How accurate does the tortoise have to be to beat the hare?

Meet Amy, Rich, and George. They are participants in your study on the detectability of an English pea among a set of sugar snap pea distractors. All participants work diligently and quickly and yield the following results: Amy responds within 422 milliseconds on average, with an accuracy of around 88%. Rich is a little slower […]

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When Rain Man meets Braille: Tactile Subitizing and Numerosity Estimates

Put Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman together and you get Rain Man, the Academy-Award winning story of an autistic savant—played by Hoffman who received the Best Actor award for his performance—who turns out to have many unexpected talents. The clip below shows one famous scene, in which Hoffman knows within seconds that the waitress dropped […]

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Mind-space continuum: A new framework for understanding theory of mind

In the late 1970s, a chimpanzee named Sarah watched a human named Keith struggle to complete simple tasks. When given various solutions, Sarah picked the solutions that would help Keith succeed in his tasks. In one task Keith attempted to grab for an unreachable object (see the left figure below). Sarah chose the option to […]

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#AS50: A brief conclusion with pointers to the articles

The #AS50 digital event concluded last week. The posts for this event coincided with the publication of a special issue of Memory & Cognition that celebrated the impact on cognitive science of a paper published by Richard C. Atkinson and Richard M. Shiffrin in 1967. The paper, given the hashtag #AS50 for our event, reported […]

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Finding Lisa with SAM: #AS50 and a simple story of forgetting and remembering

Oh dang. It happened again. I walked into a room full of people and experienced retrieval failure. It’s a birthday party and although I’ve met most people on the host’s previous birthdays, some of the guest only look vaguely familiar. A woman greets me (she knows my name) and asks me about my recent trip. […]

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#AS50 is also about taking control: When it does and does not improve memory

Atkinson and Shiffrin’s seminal 1968 paper is best known for outlining a possible structure for the memory system.  Their concepts of sensory memory, short-term memory and long-term memory are still highly influential.  Often forgotten, however, is that Atkinson and Shiffrin also described multiple control processes that determine how and if information moves through the memory […]

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#AS50: The journey towards finding a precisely-right explanation for memory

Atkinson and Shiffrin’s “modal” model of memory is more than 50 years old and continues to inspire memory research. The continued reliance on the model is a testament to its strength and the strength of the work that informed it. There are plenty of robust and replicable findings in the published memory literature, and many […]

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#AS50: Reading Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968) Is Good For You

Given all that has been recently written about the current state of psychology and the challenges that we face as a field, I am happy to say that the 50th anniversary of the Atkinson-Shiffrin model and the special issue in Memory and Cognition celebrating it couldn’t have been timelier. Although highly cited (over 10,000 times, […]

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Decades of Progress and Paradoxes within the Atkinson and Shiffrin Framework

(The first author of this post was Ken Malmberg.) About 50 years ago, Richard C. Atkinson and Richard M. Shiffrin published the results of several years of research in Human Memory: A Proposed System and its Control Processes. The recent special issue of Memory & Cognition calls attention to this anniversary and celebrates its contribution […]

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Muhammad Ali, Apollo, The Naked Ape, and Atkinson & Shiffrin: A post card from 1967 for #AS50

In 1967, the average house in the U.S. cost $14,250, compared to an average annual income of $7,300. Gas was 33c a gallon and a new car cost $2,750 on average. Before you get too nostalgic, remember that at the same time 475,000 American troops served in Vietnam, and Muhammad Ali was stripped of his […]

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