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 […]
“They began three and a half centuries ago,” writes Gernsbacher (2018, p. 403). They can delight us or frighten us, teach us and confuse us, intimidate us or encourage us. They are the base unit of productivity and the currency of academic prestige and advancement. “They,” of course, are scientific journal articles. The professional academic […]
YouTube is (in)famous for its cat videos. An estimate from 2015, now surely superseded by masses of additional material, located more than 2 million cat videos on YouTube that collectively have been watched 25,000,000,000 times. Even if you are not a cat aficionado, there is at least one video that is worth watching. It explains […]
Humans have a sort Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde relationship with safety devices, such as helmets. For example, on the one hand bicycle helmets are known to reduce serious head injuries (by 70%, it turns out). On the other hand, helmets might also lead to more risky behavior. For instance, cyclists are often thought to ride faster […]
Sarcasm, a type of irony, is inescapably embedded in the internet today, with ironic language of some kind being ubiquitous on Facebook, Twitter, in blogs, in news articles, and more. Computers, unlike people, often fail to detect sarcasm, which has the notable quality of often meaning nearly the opposite of what was written. For example, […]
Toxic. Justice. Misinformation. These three words garnered much attention in 2018. For example, there was a 45% increase in the number of times that the word “toxic” was looked up and a 75% increase in the number of times that the word “justice” was looked up on online dictionaries. The increase in interest in these […]