Marcia K. Johnson (born 1943) is a
Sterling Professor emeritus of
Psychology
Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries between ...
at
Yale University
Yale University is a Private university, private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Sta ...
. 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
Sterling Professor of
Psychology
Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries between ...
at
Yale University
Yale University is a Private university, private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Sta ...
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
D. Stephen Lindsay is a cognitive psychologist in the field of memory, and a professor of psychology at the University of Victoria (UVic), British Columbia. He received his PhD from Princeton University in 1987.
Lindsay's research is focused on h ...
,
Elizabeth A. Phelps, Kristi Multhaup, Chad Dodson, Denise Evert,
Mara Mather, John Reeder, Wil Cunningham, and Keith Lyle.
Johnson has received
American Psychological Association
The American Psychological Association (APA) is the largest scientific and professional organization of psychologists in the United States, with over 133,000 members, including scientists, educators, clinicians, consultants, and students. It ha ...
Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award,
[Yale Scientific](_blank)
p.74 (won Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award in 2006) the
American Psychological Society
The Association for Psychological Science (APS), previously the American Psychological Society, is an international non-profit organization whose mission is to promote, protect, and advance the interests of scientifically oriented psychology in ...
William James Fellow Award, and a
Guggenheim Fellowship. 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
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