Richard M. Shiffrin honored
Photo by: IU Home Pages
Richard Shiffrin
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Richard M. Shiffrin, Distinguished Professor and Luther Dana Waterman Professor in the Department of Psychology at Indiana University Bloomington, received a Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association earlier this year.
Shiffrin's research, since he was a graduate student in the mid-1960s, has combined the formal modeling of cognitive processes with experimental investigations. According to the APA, Shiffrin's work "has organized the manner in which the field addresses the key issues of memory and attention." Shriffrin's research, states the APA, "helped shape the direction of cognitive psychology. His theories of memory and attention are the leading theories in the psychology of cognition."
Shiffrin came to IUB in 1968. He has helped create and test several of the most respected and accepted theories in psychology and cognitive science, including models specifying the ways short-term and long-term memory differ and interact, the ways our cognitive systems are controlled, the ways attention works, and the ways learning produces automatic processing. His Search of Associative Memory theory of memory retrieval, which highlighted the critical importance of the context cue and provided a principled basis for cue combination in retrieval, remains the gold standard in the field. Shiffrin's more recent work involves developing and testing his Retrieving Effectively from Memory model, which is an extension of SAM and explains how knowledge grows from experience. Implicit memory effects and priming effects are ways the field has developed to explore the relations between knowledge and events. Several articles in collaboration with students and colleagues modeled such relations with the REM framework, in tasks such as perceptual identification and naming, lexical decision and animacy judgments.
Shiffrin's research since arriving at IUB has been supported by continuous grants primarily from the National Institute of Mental Health. In the late 1980s, he founded IU's internationally renowned Cognitive Science Program, and has been director of that program in most of the years since.
Shiffrin has received the most significant honors in his fields. In addition to the APA award, these include election to the National Academy of Sciences in 1995 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996; an honorary doctorate from the University of Amsterdam in 1997; the Howard Crosby Warren Medal from the Society of Experimental Psychologists in 1999; and the David E. Rumelhart Prize for Contributions to the Formal Analysis of Human Cognition, from the Gluschko-Samuelson Foundation, in 2002.
