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1994–1995 that facilitated his research on memory illusions, among other endeavors. Making his way to Washington University in St. Louis in 1996, he served as Chair of the Department of Psychology until 2004 and since then has continued as Dean of Academic Planning in Arts and Sciences, in addition to his title as the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Psychology.
For the years between 1994 and 1998, Roediger served as the editor of the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, a position he held between 1985 and 1989 for the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. He was named President of the American Psychological Society (now named the Association for Psychological Science) in 2003. He received the Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award and the Howard Crosby Warren Medal from the Society of Experimental Psychologists, both in 2008. Roediger has been a prolific researcher, publishing hundreds of works on the topic of human learning and memory. Moreover, his publications were cited as having the greatest impact in the field of psychology, according to a study by the Institute of Scientific Information covering the years between 1990 and 1994.
He is married to Kathleen McDermott, and he has two children from a previous marriage, Kurt and Rebecca.

Research

Roediger’s name is familiar in memory research, not only because of his widely read articles and textbooks on the subject, but also because of his involvement in studying a variety of issues in the field, including part-list cueing inhibition, hypermermnesia (improved recall over repeated tests), and others described below.
In 1995 Roediger collaborated with Kathleen McDermott in developing the Deese/Roediger/McDermott (DRM) paradigm commonly used in classroom demonstrations. This experiment reveals that memory is not a veritable recording of past experiences, but a creation that can be distorted by inferences that we draw from past experiences. Indeed, presenting participants with a number of semantically related words (e.g., HOT, SHIVER, FREEZE, CHILLY, FROST, ICE, WINTER, SNOW) often results in vivid false memories for having seen a critical item that was absent from the original list (e.g., COLD).
Roediger has also explored how source-monitoring failures contribute to false memories, including how information from one source (e.g., an authority figure’s suggestion or one’s own imagination) can become confused with one’s memory of actual events. Not everyone is equally prone to suffer from memory illusions and false memory effects, according to Roediger’s research. Namely, older adults tend to be more susceptible than are younger adults; the extent to which age-related deterioration of certain brain regions is to blame for this is the topic of ongoing investigation, in addition to figuring out how false memories can be reduced.
Another area that has come under Roediger’s empirical eye has been the dissociation between explicit and implicit memories. He and his collaborators have sought to increase our understanding of how the principles guiding memory differ, based upon the type of test used to assess retention. Roediger, himself an acclaimed lecturer, has advocated for applying the findings of laboratory experiments, such as these, to real-world learning situations. For instance, he has reported that repeated testing, rather than study, appears to ensure better long-term recall. The testing effect, therefore, demonstrates that tests should not be relegated to a simple outcome measure of learning, but also should be used as a potent learning tool. Currently he is exploring the generalizability of the testing effect and the type of factors that moderate its benefits.

References

Roediger, H. L. (1990). Implicit memory: Retention without remembering. American Psychologist, 45, 1043–1056.
Roediger, H. L., & McDermott, K. B. (1995). Creating false memories: Remembering words not presented in lists. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 21, 803–814.
Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). The power of testing memory: Basic research and implications for educational practice. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 1, 181–210.

John M. Wilding

Personal history

John Wilding was born in Newbury, England and attended schools in Newbury, Plymouth, and Reading. After National Service in Germany he went to St. John’s College, Oxford to study Literae Humaniores, popularly known as Greats (Latin and Greek literature and history, plus ancient and modern philosophy). During the course of this, he developed an interest in psychology, particularly attracted by the lure of discovering new knowledge by experimentation and took a further degree in Psychology and Philosophy. In 1964 he was appointed to an assistant lectureship at Bedford College, University of London. He then completed a part-time Ph.D. at University College, which required laborious and detailed analysis of hundreds of decision times from a stimulus identification task with the aid of only a basic calculator.
He was appointed Reader in Psychology in 1985 and moved with the Bedford Psychology Department to Royal Holloway, University of London when the two colleges merged. He remained in that position until 2001, when he retired. Wilding served as co-editor of the Bulletin of the British Psychological Society (the precursor to The Psychologist) from 1976–1982, as Reviews Editor for the European Journal of Cognitive Psychology from 1988–1994, and was on the Editorial Board of Applied Cognitive Psychology from 2000–2004.

Research

After receiving his Ph.D., Wilding continued to study reaction times on stimulus identification tasks and pursued a number of other research interests in the next few years, including studies on subliminal perception and the effects of noise and other arousing factors on short-term memory performance.
In the early 1980s, with Elizabeth Valentine, his interest was aroused through a student project in studying individual cases of unusual memory ability, and this proved the precursor to a fruitful collaboration over the next 20 years. Their collaboration produced a number of papers and chapters and culminated in their book, Superior Memory, published in 1997. An important finding of the research was the development of objective criteria that distinguished expertise based on strategies for memorizing from expertise that appeared to depend on superior natural ability.
In 2003, with Eleanor Maguire and Narinder Kapur, Wilding and Valentine published a unique study using fMRI scanning to record activity in the brains of memory experts while they carried out a variety of tasks; this demonstrated higher activity in brain areas processing location, matching the experts’ explanation of their memory as based on the method of loci.
Wilding and Valentine also became interested in wider issues of the role of memory, study strategy, and other abilities in academic performance, and published a number of studies of school and university students; at one point making the front page of the Times Educational Supplement with a study showing that memory ability was a better predictor of examination performance in 16-year-olds than IQ. More recently this line of work has continued with a different emphasis, in collaboration with Bernice Andrews, in studies incorporating investigations of the effects of stress on student performance.
Wilding has also collaborated with Susan Cook in studying one other aspect of memory, memory for voices (earwitness memory), where they demonstrated that such memory was impaired when the face of the speaker was visible (the voice overshadowing effect).
In the mid 1990s, Wilding began to develop again one of his early research interests that he had not pursued in depth, the nature of attention, and he combined this with a developing interest in the use of the increasingly available portable computers for running experiments, particularly for use with cases of neurodevelopmental disorders. He was particularly interested in the possibilities for devising interesting tasks for children, especially groups that are difficult to test, in the form of computer games.
Since his retirement as Emeritus Reader in 2001 this has been his main research interest and he has published a large number of papers, many of them in collaboration with Kim Cornish at McGill University in Montreal, both on normally developing children and on children with genetic disorders of attention. These studies have made extensive and fruitful use of the computerized games he devised to test attention in young children. Wilding and Cornish’s book, Attention, Developmental Disorders and Genes, was published by Oxford University Press in 2010.

References

Wilding, J., & Valentine, E. (1997). Superior memory. Hove, UK: Psychology Press.
Wilding, J. (2005). Is attention impaired in ADHD? British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 23, 487-505.
Wilding, J. M., & Valentine, E. R. (2006). Exceptional memory. In: K. A. Ericsson, N. Charness, R. Hoffman, and P. Feltovich (Eds.), Cambridge handbook of expertise and expert performance (pp. 539–554). Cambridge: C.U.P.
Cornish, K., & Wilding J. M. (2009). Attention, Developmental Disorders and Genes. New York: O.U.P.

Anders Ericsson

Personal history

Anders K. Ericsson received his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Stockholm, Sweden, after defending his research into problem solving. He moved on to the Institute of Aviation Medicine, where he did work relating to human factors applications before beginning a 3-year postdoctoral fellowship under Herbert Simon and Bill Chase at Carnegie-Mellon University. Following this, he became an Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado’s Department of Psychology.
Though he spent 2 years at the Max-Planck Institute for Development and Education in Berlin, he would remain at Colorado until 1993 when he became a Conradi Eminent Scholar and Professor of Psychology at Florida State University. He remains at Florida State University, having taken his sabbatical year at the Center of Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. Ericsson is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science.

Research

Ericsson has been actively investigating how thinking, reasoning, and planning mediate problem solving, learning, and skilled performance. More specifically, he has examined how experts gain their skill in particular areas. In the course of his research, Ericsson has studied expertise in numerous domains, including music, science, golf, darts, chess, Shakespeare, and restaurant waiting. Additionally, he and his collaborator, Bill Chase, looked at how practice enhances memory for digits. By asking his participants to report on the processes used in the previous trial, Ericsson and Chase were able to reconstruct how their participants structured their memories. The result was their Theory of Skilled Memory. Additional evidence comes from online verbal reports, in which participants narrate their current thoughts aloud, a procedure that Ericsson summarized in Protocol Analysis: Verbal Reports as Data.
Ericsson and Lehmann reviewed the literature in 1996, concluding that experts tend to be superior only in their specialized domain thanks mainly to practice, and with little generalizability. While practice results in dramatic improvements in early training, eventually, generalized practice suffers from diminishing returns. Those who are to become experts pursue specific tutelage in particular aspects of their domain of interest. This deliberate practice serves to differentiate true experts from those who don’t quite obtain that level of performance, as reported in Ericsson’s 1993 Psychological Review article.
Ericsson’s work has also provided evidence that experts selectively encode relevant information into working memory during difficult feats involving their skill set. They are then able to manipulate this information in ways that allow for planning, evaluation, and reasoning. Thus, not only do experts have more accumulated knowledge than do novices, they organize it in ways inherently locked into domain-related concepts, allowing for easy retrieval.
Ericsson has written numerous books on the subject of expertise and skill learning, including Toward a General Theory of Expertise, The Road to Excellence: The Acquisition of Expert Performance in the Arts and Sciences, Sports and Games, Expert Performance in Sports, and, recently, The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance.

References

Ericsson, K. A. (2006). Protocol analysis and expert thought: Concurrent verbalizations of thinking during experts’ performance on representative task. In K. A. Ericsson, N. Charness, P. Feltovich, and R. R. Hoffman (Eds.). Cambridge handbook of expertise and expert performance (pp. 223–242). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Ericsson, K. A. (2006). The influence of experience and deliberate practice on the development of superior expert performance. In K. A. Ericsson, N. Charness, P. Feltovich, and R. R. Hoffman (Eds.). Cambridge handbook of expertise and expert performance (pp. 685–706). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Ericsson, K. A., & Kintsch, W. (1995). Long-term working memory. Psychological Review, 102(2), 211–245.

Peter Edwin Morris

Personal history

Peter Edwin Morris was born in Birmingham, England on November 13, 1947 where he would attend the George Dixon Grammar School. He moved to Weston-super-Mare in 1961, prompting his switch to the Weston-super-Mare Boys Grammar School. Morris attended Exeter University from 1966–1969, earning his B.A. combined honors in philosophy and psychology. He stayed at Exeter for his Ph.D. work, for which he was awarded his diploma in 1972. His first academic post was at the Open University as a Lecturer. After 2 years, he transitioned to Lancaster University where he has remained through the present time, rising to full Professor of Psychology in 1989.
Morris has served as president and vice president of the British Psychological Society in the early 1990s, in addition to other positions within the body.

Research

Morris’s primary research interests relate to memory and, especially, improving memory and learning. Morris has noted that the common practice of compiling the first letter of each to-be-remembered item as a mnemonic strategy is only helpful when the items are well known and serial order is important. As such, Morris has refocused the attention of memory researchers on other types of mnemonic strategies, many of which have been around for centuries (e.g., the pegword strategy), to serve in a variety of situations. Specifically, Morris began by studying the influence of mental imagery as a mnemonic aid, and also the nature of imagery more generally, and then turned to other mnemonic methods. For example, one can become dramatically better at learning people’s names if one forms an imageable substitute for the name and then links a prominent feature of the person’s face to that imageable substitute.
More recently, he has been interested in expanding retrieval practice and memory improvement methods that exploit it, such as the name game. Expanding retrieval practice refers to a flexible strategy in which a new item is first tested following a brief delay in order to minimize the chance that it will be forgotten, further strengthening it via the generation effect. As the item becomes better learned, the delays are increased, so as to benefit from the spacing effect. Morris has demonstrated that this method is vastly superior to even the imagery mnemonic for names. Moreover, he and his collaborators have accumulated substantial evidence indicating that retrieval practice, with appropriate feedback, is also effective in myriad contexts, including text and language learning, and is appropriate for preschool-aged children on up to adults. He is currently working on developing software to incorporate retrieval practice into statistics training.
Morris’s interest in memory improvement led to his helping to convene the first and the second International Practical Aspects of Memory conferences (1978, 1987) and also to an interest in remembering in everyday life (e.g., soccer scores) and eyewitness testimony—which relates to his interest in false memory and face recognition research.
In addition, Morris and his collaborator, Catherine Fritz, have also been investigating the part-set cuing phenomenon, in which presenting a subset of a broader category/list of items has been found to impair, rather than facilitate, one’s ability to recall the other elements in the set.
Morris has a general interest in applicable research, encouraging him to broaden out into some other research areas, such as psychological issues relating to commercial diving. Morris has also turned his attention to the development of effective study skills. His five-step SQ3R method (Study, Question, Read, Recite, and Review) encourages the learner to be an active participant in the study process, which is one reason the technique has proven so effective.

References

Morris, P. E., & Stevens, R. (1974). Linking images and free recall. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behaviour, 13, 310–315.
Morris, P. E., Tweedy, M., & Gruneberg, M. M. (1985). Interest, knowledge and the memorizing of soccer scores. British Journal of Psychology, 76, 417–425.
Morris, P. E., & Fritz, C. O. (2002). The improved name game: Better use of expanding retrieval practice. Memory, 10, 259–266.
Morris, P. E., Fritz, C. O., Jackson, L., Nichol, E., & Roberts, E. (2005). Strategies for learning proper names: Expanding retrieval practice, meaning and imagery. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 19, 779–798.
Morris, P. E., & Gruneberg, M. (Eds.) (1994). Theoretical aspects of memory. London: Routledge.
Hampson, P. J., & Morris, P. E. (1996). Understanding cognition. Oxford: Blackwells.
Smyth, M. M., Collins, A., Morris, P. E., & Levy, P. M. (1994). Cognition in action (2nd ed.). Hove, UK: Psychology Press.