The goal of cognitive science is to understand how the mind works. It is a peculiar aspect of this quest that cognitive science often seems to be as much about computers and software as it is about the human mind: There is an intriguing parallelism between developments in computer science and affiliated fields on the […]
Digital Event
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
(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 […]
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 […]
The digital event dedicated to preregistration drew to a close last week, after a series of 8 posts. #PSprereg has now been given a permanent home, at this landing page. Feel free to bookmark the page or circulate the link to interested parties for easy (and permanent) access to the collection of 8 posts. As […]
At 1 am on 6 August 1997 Korean Air Flight 801, on approach to Guam, flew into Nimitz Hill, 6 km short of the runway, killing 228 of the 254 people on board. The approach occurred in limited visibility and while the instrument landing system was out of service. The crash was a classic example […]