Richard Shiffrin, PhD

“We need to place the focus on the best of science, communicating the immense strides science is making, and the immense good science is doing for society.”

Richard Shiffrin is a professor of cognitive science in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University, Bloomington. He also directs the department’s Memory and Perception Laboratory.

Shiffrin has contributed a number of theories of attention and memory to the field of psychology. 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 attention 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.

Shiffrin graduated with a Ph.D. in Mathematical Psychology from Stanford in 1968, and joined Indiana University as faculty that same year.