We rarely listen to just one stream of information at a time. Whether we are at a dinner party, on a crowded bus, or talking on the phone while walking down a busy street, more often than not there are multiple voices that compete for our attention. People are generally very good at focusing on […]
Learning and Memory
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 idea of enhanced or superior memory is a theme that has long fascinated cognitive researchers and society in general. It has been the theme of various novels, films, and probably an equal number of academic journal articles. The single question motivating both works of fact and fiction is, what techniques might an individual employ […]
In the late 90s, Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks starred in the romantic comedy, “You’ve Got Mail”, which romanticized the idea of online dating and amplified AOL’s fame. “The Dating Game” Shortly after this movie, the year 2000 was the official start to dating websites with the release of eharmony, according to the “history of […]
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 […]
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, […]