Richard Shiffrin (born March 13, 1942) is an American

psychologist A psychologist is a professional who practices psychology and studies mental states, perceptual, cognitive, emotional, and social processes and behavior. Their work often involves the experimentation, observation, and interpretation of how in ...

, 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 Attention is the behavioral and cognitive process of selectively concentrating on a discrete aspect of information, whether considered subjective or objective, while ignoring other perceivable information. William James (1890) wrote that "At ...

and

memory Memory is the faculty of the mind by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. It is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action. If past events could not be remembered, ...

to the field 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 betwe ...

. 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

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.

Biography

Career

Shiffrin proposed a mathematical model of memory with

Richard C. Atkinson Richard Chatham Atkinson (born March 19, 1929) 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 Cal ...

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. Shiffrin graduated with a Ph.D. in Mathematical Psychology from Stanford in 1968, 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. 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. 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. In 1997 Shiffrin extended the SAM model with the Retrieving Effectively From Memory (REM) model. Shiffrin runs an Annual Summer Interdisciplinary Conference (ASIC) 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.

Awards

Guggenheim Fellow 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 ...

, 1975–76 * Fellow of the

American Association for the Advancement of Science The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is an American international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific respon ...

* James McKeen Cattell Sabbatical Fellowship, 1994–95 * Elected to the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Na ...

, 1995 * Elected to the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, ...

, 1996 * Fellow of 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 ...

, 1996 *

Howard Crosby Warren Medal Howard is an English-language given name originating from Old French Huard (or Houard) from a Germanic source similar to Old High German ''*Hugihard'' "heart-brave", or ''*Hoh-ward'', literally "high defender; chief guardian". It is also probab ...

(

Society of Experimental Psychologists The Society of Experimental Psychologists (SEP), originally called the Society of Experimentalists, is an academic society for experimental psychologists. It was founded by Edward Bradford Titchener in 1904 to be an ongoing workshop in which me ...

), 1999 * The David E. Rumelhart Prize for Contributions to the Formal Analysis of Human Cognition, 2002 * Elected to the

American Philosophical Society The American Philosophical Society (APS), founded in 1743 in Philadelphia, is a scholarly organization that promotes knowledge in the sciences and humanities through research, professional meetings, publications, library resources, and communit ...

, 2005 * William James Fellow Award (

Association for Psychological Science 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 ...

), 2007 * Awarded IU President's Medal for Excellence, 2014

References

* Shiffrin, R.M,, Murnane, K., Gronlund, S. and Roth, M.P. On Units of Storage and Retrieval. Chizuko Izawa (Ed.), Current Issues in Cognitive Processes, 1988; Erlbaum.

External links

Shiffrin's Biography on Association for Psychological Science website

{{DEFAULTSORT:Shiffrin, Richard Living people Memory researchers Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Indiana University faculty Rumelhart Prize laureates 1942 births Fellows of the Cognitive Science Society

Biography

Career

Awards

See also

References

External links