Gordon H. Bower - Career

Career

In 1959, Bower was hired at the Stanford Psychology Department. Until the late 1960s, he continued the animal research he had begun as a graduate student, but when Bill Estes and Dick Atkinson joined the faculty, his focus shifted to mathematical models of memory. One model they produced explained "hypothesis testing behavior of subjects learning very simple classifications (concepts) in the standard trial-by-trial procedures that overtaxed memory." After wearying of studying models of memory, Bower shifted his focus to study short-term memory. He worked on a team that created both the time-decay queuing model and the fixed-space displacement model to describe how items in short term memory might be lost before they could be encoded in long-term memory. This spawned into research into how organizational devices could expand the capacity of short term memory past the traditional 7 items. A particular mnemonic device that Bower researched that is still popular today is chunking, in which a person groups objects together to improve memory. His works during this time also included the huge benefits of mnemonic aids and how these aids are often converted into visual images, human associative memory and propositional learning, state dependent memory, connectionist modeling for categorical learning, and how we remember narratives. In 1979 he was honored with the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contribution by the American Psychological Association.