Richard Shiffrin

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Richard Shiffrin
Born (1942-03-13) March 13, 1942 (age 81)
Alma mater
Known forEmpirical, theoretical, and computational work in the modeling of human cognition
SpouseJudith Mahy
Children4
Awards1995  Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences

1996  Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Contents

1996  Fellow of the American Psychological Society

2002   Rumelhart Prize

2005  Fellow of the American Philosophical Society
Scientific career
Fields Cognitive science
Institutions Indiana University
Thesis Search and retrieval processes in long-term memory  (1968)
Doctoral advisor Richard C. Atkinson

Richard Shiffrin (born March 13, 1942) 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, [1] who was his academic adviser at the time. In 1977, he published a theory of attention with Walter Schneider. [2] With Jeroen G.W. Raaijmakers in 1980, Shiffrin published the Search of Associative Memory (SAM) model, [3] which has served as the standard model of recall for cognitive psychologists well into the 2000s. [4] He extended the SAM model with the Retrieving Effectively From Memory (REM) model in 1997 with Mark Steyvers. [5]

Biography

Career

Shiffrin proposed a mathematical model of memory with Richard C. Atkinson in 1968 while at Stanford University. This laid out components of short and long-term memory and processes that control the operations of memory. The Atkinson-Shiffrin memory model showed the importance and possibility of modeling the control processes of cognition, and remains one of the most highly cited in the entire field of psychology. [6]

Shiffrin graduated with a Ph.D. in Mathematical Psychology from Stanford in 1968, [7] and joined Indiana University as faculty that same year, where he remains today as a distinguished Professor and Luther Dana Waterman Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences. Shiffrin also directs the department's Memory and Perception Laboratory.

In the 1980s, Shiffrin's formal theory of memory took a great leap forward with the Search of Associative Memory (SAM) model. This model quantified the nature of retrieval from long-term memory and characterized recall as a memory search with cycles of sampling and recovery. [8] In 1984, another quantum step forward occurred, when the theory was extended to recognition memory, in which a decision is based on summed activation of related memory traces. [9] It was a major accomplishment that the same retrieval activations that had been used in the recall model could be carried forward and used to predict a wide range of recognition phenomena. Another major step, In 1990, Shiffrin published two articles on the list-length effect which clearly established that experience leads to the differentiation, rather than the mere strengthening, of the representations of items in memory. [10] [11] In 1997 Shiffrin extended the SAM model with the Retrieving Effectively From Memory (REM) model. [12] [13]

Shiffrin runs an Annual Summer Interdisciplinary Conference (ASIC) [14] that features talks and posters in the broad frame of Cognitive Science and related areas. Days are free for activities, and talks/posters fall in late afternoon and evening sessions, followed by dinner. The settings are in scenic and dramatic mountain venues with access to summer adventure and mountain sports such as climbing, hiking, biking, canyoning, white water rafting, and via ferrata. Attendees are welcome to bring family and friends and the conference is open to all interested parties. Invitation is not needed to attend. [14]

Awards

See also

Related Research Articles

Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and reasoning.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Forgetting</span> Loss or modification of information encoded in an individuals memory

Forgetting or disremembering is the apparent loss or modification of information already encoded and stored in an individual's short or long-term memory. It is a spontaneous or gradual process in which old memories are unable to be recalled from memory storage. Problems with remembering, learning and retaining new information are a few of the most common complaints of older adults. Studies show that retention improves with increased rehearsal. This improvement occurs because rehearsal helps to transfer information into long-term memory.

Long-term memory (LTM) is the stage of the Atkinson–Shiffrin memory model in which informative knowledge is held indefinitely. It is defined in contrast to sensory memory, the initial stage, and short-term or working memory, the second stage, which persists for about 18 to 30 seconds. LTM is grouped into two categories known as explicit memory and implicit memory. Explicit memory is broken down into episodic and semantic memory, while implicit memory includes procedural memory and emotional conditioning.

Information processing is the change (processing) of information in any manner detectable by an observer. As such, it is a process that describes everything that happens (changes) in the universe, from the falling of a rock to the printing of a text file from a digital computer system. In the latter case, an information processor is changing the form of presentation of that text file. The computers up to this period function on the basis of programs saved in the memory, having no intelligence of their own.

Semantic memory refers to general world knowledge that humans have accumulated throughout their lives. This general knowledge is intertwined in experience and dependent on culture. New concepts are learned by applying knowledge learned from things in the past.

The Atkinson–Shiffrin model is a model of memory proposed in 1968 by Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin. The model asserts that human memory has three separate components:

  1. a sensory register, where sensory information enters memory,
  2. a short-term store, also called working memory or short-term memory, which receives and holds input from both the sensory register and the long-term store, and
  3. a long-term store, where information which has been rehearsed in the short-term store is held indefinitely.
<span class="mw-page-title-main">ACT-R</span>

ACT-R is a cognitive architecture mainly developed by John Robert Anderson and Christian Lebiere at Carnegie Mellon University. Like any cognitive architecture, ACT-R aims to define the basic and irreducible cognitive and perceptual operations that enable the human mind. In theory, each task that humans can perform should consist of a series of these discrete operations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Testing effect</span> Memory effect in educational psychology

The testing effect suggests long-term memory is increased when part of the learning period is devoted to retrieving information from memory. It is different from the more general practice effect, defined in the APA Dictionary of Psychology as "any change or improvement that results from practice or repetition of task items or activities."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Richard C. Atkinson</span> American educational psychologist and academic

Richard Chatham Atkinson is an American professor of psychology and cognitive science and an academic administrator. He is president emeritus of the University of California system, former chancellor of the University of California, San Diego, and former director of the National Science Foundation.

The Levels of Processing model, created by Fergus I. M. Craik and Robert S. Lockhart in 1972, describes memory recall of stimuli as a function of the depth of mental processing. Deeper levels of analysis produce more elaborate, longer-lasting, and stronger memory traces than shallow levels of analysis. Depth of processing falls on a shallow to deep continuum. Shallow processing leads to a fragile memory trace that is susceptible to rapid decay. Conversely, deep processing results in a more durable memory trace. There are three levels of processing in this model. Structural processing, or visual, is when we remember only the physical quality of the word E.g how the word is spelled and how letters look. Phonemic processing includes remembering the word by the way it sounds. E.G the word tall rhymes with fall. Lastly, we have semantic processing in which we encode the meaning of the word with another word that is similar of has similar meaning. Once the word is perceived, the brain allows for a deeper processing.

Computational cognition is the study of the computational basis of learning and inference by mathematical modeling, computer simulation, and behavioral experiments. In psychology, it is an approach which develops computational models based on experimental results. It seeks to understand the basis behind the human method of processing of information. Early on computational cognitive scientists sought to bring back and create a scientific form of Brentano's psychology.

Mathematical psychology is an approach to psychological research that is based on mathematical modeling of perceptual, thought, cognitive and motor processes, and on the establishment of law-like rules that relate quantifiable stimulus characteristics with quantifiable behavior. The mathematical approach is used with the goal of deriving hypotheses that are more exact and thus yield stricter empirical validations. There are five major research areas in mathematical psychology: learning and memory, perception and psychophysics, choice and decision-making, language and thinking, and measurement and scaling.

Information processing theory is the approach to the study of cognitive development evolved out of the American experimental tradition in psychology. Developmental psychologists who adopt the information processing perspective account for mental development in terms of maturational changes in basic components of a child's mind. The theory is based on the idea that humans process the information they receive, rather than merely responding to stimuli. This perspective uses an analogy to consider how the mind works like a computer. In this way, the mind functions like a biological computer responsible for analyzing information from the environment. According to the standard information-processing model for mental development, the mind's machinery includes attention mechanisms for bringing information in, working memory for actively manipulating information, and long-term memory for passively holding information so that it can be used in the future. This theory addresses how as children grow, their brains likewise mature, leading to advances in their ability to process and respond to the information they received through their senses. The theory emphasizes a continuous pattern of development, in contrast with cognitive-developmental theorists such as Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development that thought development occurs in stages at a time.

Memory has the ability to encode, store and recall information. Memories give an organism the capability to learn and adapt from previous experiences as well as build relationships. Encoding allows a perceived item of use or interest to be converted into a construct that can be stored within the brain and recalled later from long-term memory. Working memory stores information for immediate use or manipulation, which is aided through hooking onto previously archived items already present in the long-term memory of an individual.

In psychology, memory inhibition is the ability not to remember irrelevant information. The scientific concept of memory inhibition should not be confused with everyday uses of the word "inhibition". Scientifically speaking, memory inhibition is a type of cognitive inhibition, which is the stopping or overriding of a mental process, in whole or in part, with or without intention.

In mental memory, storage is one of three fundamental stages along with encoding and retrieval. Memory is the process of storing and recalling information that was previously acquired. Storing refers to the process of placing newly acquired information into memory, which is modified in the brain for easier storage. Encoding this information makes the process of retrieval easier for the brain where it can be recalled and brought into conscious thinking. Modern memory psychology differentiates between the two distinct types of memory storage: short-term memory and long-term memory. Several models of memory have been proposed over the past century, some of them suggesting different relationships between short- and long-term memory to account for different ways of storing memory.

Retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) is a memory phenomenon where remembering causes forgetting of other information in memory. The phenomenon was first demonstrated in 1994, although the concept of RIF has been previously discussed in the context of retrieval inhibition.

Robert Mark Nosofsky is an American psychologist. He is a professor in the department of psychological and brain sciences at Indiana University Bloomington, who is known for his exemplar theory. His research interest are categorization, recognition memory, math modeling, combining formal modeling and FMRI Studies. His research is in the development and testing of formal mathematical models of perceptual category learning and representation.

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.

Jeffrey Sherman is a Social Psychologist and Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Davis. He is known for his research on social cognition, stereotyping, and implicit bias.

References

  1. Atkinson, R.C. & Shiffrin, R.M. (1968) Human memory: A proposed system and its control processes. In K.W. Spence and J.T. Spence (Eds.), The psychology of learning and motivation, vol. 8. London: Academic Press.
  2. Shiffrin, R. M. & Schneider, W. (1977). Controlled and automatic human information processing: II. Perceptual learning, automatic attending, and a general theory. Psychological Review, 84, 127–190.
  3. Raaijmakers, J. G. W. & Shiffrin, R. M. (1980). SAM: A theory of probabilistic search of associative memory. In Bower, G. H. (Ed.), The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, Vol. 14, 207–262. New York: Academic Press.
  4. "July/August – Association for Psychological Science – APS". www.psychologicalscience.org.
  5. Shiffrin, R. M. & Steyvers, M. (1997). A model for recognition memory: REM: Retrieving effectively from memory. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 4(2), 145–166.
  6. Atkinson, R. C., & Shiffrin, R. M. (1968). Human memory: A proposed system and its control processes. In K. W. Spence and J. T. Spence (Eds.), The Psychology of Learning and Motivation: Advances in Research and Theory (Vol. 2, pp. 89-195). New York: Aaademic Press.
  7. Shiffrin, Richard Martin (1968). Search and retrieval processes in long-term memory (Ph.D.). Stanford University. OCLC   654761590 via ProQuest.
  8. Raaijmakers, J. G. W., & Shiffrin, R. M. (1980). SAM: A theory of probabilistic search of associative memory. In Bower, G. H. (Ed.), The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, Vol. 14, 207-262. New York: Academic Press.
  9. Gillund, G., & Shiffrin, R. M. (1984). A retrieval model for both recognition and recall. Psychological Review, 91, 1-67.
  10. Ratcliff, R., Clark, S., & Shiffrin, R. M. (1990). The list-strength effect: I. Data and discussion. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 16, 163-178.
  11. Shiffrin, R. M., Ratcliff, R., & Clark, S. (1990). The list-strength effect: II. Theoretical mechanisms. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 16, 179-195.
  12. Shiffrin, R. M., & Steyvers, M. (1997). A model for recognition memory: REM: Retrieving effectively from memory. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 4 (2), 145-166.
  13. "Richard M. Shiffrin". www.lrdc.pitt.edu.
  14. 1 2 "ASIC 2004". www.cogs.indiana.edu. Archived from the original on 2004-01-21.