This page is dedicated to honoring and preserving the legacies of our deceased members. If you know a member of our community who has recently passed away, please contact Colin MacLeod. Particularly valuable would be suggestions for who might write the obituary. For consistency, the text is to be no more than 150 words, adding one or two links to longer tributes published elsewhere.

 

2025

Murray Glanzer (1922-2025)

Murray Glanzer earned his B.A. from the City College of New York and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. A distinguished researcher and professor at New York University, Murray made many significant contributions to experimental and cognitive psychology. His early work helped define mice-through-a-maze progress as relying on decision making. In the 1960s, Murray helped to clarify memory with work on the serial position effect. This research led to him being awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship at Hebrew University in 1969. Later, he identified the mirror effect in recognition memory and developed attention/likelihood theory to explain the phenomenon. His most recent work further expanded on both the mirror effect and attention/likelihood theory showing that the effect is not limited to memory but can be seen broadly in various areas that rely on decision making. Murray is survived by his three children, six grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.

More information about Murray can be found here.

 

Eleanor A. Maguire (1970-2025)

Small in size, big in character, Eleanor Maguire was a tour de force in cognitive neuroscience. Her work focused on trying to understand the neuroanatomy of core cognitive functions such as human memory and navigation. From the outset of her research career, ecological validity was of crucial importance to her. She strove to investigate human cognition “in the wild” so that her many and varied insights would be relevant to people’s everyday lives. To achieve this goal, she boldly embraced the latest technologies and never shied away from asking the difficult questions. She managed to concurrently achieve rigour and simplicity in her experimental designs, as well as in her dissemination of findings to peers or the broader public. She will be sorely missed by her many colleagues and friends to whom she was generous with her time and guidance.

More information about Eleanor can be found here and here.

 

David A. Washburn (1961-2025)

David Washburn earned a B.A. from Covenant College and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Georgia State University. He remained at GSU until he retired in 2019 as Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, having served as Chair of the psychology department and, for 18 years, as Director of the Language Research Center. He then served as Professor of Psychology at Covenant College, where he taught and conducted research until his death. Among his many accomplishments was the development and training of nonhuman primates to use computers to provide insights into their cognition. He was a Fellow of four divisions in APA, and of APS, and of the Psychonomic Society. What is not captured in his CV is the extent to which he made groups that he was a part of more collegial and so much more interesting. He is survived by his beloved wife, Catherine Anne, and their children and grandchildren.

More information about David can be found here.

 

2024

Daniel Kahneman (1934-2024)

Daniel Kahneman’s research and writings on judgment and decision making (much of it with Amos Tversky), attention, well-being, and thinking have had enormous influence not only on psychology but also on economics, AI, business, philosophy, political science, law, sports, and a receptive public. His 2011 book, Thinking Fast and Slow, has sold more than ten million copies world-wide. He was awarded 24 honorary degrees and many prizes, including the Nobel Prize in Economics (2002) and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2013). Born in what is now Israel, he spent his childhood in France, much of it hiding from Nazi invaders. His undergraduate work was at Hebrew University and his graduate work at University of California-Berkeley. He later taught at both, at the University of British Columbia, and finally at Princeton University, retiring in 2008. He is sorely missed by his family, as well as by his many friends and collaborators.

More information about Danny can be found here and here.

 

Robert Perry Sanford (1953-2024)
After attending the Berklee School of music in Boston, Rob Sanford worked for the Psychonomic Society, initially as Manager at our Austin publications office and subsequently as Submissions Editor for our journals, for virtually his entire adult life. Rob was universally liked for his competence, for his directness, and for his laid-back attitude.  His integrity in maintaining the highest standards of academic excellence was unparalleled. His legacy is not just in the work bearing his meticulous touch but in the countless researchers whom he mentored and inspired through the complex landscape of scientific publishing. Rob's passion for our science and his commitment to quality will continue to resonate in the pages of our journals, and he will be sorely missed. Beyond his commitment to the Society, Rob continued throughout his life to compose and play music, and to greatly enjoy his time with his extended family and friends.

 

More information about Rob can be found here.

 

Larry L. Jacoby (1944-2024)
Larry Jacoby's ideas and experimental findings were transformational for theories of memory and social cognition. He studied the interplay between consciously controlled and automatic processes on subjective experiences such as the feeling of remembering, and his process dissociation procedure was an ingenious and highly influential method for separating these two influences. Larry was born in Kansas in 1944 and died in March 2024 in the presence of his wife Carole, son Derek, daughter Karin, and granddaughters Becca and Shannon. He played center on his high school football team; and decades later joked that he was cursed with "a brilliant mind trapped in the body of a football player!" He held positions at multiple universities, but his two longest-lasting research homes were McMaster University and Wash U St. Louis. Google Scholar lists nine articles with more than a thousand citations. Larry lived and breathed his work with perseverance and dedication.

 

More information about Larry can be found here.

 

2023

Colleen M. Kelley (1953-2023)
Colleen Kelley completed her BA at Reed College (1975) and her PhD at Stanford (1983), supervised by Gordon Bower. She taught at Reed, Williams, and Macalister Colleges before moving to Florida State University in 1996, becoming professor emerita in 2021. Her memory research, funded by sources including the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Aging, has had substantial impact. A Fellow of both APA and APS, Colleen read widely and penetratingly and had rigorous standards. She was a superb mentor for her own graduate students and for other students and junior faculty. As former student Michael Alban said, Colleen possessed "an extraordinary combination of clear thinking and kindness." She was an insightful collaborator who enhanced her coauthors' thinking and the clarity and reach of the works they co-created. She was also an altogether remarkable person possessed of a rapier wit, and was much admired and greatly appreciated.

 

 

Robert Proctor (1949-2023)
Robert Proctor is remembered for his empirical work on stimulus-response compatibility. Robert earned his PhD from the University of Texas, Arlington in 1975. After stints at Michigan State University and Auburn University, Robert joined the faculty at Purdue University in 1988, where he remained for his career. He became a distinguished professor at Purdue in 2007. His academic legacy includes 38 PhD graduates, 24 books, 66 book chapters, 325 journal articles, and 26 book reviews and commentaries. Robert was the editor-in-chief dfor the journals Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers (1994-1999) and the American Journal of Psychology (since 2008). He was an award-winning mentor for faculty and students. In addition to a love of science, Robert enjoyed watching Purdue football and women's basketball games, listening to jazz and progressive rock music, and a good chile relleno with a margarita.

Endel Tulving (1927-2023)
Endel Tulving was one of the most influential psychologists of the last 100 years. Born in Estonia, he spent most of his career in Toronto. In early studies, he rejected the notion of pair-wise associations in verbal learning in favor of the concept of organization. He next explored the neglected issue of retrieval processes and the crucial role of cues, culminating in the encoding specificity principle. He may be best known for the idea of memory systems—notably the distinction between episodic and semantic memory—laid out lucidly in Elements of Episodic Memory. His later work focused on brain correlates of encoding and retrieval, and on the case of KC, a man with essentially no episodic memory. Tulving's importance as a scientist was recognized by election to the national academies of Canada, Britain, USA, Sweden, and Estonia. In his leisure time he played tennis, bridge, and chess with competitive enthusiasm.

 

Stephen E. Palmer (1948-2023)
Stephen E . Palmer, professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley died on July 29, 2023. Born and raised in New Jersey, Steve earned his BA at Princeton and his PhD at UC San Diego. He joined the Berkeley faculty in 1975 and remained until retiring in 2009. Steve co-founded and directed the Berkeley Cognitive Science program (1990-2000) and was Editor of Cognitive Psychology (1986-1990). Steve served on the Psychonomic Society Governing Board (1996-2000; Chair 2001-2002) and Publications Board (1996-2001; Chair 2000-2002). Steve’s research contributed enormously to understanding cognitive representation, perceptual organization, and aesthetics. He is well-known for his foundational book Vision Science: Photons to Phenomenology. An outstanding colleague and teacher, Steve challenged people to ask the hard questions and pursue answers with rigor and elegance. Steve will be deeply missed by his loving husband Avi, his family, countless students, and colleagues graced by his sharp intellect and profound kindness.

~Karen B. Schloss and Joseph L. Brooks

Walter Kintsch (1932-2023)
Walter Kintsch passed away on March 24, 2023, at the age of 90. He was born in Timișoara, Romania and grew up Austria. He received his PhD in 1960 from the University of Kansas and held faculty positions at the University of Missouri, the University of California-Riverside, and a visiting professorship at Stanford University before moving to the University of Colorado Boulder in 1968. He served as the president of APA’s Division 3 and chaired the Psychonomic Society’s Governing Board and the Cognitive Science Society’s Governing Board. He edited Psychological Review and the Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior. His research explored memory, knowledge representation, text/discourse understanding, and their intersection. Notable publications include the Kintsch and van Dijk (1978) text comprehension/production model and the construction-integration model (Kintsch, 1988). His intellect, creativity, and generosity will be sorely missed by lifelong spouse and collaborator Eileen Kintsch, and family, friends, and colleagues.

More information about Walter can be found here and here.

~Ernest F. Mross

Lyle E. Bourne, Jr. (1932-2023) 
Lyle Bourne, former Chair of the Governing Board (1981-1982) and Publications Committee (1983-1985) of the Psychonomic Society, died on March 2, 2023.  Lyle received his BA from Brown University (1953) and PhD from University of Wisconsin (1956).  He taught at University of Utah (1956-1963) and University of Colorado Boulder (1963-2023), where he was the first Director of the Institute of Cognitive Science (1980-1983) and Chair of the Psychology Department (1983-1991).  He also served as President of the Federation of Behavioral, Psychological, and Cognitive Sciences (1995-1997) and Editor of Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory (1975-1980).  His research explored conceptual behavior; mental arithmetic; classification skill acquisition; and training, retention, and transfer. His notable books include Human Conceptual Behavior (1966), Psychology: Its Principles and Meanings (with Bruce Ekstrand, 1973), and Train Your Mind for Peak Performance (with Alice Healy, 2014). We will miss his generous, gracious, thoughtful, and wise spirit.

More information about Lyle can be found here.

~Alice F. Healy

2022

Alexander ("Sandy") Pollatsek (1941-2022)
Sandy was a pioneer in the use of eye-movement recording to investigate reading, both for text and music. He co-authored highly influential theoretical work on the dynamics of reading, as well as a classic textbook on the subject, and extended the use of eye-movement recording to the study of driving, demonstrating an effective way to train drivers to reduce accidents. Sandy graduated from the Bronx High School of Science, got a master’s degree in Chemistry from Harvard, and then earned a PhD in Mathematical Psychology at the University of Michigan. In 1969 he joined the faculty at UMass-Amherst, where he trained a number of graduate students who went on to have distinguished careers. Sandy loved classical music, played the piano and composed, having studied with Nadia Boulanger in France. Sabbaticals at the University of Oregon and in England enriched his life and the lives of those who hosted him.

More information about Sandy can be found here.

~David Rosenbaum

 

Martin A. Conway (1952-2022)
Martin Conway is remembered for his theoretical work on autobiographical memory setting out the processes by which specific memories are shaped in an organisational hierarchy with the self at its core. One of six children, Martin was born in Darlington, UK. After finishing school without qualifications, he moved to London where, in evening classes, he discovered psychology. His career started as a scientist at the Applied Psychology Unit in Cambridge in 1983. He then held lectureships at the Universities of Hertfordshire and Lancaster before moving to Bristol as Professor in 1993. At Bristol, he was head of department and then went on to serve in this role at Durham University, the University of Leeds, and City University (London). He is known for the International Conference on Memory and the journal Memory, both co-founded with Susan Gathercole. Martin was a keen poet and a Fellow of the Royal College of Arts.

Michael Wertheimer (1927-2022)
Michael Wertheimer was born in Berlin and was six when his family escaped Nazi Germany. They immigrated to New York where Michael’s childhood included visits from close family friends, such as Albert Einstein and Solomon Asch. He earned his PhD from Harvard University in 1952 before joining the faculty at Wesleyan University. In 1955, he moved to the University of Colorado Boulder where he researched cognition and psycholinguistics before becoming a leading historian of psychology. Michael edited and authored some 50 books, including his celebrated volume A Brief History of Psychology. He also co-authored a biography of his father, Max Wertheimer, the founder of Gestalt psychology. In 2020, he published his autobiography, Facets of an Academic's Life: A Memoir. Brimming with ageless energy, Michael was a dedicated scholar, an award-winning educator, and a trusted mentor. He passed away on December 23, 2022, survived by his beloved wife and family.

More information about Michael can be found here.

~D. Brett King

Raymond S. Nickerson (1931-2022)
Ray Nickerson died on December 13, 2022. He attended Providence Bible College as an undergraduate. He then served 2 years in the U.S. Army before earning his master’s degree (University of Maine Orono, 1959), and his PhD (Tufts, 1965). After 25 years at BBN Systems and Technologies, Ray returned to Tufts as a research professor. Here he ran the NSF-funded Laboratory for Probabilistic Reasoning. Ray was an expert in and champion of Applied Cognition, founding the  Journal of Experimental Psychology:  Applied in 1994. Ray will be remembered for the keenness of his scientific insight and his creative and illuminating approach to understanding the human mind. Ray and his wife Doris established the Daniel Raymond Nickerson Foundation to honor their son’s memory and provide small grants to benefit people with disabilities. Ray is survived by three children, eleven grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren. He was predeceased by his wife Doris in 2016.

More information about Ray can be found here.

~Holly A. Taylor

Jamie I. D. Campbell (1952-2022)
Jamie Campbell, professor emeritus at the University of Saskatchewan, passed away September 12, 2022. After a few years on the road as keyboard player in a rock group, Jamie received his B.A. from Queen’s University (1979) and Ph.D. from the University of Waterloo (1985). He completed a postdoc at Carnegie Mellon University, followed by an appointment at the University of Western Ontario. In 1990, Jamie moved to the University of Saskatchewan where he remained until his retirement in 2021. Well known for his quiet temperament, sharp wit and broad knowledge, Jamie was a tireless academic whose substantial research on numerical cognition was highly recognized. His voluminous research and modeling of simple addition and multiplication within and across cultures demonstrated just how complex even the simplest cognitive functions can be. Jamie was a gifted teacher, mentor, colleague, and friend who will be sorely missed. He is survived by his life-partner, Professor Valerie Thompson.

~Jim Cheesman 

Mark H. Ashcraft  (1949-2022)
Mark Ashcraft, professor emeritus, passed away on September 5, 2022 after a difficult battle with cancer. Mark earned his Ph.D. from the University of Kansas and spent the first half of his academic career at Cleveland State University before moving to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) in 2004. He served as chair of psychology at both institutions and had retired in 2020. Mark started his career studying semantic memory, but he spent most of his career conducting research in math cognition where he explored how people solve math problems and how math anxiety affects that process. In addition to that research, he is well known for authoring many editions of a popular textbook in the field of cognitive psychology, Cognition (early editions were titled Human Memory and Cognition). Mark is survived by his wife, Mary, and his children, Jordan and Laura. 

More information about Mark can be found here. 

~David Copeland

Sam Glucksberg  (1933-2022)
Sam Glucksberg, a pioneer psycholinguist who was part of the cognitive revolution in psychology, died on August 29, 2022 in NYC following a stroke. He is survived by his wife Kay Deaux, three children, and two grandchildren. Born on February 6, 1933 in Montreal, he graduated from City College in NY (1956) and received a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from NYU (1960). After doing research at the U.S. Army Human Engineering Laboratories, he taught at Princeton University for over four decades. Glucksberg’s research had an important impact on a range of topics in language and cognition. He published numerous groundbreaking articles about the understanding of figurative language, culminating with his 2001 book “Understanding figurative language: From metaphor to idioms.” A leader in the field, he edited both Psychological Science and JEP: General. A beloved mensch who promoted young scholars, Sam will always be remembered as sharp, funny, and full of life.

More information about Sam can be found here. 

~Boaz Keysar

Irving Biederman  (1939-2022)
Irv Biederman, Harold Dornsife Chair in Neurosciences and professor of psychology and computer science at the University of Southern California, died August 17, age 83. Following undergraduate studies at Brooklyn College, he earned his PhD at the University of Michigan in 1966. He moved to USC in 1991 after professorships at the State University of New York at Buffalo and at the University of Minnesota. His influential research was in the realm of the brain’s role in vision, including studies of the recognition of shapes, objects, scenes, and faces. Best known for his “Recognition by Components Theory” that explained object recognition, his later work led him to argue that face recognition is distinct from object recognition. He also argued from a line of research on perceptual and cognitive pleasure that we are all “infovores—always seeking out novel but richly interpretable experiences,” a description that certainly fit him well.

More information about Irv can be found here. 

~Jim Pomerantz and Howard Egeth 

Roger Newland Shepard  (1929-2022)
Roger Newland Shepard, cognitive scientist and Stanford professor emeritus, died peacefully in Tucson on May 30, 2022 at aged 93 from Parkinson’s Disease. He is survived by his wife of 70 years (Barbaranne), three children, and a granddaughter. Shepard earned his BA at Stanford and his PhD at Yale, both in Psychology, and was a professor in the Psychology Departments at Harvard (1966-1968) and Stanford (1968-1996). Well-known for his research in the areas of visual and auditory perception, memory, mental imagery and representation, learning theory, music cognition, and generalization, he received many accolades, most notably The National Medal of Science (1995). In addition to a keen mind and a delightful sense of humor, he composed music, wrote poetry, pursued photography, and published a book of his hand-drawn optical illusions called Mind Sights (1990). He was supportive of both his family and the researchers with whom he collaborated.

More information about Roger can be found here. 

~Shenna Shepard

Julian Hochberg  (1923-2022)
Julian Hochberg, Columbia University Centennial Professor Emeritus of Psychology, and beloved husband, father, grandfather, and friend, died on May 22, 2022 in NYC after a brief illness. Born in Brooklyn (7/10/1923) to Edward Hochberg and Dora Wiener Hochberg, he graduated from Stuyvesant High School and the City College of New York and received his PhD from UC Berkeley. He was a professor at Cornell University and NYU before moving to Columbia University where, in addition to teaching and conducting important research on perceptual organization, he served two terms as Chairman of the Psychology Department and was a member of the University Senate. An elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, he received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the APA. A talented designer, he built a large three-story home in upstate New York for his family with his own hands. He is survived by his wife, three children, and six grandchildren.

More information about Julian can be found here and here.

~J.D.S. Hochberg

Sally Margaret Andrews  (1953-2022)
Sally Andrews died in Sydney on 4 May 2022 after a brief battle with cancer. After receiving her honours degree (1975) and PhD (1983) at University of New South Wales, Australia, she held faculty positions before serving as Head of Psychology. Sally was appointed Professor of Cognitive Psychology at The University of Sydney in 2002 and served as Head of School (2004-2011) where she had a transformative impact. Sally was a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences and recognised as an international leader particularly in the areas of reading and language. Sally was a deeply committed scientist who took no nonsense, yet remained inclusive mentoring many, and was a champion for women. Sally influenced generations of cognitive scientists, and was highly respected and much loved amongst her colleagues for her sharp intellect, her inimitable style, and her great sense of humour. She is hugely missed. 

More information about Sally can be found here. 

~Sachiko Kinoshita

Bennet Bronson Murdock Jr.  (1925-2022)
Ben Murdock passed away in Toronto in March 2022 at the age of 96. Ben received his PhD (1951) from Yale University, supervised by Leonard Doob. He was at Wesleyan University (1950-51), the University of Vermont (1951-1964), and the University of Missouri, Columbia (1964-65), before joining the University of Toronto in 1965, where he stayed until he retired as Professor Emeritus in 1991. His many honours include NSF Fellowships at Cambridge (1962-63) and Stanford (1970-71), a Killam Research Fellowship (1984-86), a Visiting Scholar at Harvard (1984-86), and the Norman Anderson Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Experimental Psychologists (2003). Ben was first known for his pioneering research into short-term memory, and later for his quantitative Theory of Distributed Associative Memory (TODAM) developed to describe the encoding and retrieval of item, associative, and serial order information. Ben supervised numerous graduate and postdoctoral students, many of whom became members of the Society. 

More information about Ben can be found here. 

~Bill Hockley

 

2021

Michael Charles Corballis  (1936-2021)
Mike Corballis died in Auckland on 13 November, 2021 after a brief battle with lymphoma. After initial training in New Zealand, Mike earned his PhD from McGill University in 1965. He held faculty positions at the University of Auckland (1967-1969) and McGill (1969-1977) before returning to Auckland as professor of psychology in 1978. Mike made major contributions to a number of research domains, including statistical inference, cerebral asymmetry, visual perception, mental imagery, language evolution, and mental time travel. He authored 13 books and more than 400 articles, reviews, and chapters. His contributions earned numerous awards, including an honorary doctorate from the University of Waterloo (1998), the New Zealand Order of Merit (2002) and, in 2016, the Rutherford Medal - New Zealand’s highest scientific honor. Mike’s erudition, mentorship and tutelage will be fondly remembered by generations of students, research fellows and collaborators. He is survived by two sons and three granddaughters.

More information about Mike can be found here.

~Paul Corballis

Geoff Hollis-Haynes (1983-2021)
Geoff Hollis-Haynes (né Hollis) died on November 8, 2021, of organ failure secondary to cancer. After his undergraduate studies at the University of Alberta, Geoff completed his masters and PhD with Guy Van Orden at the University of Cincinnati. He returned to Edmonton to teach psychology and computer science at the University of Alberta. In his brief career, he published many articles on computational psycholinguistics, venturing occasionally into other areas. Among his contributions, he championed the use of best/worst judgments, described the principle components of word-embedding models, wrote on using such models to predict word affect and humour judgments, deconstructed the lexical measure of contextual diversity, and developed a vector-based model of discriminative learning that addressed several weaknesses in the Rescorla-Wagner model. He was a friendly, good-humored, curious, creative, and much-loved man.

More information about Geoff can be found here.

~Chris F. Westbury

Robert Allen Gardner (1930-2021)
R. Allen Gardner, co-author of The Structure of Learning: From Sign Stimuli to Sign Language and dozens of other published reports from research on the cross-fostering of chimpanzees, died August 20, 2021 in his home—the same “ranch” where those innovative studies had been conducted. Brooklyn-born Gardner earned a B.A. from New York University (1950, Linguistics) and an M.A. from Columbia (1951, Psychology, mentored by C.J. Warden) before moving to Northwestern for the Ph.D. (1954, Psychology) directed by Benton J. Underwood. Allen married zoologist Beatrix Tugendhut (1933-1995) in 1961 and the lifelong collaborators moved in 1963 to the University of Nevada-Reno, where they conducted the groundbreaking studies on sign-language learning by chimpanzees Washoe, Tatu, Pili, Moja and Dar. Allen Gardner retired in 2010 as University of Nevada Foundation Professor and a Fellow in the UNR Center for Advanced Studies, which he had co-founded in 1984 and directed from 1990-1993.

More information about Allen can be found here and here.  

~David A. Washburn

Michael S. Humphreys (1942-2021)
Mike Humphreys was born in California and passed away at age 79 in Brisbane, Australia, where he had lived for 42 years. He received his BA from Reed College and his PhD from Stanford University (1970), supervised by William K. Estes. Mike was Professor Emeritus of the University of Queensland; he was elected Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia in 1991. Well known for his encyclopedic knowledge of the psychological literature, he was both an empiricist and a quantitative theorist, and published extensively in the areas of human memory, attention, and cognition. With former PhD student Kerry Chalmers, he published Thinking About Memory in 2016, presenting a novel approach that considered the task goals, available cues and information, opportunity to learn, and interference from irrelevant information. Mike was also a staunch environmentalist who worked tirelessly to restore the native bush of the Moggill Creek catchment area.

Russell Miller Church (1930-2021)
Russell ("Russ") Miller Church graduated from the University of Michigan in 1952 and earned his PhD from Harvard University in 1956. He spent his 63-year career in experimental psychology at Brown University where he was appointed to the distinguished position of Edgard L. Marston Professor. At the time of his retirement in 2018, Russ was the longest tenured faculty member in the university’s history. Russ was well known for being a caring and gifted mentor and served as the primary advisor for 21 PhD students. Russ repeatedly reshaped the research landscape with his innovative ideas. He was a pioneer (with John Gibbon and Warren Meck) of what became the dominant theory of timing, Scalar Timing Theory. Russ was an exceptional leader and role model and he has left behind many tools, practices, and ideas on which to build the future of behavioral science.

More information about Russ can be found here. 

2020

 

J. Frank Yates (1945-2020)
J. Frank Yates passed away November 19, 2020 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Frank earned his PhD and joined the professorial rank at the University of Michigan in 1971, where he spent his entire career, retiring in 2020 as the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Professor Emeritus of Business Administration at the Stephen M. Ross School of Business. Frank's groundbreaking scholarship defined the field in his book, Judgment and Decision Making (1990). He co-founded the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making (1987) and served as associate editor for ~30 years. He was the James McKeen Cattell Fellow (APS 2011) and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2017). An outstanding teacher, mentor, and visionary leader, Frank's programmatic efforts advanced diversity in higher education, serving thousands of students from underrepresented groups. In 2016, the Psychonomic Society established the J. Frank Yates Student Travel Awards (recently renamed the J. Frank Yates Student Conference Awards) to support diversity and inclusion in the psychological sciences.

More information about Frank can be found here and here.

-Patricia Reuter-Lorenz

Arthur Shimamura (1954-2020)
Art Shimamura was an inspirational and creative scientist who expanded our understanding of memory and the frontal lobes. His early work in cognitive neuroscience included influential studies of memory disorders. As a Berkeley professor, he explored many research topics, published many highly cited studies, and fascinated generations of students in his classes. With a Guggenheim Fellowship, he explored relationships between art and cognitive neuroscience, culminating in a popular book, Experiencing Art: In the Brain of the Beholder. In an historical excavation, he linked the innovations of photographer Edward Muybridge with personality changes due to frontal-lobe injury. Art's interests in aesthetics were reflected both in his research and in his talent as a photographer. He also took up writing for the general public on topics such as effective learning, healthy aging, psychocinematics, walkabouts around O'ahu, and cancer. He is deeply missed by friends, family, students, and his many scientific colleagues. 

For books, blogs, and photography, click here.

-Ken Paller and Rich Ivry

Gordon H. Bower (1932-2020)
Gordon Bower spent his 50-year career at Stanford University, retiring in 2008 as the Albert Ray Lang Professor of Psychology. His major contributions across diverse research areas in memory and learning led to many honors, including the President's National Medal of Science and election to the National Academy of Sciences. He was president of several major societies and received three honorary degrees. Gordon influenced many young researchers, including over 50 PhD students, leading to the 2018 APS Mentoring Award, an award he was very proud of. Beyond his accomplishments, Gordon was...Gordon. He had a disarming country accent behind which was a keen analytical mind. His students and colleagues have favorite Gordon stories, often involving tough (but insightful) questions at Friday seminars. Gordon died in his home on June 17, 2020. He is survived by Sharon, his life-long love whom he married in 1957, their three children, and five grandchildren. 

More information about Gordon can be found here, here, and here.

-Brian Ross, Andrea Halpern, Larry Barsalou 

Karl Anders Ericsson (1947-2020)
K. Anders Ericsson died in Tallahassee, FL June 17, 2020. He received his PhD at the University of Stockholm in 1976, was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University, Professor at University of Colorado at Boulder, and Associate Research Professor at Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Education in Berlin. He joined Florida State University in 1992. Anders developed a highly influential theory about the role of deliberate practice in skill acquisition. Other accomplishments included honing the use of think aloud verbal protocols to trace cognitive processes, generating ingenious case studies of memory experts, and developing the construct of long-term working memory. Importantly, Anders showed a genuine interest in people as human beings first, and as fellow scientists second. He was a towering and inspiring role model to all who had the privilege to work with him.

More information about Anders can be found here.

-Neil Charness

 

Robert A. Rescorla (1940-2020)
Bob Rescorla died on March 24, 2020 after a fall at his home. As a graduate student in Richard L. Solomon’s laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, Bob wrote two important Psychological Review papers; from then on his ideas, more than those of any other scholar, drove theorizing in the field of associative learning. His many incisive empirical papers, marked by elegant experimental designs, generally included multiple experiments with replications, making the findings ironclad.  Bob was on faculty at Yale (1966-1981) and then at Penn (1981-2009), where he was the James M. Skinner Professor of Science (1986-2000, while serving as department Chair and later as Dean) and the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Psychology (2000-2009).   His many awards included election to the National Academy of Sciences, the Howard Crosby Warren Medal of the Society of Experimental Psychologists, APA’s Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, and the Ira Abrams Teaching Award from Penn.

More information about Bob can be found here.

-Vincent M. LoLordo

2019

Marilyn Chapnik Smith  (1942-2019)
Marilyn Smith was born in Toronto on the Ides of March, 1942; she died in Toronto on November 8, 2019, at the age of 77. Marilyn did her undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto and her PhD at MIT, where she was supervised by Wayne Wickelgren. At the age of 24, she returned to the University of Toronto as a professor at the then new Scarborough campus, where she remained until her retirement in 2004. An active member of the U of T memory group—the Ebbinghaus Empire—Marilyn’s research interests ranged from basic perceptual phenomena to attention and memory. She served as Associate Editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition in the 1980s and wrote an influential Psychological Bulletin article on hypnosis and memory. Upon retirement, along with her longstanding work as an artist, her interest in cognition and the law led her to become an arbitrator.

More information about Marilyn can be found here .

-Colin M. MacLeod

Robert R. Provine (1943-2019)
Robert Provine died in Baltimore on October 17, 2019. His training focused on neuropsychology and neuroembryology. His mentors included Nobel Laureate Rita Levi-Montalcini, and Viktor Hamburger, a winner of the National Medal of Science. He was emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Association for Psychological Science. His research on yawning, laughter, tickling, and emotional tears provided fascinating insights into the fundamentals of human social behavior. Labeling his ethological approach “sidewalk neuroscience,” he demonstrated how insights could be obtained with careful observation and very simple equipment. His two books, “Laughter” and “Curious Behavior,” received stellar reviews, and his work is widely cited in textbooks. He is survived by his wife, his daughter and son, and three grandchildren. His friends and colleagues will miss his brilliance, excitement for discoveries, and great intellectual energy.

More information about Robert can be found here and here. 

-Helen R. Weems

Peggy Intons-Peterson (1930-2019)
Peggy Intons-Peterson completed her B.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota, married Lloyd Peterson in 1953, and moved to Indiana University in 1956 when Lloyd joined the faculty. They carried out research on memory, including their ground-breaking 1959 JEP article: “Short-term retention of individual verbal items.” Indiana recognized her outstanding research contributions, achieved while raising four children and teaching part-time, by appointing her directly to a full professorship in 1969. Her seminal research contributions in articles and five books extended to augmentation of memory,visual imagery and its perception-like operation and its role in creativity, and early research on gender issues, including bias and discrimination, across ages and cultures. Peggy was editor of JEP: Human Perception and Performance (1980-1982), and Memory & Cognition (1989-93), associate dean of Arts and Science (1972-74), interim dean of the faculties (1974-77), and chair of the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences (1989-1995).

More information about Peggy can be found here.

-Richard M. Shiffrin

Henry C. Ellis (1927-2019)
Henry Ellis died on July 4, 2019. He received his PhD degree from Washington University in St. Louis in 1958, supervised by Marion Bunch. Henry immediately joined the faculty of the University of New Mexico where he remained his entire career. His early research reflected Bunch's interest in perception and memory and in transfer of learning, focusing on the effect of verbal labels on memory for visual shapes and on transfer of strategies in free recall. Later, his research turned to studies of emotion and memory. Henry established the department's honors program in 1959 and later served as chair from 1975-1984. He was appointed Distinguished Professor in 1987 and Distinguished Research Professor in 1994. Henry was preceded in death by his wife of 58 years, Florence, who was the surrogate mother of numerous generations of graduate students as well as a successful real estate executive.

More information about Henry can be found here.

-Reed Hunt

Patrick Cabe (1944-2019)
Scots-Irish, he said, Patrick Allen Cabe, June 7, 1944 (Toccoa, GA) - August 13, 2019 (Fearrington Village, NC) was a distinguished ecological perceptionist, with theoretical papers lately on perceptual learning and the useful invariants in visual inputs. Pat’s recent studies on haptic information in forces were often based on insightful demos with pulleys and strings. Earlier experiments were on picture perception in birds. Good-humoured and straightforward, he was friendly to students and highly supportive of fellow researchers. BA and MA, Akron, PhD Cornell (extending J. J. and E. J. Gibson’s ideas), he collaborated around North America, publishing right up to 2019. His UNC Pembroke base gave him teaching and research awards. With Suellen, his wife for over 50 years, he paired international conferences with travel, hiking, and kayaking to see first hand the results of geological forces. The Tactile Research Group of Psychonomics, his home for decades, is dedicating their 2019 meeting to Pat.

More information about Pat can be found here.

-John M. Kennedy

James Craig Bartlett (1948-2019)
Jim Bartlett died in Dallas, Texas, USA on June 1, 2019 after undergoing treatment for cancer. Born in Newark, New Jersey, Jim received his undergraduate degree magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Texas Austin in 1970 and his PhD in Psychology from Yale in 1975. He then joined the faculty at UT Dallas, where he remained his entire career and produced 16 PhDs. He rose up through the ranks to an endowed professorship, serving in many key positions including Interim Dean of the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, which is now naming a new professorship after him. Jim’s research interests were wide-ranging. He was a major figure in the study of holistic configurations across the age span, including the perception of faces, places, objects, and melodies. His work has also had implications for applied problems such as eyewitness testimony.

More information about Jim can be found here and here.

-James Pomerantz

 

Alan Raymond Scoboria (1972-2019)
Alan Scoboria passed away from brain cancer April 12, 2019, age 46.  An applied memory researcher with strong interest in theory, he produced an impressive body of research exploring the cognitive and social processes that contribute to people’s beliefs and memories of their personal past, and examining best practices in interviewing cooperative eyewitnesses.  Alan completed his doctorate in clinical psychology at University of Connecticut in 2004, and taught at University of Windsor for 15 years.  In his too-short career, he published over 50 research articles, many with collaborators from around the world.  He served as an Associate Editor for  Applied Cognitive Psychology for 5 years. He is survived by his wife Myrna and their two daughters, whom he loved dearly, and is mourned by a community of scholars who will miss his thought-provoking ideas, his kind and open nature, and his love of a good meal.

 

More information about Alan can be found here. 

-Linda Henkel, Giuliana Mazzoni, Amina Memon

 

Douglas John Kerr Mewhort (1942-2019)
Doug Mewhort was born in Toronto and passed away in Kingston on February 28, 2019. His first passion was the French horn (A.R.C.T., 1960), and he played professionally in Toronto, Stratford, and Kingston. Doug studied Psychology at the University of Toronto (B.A. Hon, 1964) and the University of Waterloo (M.A., 1965; PhD, 1968), where he worked with Philip Bryden. He joined the Psychology Department of Queen's University in 1968 and published extensively in the areas of Cognitive Psychology, Computational Modelling, and Statistics. His academic service included Editor of the Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, Associate Editor for Psychological Research/Psychologische Forschung, Consulting Editor for the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, and Director Representating Science on the Canadian Psychological Association's Governing Board. He was a past President of the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour, and Cognitive Science and the 2019 recipient of the CSBBCS Donald O. Hebb Distinguished Contribution Award.

 

More information about Doug can be found here. 

-William E. Hockley

2018

William H. Batchelder (1940-2018)

Born in Mississippi, Bill Batchelder grew up in Indiana, attending Indiana University where he majored in Chemistry. After graduate school at Stanford, he taught for five years at the University of Illinois. In 1970, he joined the just established UC Irvine, where he spent the rest of his career, including stints as Chair of the School of Social Sciences. One of the founders of mathematical psychology, he served both as President of the Society for Mathematical Psychologists and as editor of the Journal of Mathematical Psychology. In 2017, he and colleagues edited the New Handbook of Mathematical Psychology, to which he contributed multiple chapters. A Senior Master in the United States Chess Federation, he was also an ardent sailor. A devoted mentor to graduate students, he was an influential and creative scholar.

 

More information about Bill can be found here.

-Colin M. MacLeod

 

Neal F. Johnson (1934-2018)
Neal Johnson was born May 1, 1934, in Willmar, Minnesota. Following completion of his PhD in 1961 at the University of Minnesota, Neal spent 47 years as a professor at The Ohio State University, interleaved with visiting professorships at the University of California, Berkeley ('65, '74, '75, '77, '78, '83). Neal's research program reflected the emergence of psycholinguistics as a core topic during the cognitive revolution, leading him to focus on the structure of language as providing the organizational units for encoding and retrieval, and to explore skilled reading. Neal served in many leadership roles including President of the Midwestern Psychological Association (1987), the Psychonomic Society (1999), and the General (1995) and Experimental (1996) Divisions of the American Psychological Association. He was mentor to several generations of cognitive psychologists who remember well Neal's animated hosting of celebratory parties. Neal died peacefully on December 4, 2018 at Friendship Village, Dublin, Ohio.

More information about Neal can be found here.

-Harvey H. C. Marmurek

 

Charles W. Eriksen (1923-2018)
A towering figure in experimental psychology, Charles W. Eriksen passed away in February this year. He was 95. “Erik” made extensive, lasting contributions both to research methods and to theories in several areas of psychology, especially visual information processing. He pioneered many research methods now in common use—converging operations to distinguish perception from behavior, visual search, rapid serial presentations, the stop-signal paradigm, temporal integration in form perception, spatial and temporal cues for guiding selective attention, and (with his wife Barbara Eriksen) the flankers task. He also introduced and tested many theories of selective attention. The founding Editor of Perception & Psychophysics in 1966, Erik served for 23 years as its principal Editor. An impressive and unforgettable person, and a decorated veteran of World War II, Erik was a compelling representative of “the greatest generation.”

More information about Erik can be found at https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-018-1532-9.

-Joe Lappin, Lisa Fournier, James Hoffman, Gordon Logan

 

 

Robert Fox (1932-2018)

Robert Fox, Professor of Psychology at Vanderbilt University for over half a century, died December 12, 2018, after a short illness. He was 86. Bob received his PhD from the University of Cincinnati in 1963 and then began his long association with Vanderbilt where he studied and taught until his retirement in 2012.Bob is recognized for his landmark studies of animal vision and human vision, both infant and adult. He is perhaps best known for his foundational work on binocular rivalry, with a series of landmark papers in the 60’s and 70’s that sparked interest in rivalry within vision science. He was a founding member of the Vanderbilt Vision Research Center, and over the decades trained a host of graduate students who themselves went on to productive careers. The Department honored his legacy by endowing an award in his name given annually to a post-graduate researcher in the Department.

More information about Robert can be found here.

-Randolph Blake

 

David S. Gorfein (1935-2018)
David Gorfein passed away on July 31st at the age of 83. A native New Yorker, Dave earned his PhD from Columbia University while supporting himself teaching in Montana and Utah and mailing dissertation pages home for his mother to type. His 60-year career included positions at New College, Adelphi University, and University of Texas. He started out as a social psychologist but soon became interested in short-term memory. His research on homographs culminated in the development of his activation selection model for resolving semantic ambiguity. He loved attending Psychonomics and discussing research with all his friends. Dave will be remembered for his sense of humor, his generosity toward undergraduate and graduate students, his talent for creating community, and his ability to find puns everywhere. A life-long Yankees fan, he is survived by his wife Julia and sons Will and Aaron.

-Andrea Bubka and Stephanie A. Berger

Allan R. Wagner (1934-2018)
Allan Wagner died peacefully at home with his family on September 28, 2018, at age 84 after recurrence of brain cancer.   Allan arrived at the Institute of Human Relations, which housed Yale’s Psychology Department, fresh from Iowa’s cornfields and Kenneth Spence’s tutelage.  He fit right in with neo-behaviorists Neal Miller and Frank Logan.  As the cognitive revolution began in the late 60’s, he and Bob Rescorla collaborated to revolutionize the study of association formation in classical conditioning with the Rescorla-Wagner model.  Allan remained an influential theorist and experimentalist.  His accomplishments were recognized with awards including the Howard Crosby Warren Medal of the Society of Experimental Psychologists (1991), election to the National Academy of Sciences (1992), and the APA Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions (1999).  He served as the founding editor of JEP: Animal Behavior Processes (now Animal Learning and Cognition) as well as associate editor for several other journals.

More about Allan can be found here.

-J.W.  (Bill) Whitlow, Jr.

 

Bruce W. A. Whittlesea (1950-2018)
Bruce Whittlesea passed away on July 11, 2018 in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany. After completing his PhD under the supervision of Lee Brooks at McMaster University, Bruce briefly held faculty positions at Carleton University and at Mount Allison University. He then spent 20 years at Simon Fraser University, retiring in 2009. Bruce considered himself a scientist of the mind and of all that minds can do, and he pursued his science with passion and creativity. It was his fervent conviction that representations of experiences in memory, in dynamic interaction with the current environment, were the sole driving force behind all thought, behavior, and feeling states. He proposed that memory served two functions: production (generation of thoughts, feelings, and actions) and evaluation (causal inferences about what happens during acts of production), which he articulated in a framework called the SCAPE (Selective Construction and Preservation of Experience) account of memory.

-Jason Leboe-McGowan

 

 

Anne Treisman (1935-2018)
Anne Treisman died February 9, 2018 at age 82; she had been in declining health for the past few years. Anne was a towering figure in the field of attention. Anne taught at Oxford, University of British Columbia, Berkeley, and Princeton. Her early work shaped our understanding of auditory attention with her dichotic listening experiments and Attenuation Theory. When she turned to visual attention, her visual search experiments and her seminal Feature Integration Theory propelled decades of research. Treisman was elected to the Royal Society of London in 1989, the US National Academy of Sciences in 1994, and was the recipient of the 2009 Grawemeyer Award. In 2013, Treisman received the National Medal of Science from President Obama. She was at once a rigorous and a generous colleague and mentor and will be greatly missed. Anne is survived by her husband, Daniel Kahneman, and her children and grandchildren.

More about Anne can be found here and here.

-Jeremy Wolfe

2017

Jerry Fodor (1935-2017)
Jerry Fodor passed away on November 29 at age 82. Across his career, as a faculty member first at MIT, then at CUNY, and, finally, at Rutgers, Jerry consistently offered up seminal thinking that spanned and greatly impacted both philosophy and cognitive science. Among his many contributions, his 1975 The Language of Thought continues to shape how we understand mental representations and his 1983 The Modularity of Mind is a landmark for articulating fundamental questions about the functional architecture of the mind and brain. In addition to his outsized influence on modern cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience, Jerry had a wit and personality to match: He was a very engaging speaker and his writing is highly readable. Jerry once famously remarked “On my bad days, I somePTSans wonder what philosophers are for.” On his good days, which were many, Jerry demonstrated exactly what philosophers are for: challenging our assumptions and providing insight into the big questions.

More about Jerry can be found here and here.

-Michael Tarr

 

Elizabeth Deutsch Capaldi Phillips (1945-2017)
Betty Capaldi Phillips passed away on September 23, 2017, at 72. Betty enjoyed a remarkable career. After receiving her PhD at the University of Texas, she rose through the ranks to professor at Purdue University, becoming department head and associate dean of the graduate school. She later served as provost of three universities (Florida, Buffalo, and Arizona State). Betty’s research centered on motivational effects in eating, studied in rats and humans. She served on the Psychonomic Society governing board (1992-1997), and as president of the Association for Psychological Science and the Midwestern Psychological Association. Betty was a highly effective administrator wherever she went, as the obituary below will attest. When she retired as provost at ASU, she created an entertaining and educational PBS TV show, Eating Psychology with Betty. Betty was a wonderful person and a warm, caring friend. The earth is a sadder place.

More about Betty is available on the Arizona State University website.

- Henry L. Roediger, III

William "Bill" Uttal (1934-2017)
Bill Uttal died in his sleep on February 9 at the age of 83 surrounded by his wife and family. His PhD (1957) was in experimental psychology and biophysics at Ohio State. At IBM he constructed the first multiple terminal system, developing some of the first computer-aided instruction on it. At the University of Michigan (1963) he mapped neural to behavioral responses. He was the second president of the Society for Computers in Psychology (1974). Bill moved to Arizona State University in 1988, where he turned to computer vision research and to writing books—a new one every 18-24 months. A recurring topic was the relation of brain, mind and behavior; a pervasive tone was that of an astute critic. For years a small group of us met to discuss science and philosophy. The target was often Bill. He loved the sport, leading the life of an engaged scholar to the very end.

More about Bill can be found here.

- Peter Killeen

2016

Janellen Huttenlocher (1932-2016)
Janellen Huttenlocher, a pioneer in the field of childhood development whose research explored how children acquire language, understand space, and learn math, died Nov. 20, 2016 in Chicago. She was 84. Most of her career was spent at the University of Chicago where she was William S. Gray Professor Emeritus in Psychology. She also spent time at Harvard, where she received her PhD, and at Columbia Teachers College. Huttenlocher’s impact in the field of psychology included co-authoring the books Making Space: The Development of Spatial Representation and Reasoning and Quantitative Development in Infancy and Early Childhood, as well as publishing hundreds of research articles. Her scholarship spanned 60 years from her first publication in 1956 to her last in 2015. She received many honors including the William James Award and membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her beloved husband Peter predeceased her. She is survived by her children Daniel, Anna, and Carl, and by six grandchildren.

More about Janellen is available in this University of Chicago article.

-Nora Newcombe

Bruce Bridgeman (1944-2016)
University of California, Santa Cruz professor of psychology and psychobiology, Bruce Bridgeman, an internationally renowned researcher on spatial orientation and neuroscience, was tragically killed July 10 after being struck by a bus in Taipei while crossing a multi-lane intersection. Bridgeman was due to speak that day at the Medical University of Taiwan. He and his wife, Diane Bridgeman, were on a speaking tour in Asia where both were giving talks.

More about Bruce is available in this University of California, Santa Cruz article.

-Psychonomic Society

Jerome S. Bruner (1915-2016)
Jerome Seymour Bruner was an American psychologist who made significant contributions to human cognitive psychology and cognitive learning theory in educational psychology. Bruner was a senior research fellow at the New York University School of Law. He received a BA in 1937 from Duke University and a PhD from Harvard University in 1941. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Bruner as the 28th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

More about Jerry can be found in The New York PTSans, The Washington Post, and this article from New York University.

- Wikipedia

Suzanne Hammond Corkin (1937-2016)
Sue Corkin lost her battle with liver cancer six days after a joyous 79th birthday celebration amongst family and friends. She is survived by her children Jocelyn, Damon and J. Zachary, and seven grandchildren. After graduating from Smith College, Corkin completed graduate studies with Brenda Milner at McGill University followed by work with Hans-Lukas Teuber at MIT. After Teuber’s death in 1977, Sue became the principal investigator of the laboratory. While Corkin worked on many projects, she was especially devoted to the meticulous study of H.M., a man who developed severe anterograde amnesia subsequent to temporal-lobe surgery to abate debilitating epilepsy. These studies were unique and fundamental in advancing the neuroscience of memory and its disorders.

More about Suzanne is available in The New York PTSans.

- Marlene Oscar Berman

Richard W. Held (1920-2016)
Dick Held died on November 21, 2016 at the age of 94. He was one of the earliest members of what is now the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and was its Chair in the later 70s, early 80s (when he was also my PhD advisor). He did foundational work on visual adaptation and, later, infant vision, among other topics. After retiring for a second time (from the New England College of Optometry), he became a fixture in Pawan Sinha’s lab, back at MIT. There he returned to his long interest in the classic problem of the vision of people whose sight had been restored after being blind (or nearly blind) since birth. He was in the lab regularly until he moved to western MA to be closer  to his daughter just this year.

-Jeremy Wolfe

Glyn Humphreys (1954-2016)
Glyn Humphreys, a UK based cognitive psychologist with a substantial international profile died suddenly on January 14, 2016, while in Hong Kong as a Distinguished Visiting Professor. A former editor of the  Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, of the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology , and founding editor of  Visual Cognition , he was a prolific, influential and inspiring scientist until his untimely passing. He made major contributions to the understanding of visual processing both in healthy adults and in brain damaged adults following stroke. He was president of the UK Experimental Psychology Society, Chair of Psychology at the University of Birmingham, and later became Chair of Psychology at the University of Oxford.

More about Glyn is available in tributes on this memorial page and in The Guardian and The Psychologist.

-Robert Logie

Earl Busby (Buz) Hunt (1933-2016)
Earl Busby (Buz) Hunt left us on April 12, 2016, age 83. Although slowed recently by various ailments, Buz continued working and enjoying family until the end. He received BA from Stanford (1954), then spent 3 years as a Marine officer before Yale and PhD with Carl Hovland (1960). Buz and Mary Lou (née Smith, married 1954) arrived at University of Washington in 1966. Buz’s first specializations were concept learning, mathematical modeling, and artificial intelligence. These extended soon to cultural and, especially, individual differences in cognition. Buz’s 1978 Psychological Review article (“Mechanics of verbal ability”) signaled his new and career-enduring interest in individual differences in intelligence. Buz was elected to Society of Experimental Psychologists in 1989 and received APS’s James McKeen Cattell Award in 2011.

More about Buz is available here.

-Anthony Greenwald

 

John Krauskopf (1928-2016)
John Krauskopf passed away on February 3, 2016, aged 87 following a long struggle with Parkinson’s. Krauskopf graduated from Cornell (1949). He received his PhD from University of Texas at Austin (1953) advised by M.E. Bitterman. He was a postdoc with Lorrin Riggs at Brown University. After assistant professorships at Brown and Rutgers, he joined Bell Laboratories (Murray Hill, NJ) from 1966-1986.  From 1986-2003, he was a research professor at New York University. Krauskopf made contributions to many areas of vision research and is best known for early work on stabilized retinal images and a career’s worth of important contributions to color vision research. He received the International Color Vision Society’s Verriest Medal (1999) and the Optical Society’s Tillyer Award (2004). He was elected to the Society of Experimental Psychologists in 2000.

More about John is available here.

- Jeremy Wolfe

Stan Kuczaj (1951-2016)
Dr. Stan Kuczaj, professor of psychology and director of The University of Southern Mississippi’s internationally recognized Marine Mammal Behavior and Cognition Laboratory, died April 14 at his home in Hattiesburg. He was 65. Kuczaj joined the faculty of the University’s College of Education and Psychology in 1996. In addition to his duties as professor and director of the laboratory, his service included a stint as chairman of the Department of Psychology.

University of Southern Mississippi article

-David Tisdale

George Mandler (1925-2016)
George Mandler, founding chair of the University of California San Diego’s Department of Psychology and a central figure in psychology’s cognitive revolution, died in his London home on May 6, 2016 at age 91. Mandler was born in Austria, on June 11, 1924. Mandler was active at UC San Diego from 1965 until recently, and spent time also at Harvard, University of Toronto, and University College London. Mandler authored nine books and over 150 articles and chapters. He received honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the William James Award, and he chaired the Governing Board of the Psychonomic Society. Mandler is survived by his wife, Jean; sons Peter and Michael; daughters-in-law Ruth Ehrlich and Sophie Mandler; grandchildren Ben and Hannah; and step-grandchildren Giovanni and Diana.

University of California, San Diego article

-Victor Ferreira

Allan Urho Paivio (1925-2016)
Al Paivio was born in Northern Ontario to Finnish immigrants.  After serving in the Canadian Navy in World War II, he moved to Montreal where he opened one of the city’s first health clubs; a body builder, he was named Mr. Canada in 1948.  At McGill, he received a degree in Physical Education and went on to graduate school in psychology working with Wallace Lambert on “evaluation anxiety.”  After a post-doc at Cornell and a faculty position at the University of New Brunswick, he moved to the University of Western Ontario where he spent the rest of his career. Although he published on a wide range of topics, he is best known for his “dual coding theory” that postulated separate representational systems for mental imagery and verbal processes. His work was instrumental in bringing the study of mental imagery (and cognitive processes in general) back into the forefront of experimental psychology.

More can be found here.

-Albert Katz

John A. Swets (1928-2016)

John Swets was an extraordinarily productive scientist, contributing foundational work on the theory of signal detection and finding numerous ways to apply it in medicine, education and other practical problem areas. The importance of his work has been recognized in many ways, including election to the National Academy of Sciences, receipt of the Howard Crosby Warren Medal from the Society for Experimental Psychologists, an award from the American Psychological Association for Distinguished Scientific Contributions, and recognition for “a lifetime of scientific achievement” by the Association for Psychological Science. Swets spent 36 years of his professional life at Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc (BBN), holding several positions including those of General Manager and Chief Scientist. His autobiography, Tulips to Thresholds: Counterpart Careers of the Author and Signal Detection Theory (2010), is an engaging account of his life and work.

More about John can be found here.

-Ray Nickerson

2015

George H. Collier (1921-2015)
George Collier died in his home on Saturday, April 18, 2015 at the age of 94. He was a professor at Rutgers University, New Brunswick for more than 45 years and continued his research for many years after his retirement. He served as the chair of the psychology department there for several years. He was President of the Eastern Psychological Association in 1995-1996. He published more than 100 scholarly papers, focusing on the effects of ecological factors (procurement costs, patchiness, encounter frequency, time limitations, risks, etc.) on feeding behavior, trying to understand in its full richness the manner in which this basic behavior was controlled. He received the Distinguished Career Award from the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior and the Distinguished Research Award of the Trustees of Rutgers University. His wife, Carolyn Rovee-Collier predeceased him. He was a great outdoorsman and a small-scale sheep farmer, a true gentleman and scholar. 

More can be found here.

-Charles Gallistel

Ronald A. Finke (1950-2015)
Ronald A. Finke died on November 4, 2015. He completed his Ph.D. at MIT (1979), with postdoctoral positions at Cornell and Stanford, and faculty positions at UC-Davis, SUNY-Stonybrook, Texas A&M University, and Texas State University. Ron authored numerous influential books and papers on mental imagery and creative cognition, including  Creative Cognition: Theory, Research, and Applications (1992, Finke, Ward & Smith) and Principles of Mental Imagery  (1989, Finke). He created strikingly original theoretical constructs about fundamental cognitive processes, finding convincing ways to empirically demonstrate them. His original contributions and discoveries include emergent properties in visualized combinations, representational momentum, and the geneplore theory of creative cognition. Ron was a brilliant and creative man with a wry and imaginative sense of humor.

Texas State University article

-Steven M. Smith & Thomas B. Ward

Nicholas Mackintosh (1935-2015)
Professor Nicholas Mackintosh, FRS, former Head of the Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge, died 8th February 2015, in Bury St Edmunds.

University of Cambridge article

-Lynne Reder

Alison Morris (1958-2015)
Alison Morris, Associate Professor of Psychology at Iowa State University, passed away unexpectedly on November 21, 2014. Alison received her Ph.D. from Boston University in 2000, where she worked with Catherine Caldwell-Harris. Alison studied processes occurring at the intersection between attention, perception and memory. She had particular interest in visual word recognition, especially the processes producing repetition blindness. Alison developed a computational model to account for the phenomena that she studied. Alison regularly presented at the annual Psychonomic Society meeting. Her students and colleagues were expecting her to be present for her poster when they learned of her passing. A wise and witty woman, Alison's nonacademic side included being a trained storm spotter and a die hard Green Bay Packers fan.

Iowa State University article

-Anne Cleary & Veronica Dark

David Premack (1925-2015)
David Premack, retired from the University of Pennsylvania, died at the age of 89 on June 11, 2015.  His career spanned a major revolution in psychology from behaviorism to cognitive psychology. The Premack Principle was an important modification to reinforcement theory that stipulated that reinforcement is a relative, not an absolute property.  He studied chimpanzees when testing reinforcement theory and then later showed that these primates could comprehend and produce conceptual relations using a “language” of visual symbols.  Later he and his student Guy Woodruff introduced the influential concept “Theory of Mind”  that is an active area of research in comparative and developmental psychology among others.  He demonstrated that chimpanzees can solve analogies and make causal inferences.

University of Pennsylvania article
Wikipedia page

-Lynne Reder

Keith Rayner (1943-2015)
Keith Rayner, the world’s leading figure in the study of skilled reading using eye-movement methodologies, died on January, 21, 2015 from complications due to cancer. Keith began his career at the University of Rochester, before serving a long tenure at the University of Massachusetts and concluding as Distinguished Professor at the University of California, San Diego. He won many awards for his contributions to research and mentorship, including from societies in the USA, UK, and China. He served on the Governing Board of the Psychonomic Society from 1995-2001, serving the last year as its chair. He published more than 400 articles, 1 book, and 10 edited volumes.

University of California, San Diego article 

More information can be found at http://www.forevermissed.com/keith-rayner/

-Victor Ferreira

Janet Taylor Spence (1923-2015)
Janet Taylor Spence, influential researcher and professional leader, died on March 16, 2015, at the age of 91, in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, after a short illness. Janet served on the Governing Board of Psychonomic Society (1978-1983) and chaired its Publications Committee. She was unique in having been president of both the American Psychological Association (1984) and the Association for Psychological Science (1988). In her University of Iowa dissertation (Ph.D. 1949), supervised by Kenneth Spence (whom she married in 1959), she created the widely-used Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale. In later years she made trailblazing contributions to the study of gender. Her academic career, marked by many “first to’s”, began at Northwestern University (1949-1960) and ended with her retirement from the University of Texas in 1987. 

More can be found here and in a filmed interview here.

-Kay Deaux

 

2014

Harriett Amster (1928-2014)
Harriett Amster, Professor of Psychology, at the University of Texas, Arlington, from 1977 to her retirement in 2006 passed away on October 21, 2014. Dr. Amster, received her Ph.D. from Clark University, in 1960, and pursued a career involving human learning and memory, which evolved into research focusing on verbal meaning and lexical ambiguity processing. As a member of the Psychonomic Society she presented her first paper at the 1964 annual meeting. Papers bearing her name were quite regularly presented at the annual meeting with the last presented in 2009. In addition to her interest in language processing she also served the journal, Psychology of Women Quarterly from 1973-1976, and as a consulting editor from 1977 to 1983.

-David Gorfein and Ruth Maki

Thomas K. Landauer (1933-2014)
Thomas K. Landauer, one of the most creative and innovative cognitive scientists of his generation, died on March 26, 2014, at age 81. After a PhD at Harvard, Tom held faculty positions at Dartmouth, Stanford, and Princeton before spending 25 years at Bell Laboratories and Bellcore, where he created one of the first research programs in human-computer interaction. After returning to the University of Colorado, his undergraduate alma mater, Tom carried out his seminal work on Latent Semantic Analysis and founded Knowledge Analysis Technologies, reflecting his desire to turn research into real-world products.

For more on Tom’s life and how his wit, wisdom, and insights inspired so many of us, see http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/dailycamera/obituary.aspx?pid=170505204, written by his wife, Lynn, and http://psych-www.colorado.edu/docs/Landauer-obituary-Apr-2014.pdf.

-Robert A. Bjork

Patrick Colonel Suppes (1922-2014)
Patrick Colonel Suppes, age 92, died on November 17, 2014 in his home at Stanford, California. Pat graduated from the University of Chicago. Following two years of military service in the South Pacific he began graduate training at Columbia University in 1947, graduating in 1950. In 64 years at Stanford as a professor of Philosophy, Statistics, Education and Psychology, he published 32 books and hundreds of technical reports and articles. His deep knowledge of the foundations for mathematical and set-theoretical thinking generated advances in the foundations of physics and quantum mechanics, decision theory, probability and causality, psychology, philosophy of language, education and computers, and philosophy of science. His practical application of these ideas created computer assisted instruction and introduced computers in grade schools as teaching aids. As a founder and Director of The Institute for Mathematical Studies in the Social Sciences, Suppes brought outstanding researchers to Stanford. His award of the National Medal of Science in 1990 distinguished him as a man of rare talents used to clarify and formalize the foundations of many disciplines.

Stanford University article
New York PTSans article

-Stephen Link

Richard F. Thompson (1930-2014)
Richard F. Thompson, the Keck chair emeritus at USC and a pioneer of behavioral neuroscience, died at home of natural causes September 16, 2014. Thompson played a leading role in the ascendance of studies of learning and memory in modern neuroscience. Educated at Reed College then earning a University of Wisconsin PhD, Thompson’s textbook, Foundations of Physiological Psychology (1967), shaped the burgeoning field. A founder of the Psychonomic Society, Thompson taught at University of California, Irvine, Harvard University, and Stanford University before USC. He was best known for his research tracing out brain circuits underlying behavioral habituation and classical conditioning. Thompson published more than 450 articles and mentored 60 PhD and post-doctoral students.

University of Southern California article
His autobiography in Squire, L.R. (Ed.) The history of neuroscience in autobiography, Vol. 4 (2004).

-Gordon Bower

Jonathan Vaughan (1944-2014)
Jonathan Vaughan, a member of the Psychonomic Society Publication Committee from 2004-2010, designer of the Society’s logo and website, died on September 14, 2014 of cancer-related pneumonia. Jon taught legions of students in his long tenure at Hamilton College. Included among his protégé’s was Cathleen Moore, the incoming Chair of the Society’s Governing Board. From 1999-2004 he served as Editor of what was then called Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, and Computers. Jon made significant contributions to the study of human perception and performance. He co-authored a 2014 book, MATLAB For Behavioral Scientists.

Hamilton College article

-David A. Rosenbaum