Randall Engle

Last updated
Randall Engle
Born (1946-12-02) December 2, 1946 (age 77)
CitizenshipAmerican
Education West Virginia State College (BA, 1968)
Ohio State University (MA, 1969; PhD, 1973)
Known for Working memory, Attentional control, Human intelligence
AwardsLifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Science (2013), Mentor Award from the Association for Psychological Science (2017), the Amoco Award for University Teacher of the Year (1993), Distinguished Honors College Professor (1992), the Ace Teacher Award (1991), the Mortar Board Excellence in Teaching Award (1988, 1994).
Scientific career
Fields Psychology
Institutions Georgia Institute of Technology
Thesis The interaction between presentation rate, retention test and the negative recency effect  (1973)
Doctoral advisor D.D. Wickens

Randall Wayne Engle is an American psychologist and professor of psychology at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Engle is known for his research on working memory, attentional control, and human intelligence. [1] Specifically, his research investigates the nature of working memory, the causes of its limitations, its role in applied cognitive tasks, and the relationships between working memory, cognitive control, and fluid intelligence. [2] His work has received funding from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, DARPA, and Office of Naval Research. [2] Dr. Engle's work has influenced modern theories of cognitive and emotional control, and has had an impact on a number of fields including social psychology, emotion, psychopathology, developmental psychology, and psychological testing. [2] According to Google Scholar, his work has been cited over 48,000 times. [3] Dr. Engle is the principal investigator in the Attention & Working Memory Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology. [2]

Contents

Professional affiliations

Dr. Engle was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences on April 27, 2020. [4] Dr. Engle is a Fellow and former President of the American Psychological Association's Society for Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Science, as well as a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Society of Experimental Psychologists. He also was a Chair of the Governing Board of the Psychonomic Society and a chair of the executive board of the Council of Graduate Departments of Psychology. [5] He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018. [6] Dr. Engle served as Editor-in-Chief for the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science for a decade. [7] He also was the founder and Director of the Georgia State University/Georgia Institute of Technology Center for Advanced Brain Imaging. [5]

Biography

Randy Engle spent his childhood in rural West Virginia. He was the first college graduate in his family. Randy earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in psychology from West Virginia State College in 1968. As an undergraduate, he earned nearly as many credits in mathematics and zoology as in psychology, and only found out about the field through a fellow student who mentioned it during freshman orientation. Randy was interested in the experimental study of thought and behavior, and began his graduate studies at Ohio State under the direction of D. D. Wickens. In 1973, Randy earned his Ph.D. His thesis was titled “The interaction between presentation rate, retention test and the negative recency effect.” After graduating, Randy spent two years at King College in Tennessee where he honed his teaching skills; he taught 10 courses per year. During this time he published several articles on modality effects in short-term memory. His work attracted the attention of the University of South Carolina, where he was hired and would eventually be promoted to Professor in 1983. Twelve years later, in 1995, Randy was offered the chair position in the School of Psychology at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He accepted the position and served as chair for 13 years. Today, he is a professor of psychology at Georgia Tech. [5]

Working Memory and Attention Control Tasks

The cognitive tests used in Dr. Engle's lab to measure individual differences in working memory capacity and attention control are freely available for download from the Attention & Working Memory Lab website: http://englelab.gatech.edu/taskdownloads. [8]

Influential Publications

The following publications each have over 2,000 citations according to Google Scholar. [3]

Engle, R. W., Tuholski, S. W., Laughlin, J. E., & Conway, A. R. (1999). Working memory, short-term memory, and general fluid intelligence: a latent-variable approach. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 128, 309–331. [9]

Engle, R. W. (2002). Working memory capacity as executive attention. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 11, 19–23. [10]

Turner, M. L., & Engle, R. W. (1989). Is working memory capacity task dependent? Journal of Memory and Language, 28, 127–154. [11]

Conway, A. R., Kane, M. J., Bunting, M. F., Hambrick, D. Z., Wilhelm, O., & Engle, R. W. (2005). Working memory span tasks: A methodological review and user's guide. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 12, 769–786. [12]

Kane, M. J., & Engle, R. W. (2002). The role of prefrontal cortex in working-memory capacity, executive attention, and general fluid intelligence: An individual-differences perspective. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 9, 637–671. [13]

Presentations and Interviews

Below is a list of presentations and interviews given by Dr. Randall Engle:

2017 Psychonomic Society Annual Meeting Keynote Address [14]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0wyyfpj640

Brief History of Individual Differences in Working Memory Capacity [15]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woYyc-jcMJc

2019 meeting of the International Society for Intelligence Research [16]
http://englelab.gatech.edu/about

An Interview with Professor Randall Engle [17]
https://in-sightjournal.com/2016/05/22/an-interview-with-professor-randell-engle-adjunct-professor-psychiatry-emory-medical-school-professional-fellow-psychology-university-of-edinburgh-principle-investigator-attention-and-working/

Related Research Articles

Working memory is a cognitive system with a limited capacity that can hold information temporarily. It is important for reasoning and the guidance of decision-making and behavior. Working memory is often used synonymously with short-term memory, but some theorists consider the two forms of memory distinct, assuming that working memory allows for the manipulation of stored information, whereas short-term memory only refers to the short-term storage of information. Working memory is a theoretical concept central to cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, and neuroscience.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Psychonomic Society</span>

The Psychonomic Society is an international scientific society of over 4,500 scientists in the field of experimental psychology. The mission of the Psychonomic Society is to foster the science of cognition through the advancement and communication of basic research in experimental psychology and allied sciences. It is open to international researchers, and almost 40% of members are based outside of North America. Although open to all areas of experimental and cognitive psychology, its members typically study areas such as learning, memory, attention, motivation, perception, categorization, decision making, and psycholinguistics. Its name is taken from the word psychonomics, meaning "the science of the laws of the mind".

In psychology and neuroscience, memory span is the longest list of items that a person can repeat back in correct order immediately after presentation on 50% of all trials. Items may include words, numbers, or letters. The task is known as digit span when numbers are used. Memory span is a common measure of working memory and short-term memory. It is also a component of cognitive ability tests such as the WAIS. Backward memory span is a more challenging variation which involves recalling items in reverse order.

Mind-wandering is loosely defined as thoughts that are not produced from the current task. Mind-wandering consists of thoughts that are task-unrelated and stimulus-independent. This can be in the form of three different subtypes: positive constructive daydreaming, guilty fear of failure, and poor attentional control.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert A. Bjork</span> American cognitive psychologist (born 1939)

Robert Allen Bjork is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on human learning and memory and on the implications of the science of learning for instruction and training. He is the creator of the directed forgetting paradigm. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022.

Rochel Gelman is an emeritus psychology professor at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Science. Gelman is married to fellow psychologist C. Randy Gallistel. Prior to joining the Rutgers faculty she taught at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Richard Shiffrin is an American psychologist, professor of cognitive science in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University, Bloomington. Shiffrin has contributed a number of theories of attention and memory to the field of psychology. He co-authored the Atkinson–Shiffrin model of memory in 1968 with Richard Atkinson, who was his academic adviser at the time. In 1977, he published a theory of attention with Walter Schneider. With Jeroen G.W. Raaijmakers in 1980, Shiffrin published the Search of Associative Memory (SAM) model, which has served as the standard model of recall for cognitive psychologists well into the 2000s. He extended the SAM model with the Retrieving Effectively From Memory (REM) model in 1997 with Mark Steyvers.

The n-back task is a continuous performance task that is commonly used as an assessment in psychology and cognitive neuroscience to measure a part of working memory and working memory capacity. The n-back was introduced by Wayne Kirchner in 1958. N-Back games are purported to be a training method to improve working memory and working memory capacity and also increase fluid intelligence, although evidence for such effects are lacking.

Judith F. Kroll is a Distinguished Professor of Language Science at University of California, Irvine. She specializes in psycholinguistics, focusing on second language acquisition and bilingual language processing. With Randi Martin and Suparna Rajaram, Kroll co-founded the organization Women in Cognitive Science in 2001. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Psychological Association (APA), the Psychonomic Society, the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and the Association for Psychological Science (APS).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nora Newcombe</span>

Nora S. Newcombe is the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Psychology and the James H. Glackin Distinguished Faculty Fellow at Temple University. She is a Canadian-American researcher in cognitive development, cognitive psychology and cognitive science, and expert on the development of spatial thinking and reasoning and episodic memory. She was the principal investigator of the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (2006-2018), one of six Science of Learning Centers funded by the National Science Foundation.

Nelson Cowan is the Curators' Distinguished Professor of Psychological Sciences at the University of Missouri. He specializes in working memory, the small amount of information held in mind and used for language processing and various kinds of problem solving. To overcome conceptual difficulties that arise for models of information processing in which different functions occur in separate boxes, Cowan proposed a more organically organized "embedded processes" model. Within it, representations held in working memory comprise an activated subset of the representations held in long-term memory, with a smaller subset held in a more integrated form in the current focus of attention. Other work has been on the developmental growth of working memory capacity and the scientific method. His work, funded by the National Institutes of Health since 1984, has been cited over 41,000 times according to Google Scholar. The work has resulted in over 250 peer-reviewed articles, over 60 book chapters, 2 sole-authored books, and 4 edited volumes.

George Mandler was an Austrian-born American psychologist, who became a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California, San Diego.

Working memory training is intended to improve a person's working memory. Working memory is a central intellectual faculty, linked to IQ, ageing, and mental health. It has been claimed that working memory training programs are effective means, both for treating specific medical conditions associated with working memory deficit, as and for general increase in cognitive capacity among healthy neurotypical adults.

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Suparna Rajaram, SUNY Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Stony Brook University, is an Indian-born cognitive psychologist and expert on memory and amnesia. Rajaram served as Chair of the Governing Board of the Psychonomic Society (2008) and as president of the Association for Psychological Science (2017-2018). Along with Judith Kroll and Randi Martin, Rajaram co-founded the organization Women in Cognitive Science in 2001, with the aim of improving the visibility of contributions of women to cognitive science. In 2019, she was an inaugural recipient of Psychonomic Society's Clifford T. Morgan Distinguished Leadership Award for significant contributions and sustained leadership in the discipline of cognitive psychology.

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References

  1. ↑ "Randall W. Engle". Georgia Tech School of Psychology. Retrieved 2020-02-07.
  2. 1 2 3 4 "Randy Engle, PhD". Attention & Working Memory Lab at Georgia Tech. Retrieved 2020-02-07.
  3. 1 2 "Google Scholar page for Randall Engle". Google Scholar. Retrieved 2020-02-07.
  4. ↑ "Six APS Fellows Elected to Membership in National Academy of Sciences". Aps Observer. 33. 29 June 2020. Retrieved 2020-07-14.
  5. 1 2 3 "Randall W. Engle, PhD". FABBS. 30 August 2016. Retrieved 2018-08-14.
  6. ↑ "Randall Engle Elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences". Georgia Tech (Press release). 2018-04-25. Retrieved 2018-08-14.
  7. ↑ "New Directions After Current Directions". Aps Observer. 32. 25 November 2019. Retrieved 2020-02-07.
  8. ↑ "Task Downloads". Attention & Working Memory Lab at Georgia Tech. Retrieved 2020-02-07.
  9. ↑ Engle, R. W.; Tuholski, S. W.; Laughlin, J. E.; Conway ARA (1999). "Engle et al. (1999)". Journal of Experimental Psychology. General. 128 (3): 309–331. doi:10.1037/0096-3445.128.3.309. PMID   10513398.
  10. ↑ "Engle (2002)". doi:10.1111/1467-8721.00160. S2CID   116230.{{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  11. ↑ Turner, Marilyn L.; Engle, Randall W. (April 1989). "Turner & Engle (1989)". Journal of Memory and Language. 28 (2): 127–154. doi:10.1016/0749-596X(89)90040-5 . Retrieved 2020-02-07.
  12. ↑ Conway, A. R.; Kane, M. J.; Bunting, M. F.; Hambrick, D. Z.; Wilhelm, O.; Engle, R. W. (2005). "Conway et al. (2005)". Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. 12 (5): 769–86. doi: 10.3758/BF03196772 . PMID   16523997.
  13. ↑ Kane, M. J.; Engle, R. W. (2002). "Kane & Engle (2002)". Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. 9 (4): 637–71. doi: 10.3758/BF03196323 . PMID   12613671.
  14. ↑ "2017 Psychonomic Society Annual Meeting Keynote Address". Youtube. Retrieved 2020-02-07.
  15. ↑ "Brief History of Individual Differences in Working Memory Capacity". Youtube. Retrieved 2020-02-07.
  16. ↑ "2019 meeting of the International Society for Intelligence Research". Youtube. Retrieved 2020-02-07.
  17. ↑ "An Interview with Professor Randall Engle". In-Sight Publishing. 22 May 2016. Retrieved 2020-02-07.
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