Henry Roediger

Who they are

The work of Henry Roediger reaches this site through the paper listed below. On this site the name is tied to Attentional Control, Working Memory, Deliberate Practice, Survivorship Bias.

Key papers

Roediger, H. L., & McDermott, K. B. (1995). Creating false memories: Remembering words not presented in lists. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 21(4), 803-814. What it reports: Two experiments with lists of words all related to one word that was never shown. The missing word was recalled 40 per cent of the time in the first experiment and 55 per cent in the second, and was later recognised with high confidence.

Key ideas

Attentional Control: The ability to hold focus on the information that matters and keep everything else out.

Working Memory: The small, temporary store that holds what you are currently thinking about.

Deliberate Practice: Practice defined by Ericsson and colleagues in 1993 as solitary work set up with a teacher, aimed at specific weaknesses. This article treats it as necessary for skill and as explaining a modest, field-dependent share of performance differences.

Survivorship Bias: Reasoning from the cases that made it, because those are the only ones still visible.

---