Marcia K. Johnson (born 1943) is a

Sterling Professor Sterling Professor, the highest academic rank at Yale University, is awarded to a tenured faculty member considered the best in his or her field. It is akin to the rank of university professor at other universities. The appointment, made by the ...

emeritus of Psychology at Yale University. She was born in 1943 in Alameda, California. Johnson attended public schools in Oakland and Ventura. She attended the University of California, Berkeley where she received both her B.A. in psychology (1965) and Ph.D. in experimental psychology (1971). In 1970 Johnson moved to Long Island, New York to take a faculty position at The State University of New York at Stony Brook, where she worked until 1985. She then accepted a position at Princeton University and was there from 1985 to 2000. Johnson became

of Psychology at Yale University in 2000. While in her undergraduate program, she conducted her first psychological experiment, and found that people were better able to identify stimuli in an ambiguous environment if they had encoded the targets in terms of holistic schemas or concepts than if they had differentiated among them on the basis of specific features. She also received two research assistant opportunities with Lloyd Peterson and Kathleen Archibald, both afforded her with models of engaged academics. In graduate school she mentored with Leo Postman and Geoffrey Keppel at Berkeley’s Institute of Human Learning, where she investigated organizational processes in memory. She became the Dilley Professor of Psychology in 2004, and was appointed as a Sterling Professor in 2011.(21 January 2011)
Marcia Johnson is named Sterling Professor of Psychology
, ''Yale Daily Bulletin'' Her former graduate students include Shahin Hashtroudi, Frank Durso, Mary Ann Foley, Tracey Kahan, Stephen Lindsay,

Elizabeth A. Phelps Elizabeth Anya Phelps is the Pershing Square Professor of Human Neuroscience at Harvard University in the Department of Psychology. She is a cognitive neuroscientist known for her research at the intersection of memory, learning, and emotion. S ...

, Kristi Multhaup, Chad Dodson, Denise Evert,

Mara Mather Mara Mather is a professor of gerontology and psychology at the USC Davis School of Gerontology. Her research deals with aging and affective neuroscience, focusing on how emotion and stress affect memory and decisions. She is the daughter of math ...

, John Reeder, Wil Cunningham, and Keith Lyle. Johnson has received American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award,Yale Scientific
p.74 (won Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award in 2006) the American Psychological Society William James Fellow Award, and a

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

. In 2014, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Johnson is the director of the Memory and Cognition Lab (MEMlab) at Yale.

References

American women psychologists American cognitive scientists Women cognitive scientists Yale University faculty Yale Sterling Professors University of California, Berkeley alumni 1943 births Living people American women academics 21st-century American women The Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science laureates 21st-century American psychologists {{US-psychologist-stub