UC Legend Dick Atkinson Digs into Memory

Atkinson’s skills as an administrator are well-known. What may be less familiar to many is that his scholarship has also been influential.

A professor emeritus of psychology and cognitive science in the UC San Diego School of Social Sciences, Atkinson – together with his then-doctoral student Richard Shiffrin – proposed a model of human memory in 1968, while at Stanford University, that continues to be relevant to this day. Atkinson and Shiffrin laid out components of memory and, significantly, modeled their control processes. The model is not without its critics, but it inspired decades of subsequent research. And their paper describing the Atkinson-Shiffrin model, also sometimes called the modal model of memory or the multi-store model, remains one of the most highlly cited papers in the field.

In the summer of 2023 – at the invitation of UC San Diego Chancellor Pradeep K. Khosla and Social Sciences Dean Carol Padden – Atkinson, 94, took to the podium in the Atkinson Pavilion to talk about the “Machinery of Human Memory.” He was then joined on stage by cognitive scientist Benjamin Bergen, associate dean of Social Sciences at UC San Diego, for a Q&A with the audience.