Class News
Richard Shiffrin '64 wins Rumelhart Prize
The David E. Rumelhart Prize, for contributions to the formal analysis of human cognition, is sponsored by the Robert J. Glushko & Pamela Samuelson Foundation.
Richard Shiffrin is at George Mason University in the Human Factors and Applied Cognition Department.
The Glushko-Samuelson Foundation and the Cognitive Science Society are
pleased to announce that Richard M. Shiffrin has been chosen as the second
recipient of the $100,000 David E. Rumelhart Prize, awarded annually for
an outstanding contribution to the formal analysis of human cognition.
Shiffrin will receive this prize and give the Prize Lecture at the 2002
Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, at George Mason University,
August 7-11, 2002.
Shiffrin has made many contributions to the modeling of human cognition in
areas ranging from perception to attention to learning, but is best known
for his long-standing efforts to develop explicit models of human memory.
His most recent models use Bayesian, adaptive approaches, building on
previous work but extending it in a critical new manner, and carrying his
theory beyond explicit memory to implicit learning and memory processes.
The theory has been evolving for about 35 years, and as a result
represents a progression similar to the best theories seen in any branch
of science.
Shiffrin's major effort began in 1968, in a chapter with Atkinson [1] that
laid out a model of the components of short- and long-term memory and
described the processes that control the operations of memory. The
Atkinson-Shiffrin model encapsulated empirical and theoretical results
from a very large number of publications that modeled quantitatively the
relation of short- to long-term memory. It achieved its greatest success
by showing the critical importance―-and the possibility―-of modeling the
control processes of cognition. This chapter remains one of the most cited
works in the entire field of psychology.
Shiffrin's formal theory was taken forward in a quantum leap in 1980 [2]
and 1981 [3] with the SAM (Search of Associative Memory) model. This was a
joint effort with Jeroen Raaijmakers, then a graduate student. The SAM
model quantified the nature of retrieval from long-term memory, and
characterized reCALL as a memory search with cycles of sampling and
recovery. The SAM theory precisely incorporates the notions of interactive
cue combination that are now seen to lie at the heart of memory retrieval.
Another major quantum step occurred in 1984 [4] when the theory was
extended to recognition memory. With another former student, Gary Gillund,
Shiffrin initiated what has become the standard approach 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. The
next major step occurred in 1990, when Shiffrin published two articles on
the list-length effect with his student Steve Clark and his colleague,
Roger Ratcliff [5, 6]. This research was of critical importance in that it
established clearly that experience leads to the differentiation, rather
than the mere stregthening, of the representations of items in memory.
In 1997, the theory evolved in a radical direction in an important paper
with another former student, Mark Steyvers [7]. Although the changes were
fundamental, the new model retained the best concepts of its predecessors,
so that the previous successful predictions were also a part of the new
theory. REM added featural representations, to capture similarity
relations among items in memory. Building on earlier ideas by John
Anderson, and related ideas developed in parallel by McClelland and
Chappell, Shiffrin used Bayesian principles of adaptive and optimal
decision making under constraints to guide the selection of the
quantitative form of the activation functions. In addition, storage
principles were set forth that provided mechanisms by which episodic
experience could coalesce over development and experience into permanent
non-contextualized knowledge. This latter development allowed the modeling
of implicit memory phenomena, in work that is just now starting to appear
in many journals, including a theory of long-term priming [with Schooler
and Raaijmakers, 8] and a theory of short-term priming [with his student
David Huber and others, 9]. The short-term priming research showed that
the direction of priming can be reversed by extra study given to
particular primes, leading to another conceptual breakthrough. A new
version of the REM model explains this and other findings by assuming that
some prime features are confused with test item features, and that the
system attempts to deal with this situation optimally by appropriate
discounting of evidence from certain features.
Biographical Information
Shiffrin received his Ph. D. from the Mathematical Psychology Program in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University in 1968, the year after Rumelhart received his degree from the same program. Since 1968 he has been on the faculty of the Department of Psychology at Indiana University, where he is now the Luther Dana Waterman Professor of Psychology and Director of the Cognitive Science Program. Shiffrin has accumulated many honors, including membership in the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Howard Crosby Warren Award of the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and a MERIT Award from the National Institute of Mental Health. Shiffrin has served the field as editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition, and as a member of the governing boards of several scientific societies.
Cited Articles By Richard M. Shiffrin
[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: Advances in Research and
Theory (Vol. 2, pp. 89-195). New York: Academic Press.
[2] 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.
[3] Raaijmakers, J. G. W., & Shiffrin, R. M. (1981). Search of associative
memory. Psychological Review, 88, 93-134.
[4] Gillund, G., & Shiffrin, R. M. (1984). A retrieval model for both
recognition and recall. Psychological Review, 91, 1-67.
[5] 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.
[6] 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.
[7] Shiffrin, R. M., & Steyvers, M. (1997). A model for recognition
memory: REM: Retrieving effectively from memory. Psychonomic Bulletin
and Review, 4 (2), 145-166.
[8] Schooler, L., Shiffrin, R. M., & Raaijmakers, J. G. W. (2001). A model
for implicit effects in perceptual identification. Psychological Review,
108, 257-272.
[9] Huber, D. E., Shiffrin, R. M., Lyle, K. B., & Ruys, K. I. (2001).
Perception and preference in short-term word priming. Psychological
Review, 108, 149-182.