Did you watch an interview where Robert Downey Jr. says he’s coming back as Iron Man or did you just read an avid fan theory on Reddit? Was it your mother or anatomy professor who said bubble gum would stay in your stomach for seven years? Whether you’re sharing celebrity gossip or submitting a homework […]
Models of Memory
Have you ever said hello to someone who looked familiar, but then realized that they are a complete stranger? It’s embarrassing, sure. But the cost of mistaking someone for another person is much greater if you made this error as an eyewitness to a crime. This type of error is made when an eyewitness identifies an […]
An old but common adage is that “context is everything”, and while this aphorism can be applied to many different topics, it has been especially significant in theories of memory. Even in early psychological research, theorists believed that having knowledge and memory for an item meant connecting it to the “context which the world provides”, […]
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 […]
“Time is what we want most, but what, alas! we use worst.” —William Penn There are many dimensions of human behavior. Consider a typical recognition memory task in which a participant is given a list of words to remember. A little while later, suppose this participant is shown the word “bear” and asked whether it […]