Background
BOWER, Gordon was born on December 30, 1932 in Scio, Ohio, United States. Son of Clyde W. Bower and Mabelle Bosart Bower.
BOWER, Gordon was born on December 30, 1932 in Scio, Ohio, United States. Son of Clyde W. Bower and Mabelle Bosart Bower.
Bachelor, Western Reserve University, 1954. Master of Science, Yale University, 1957. Doctor of Philosophy, Yale University, 1959.
He currently holds the A. R. Language Emeritus Professorship at Stanford University. In addition to his research, Bower also was a notable adviser to numerous students, including John R. Anderson, Lawrence West. Barsalou, Lera Boroditsky, Keith Holyoak, Stephen Kosslyn, Alan Lesgold, and Robert Sternberg, among others He was voted number 42 in the list of most notable psychologists of the 20th century, published by Haggbloom {2002}.
He was awarded the National Medal of Science in 2005.
Bower is a cognitive social psychologist currently. His main areas of study include human memory, mnemonic devices, retrieval strategies, recording strategies, and category learning.
He is interested in cognitive processes, emotion, imagery, language and reading comprehension as they relate to memory. Together, they have three children.
Bower was born on December 30, 1932 in Scio, Ohio to Clyde Ward and Mabel (Bosart).
His father worked as a grocery store owner and his mother was a teacher. During high school, he was encouraged by his teachers to pursue a career in psychiatry. Out of high school, he accepted a four-year scholarship to play baseball at Cleveland"s Western Reserve University and during his freshman year, began working in the Cleveland State Mental Hospital.
In order to avoid the military draft, Bower opted for graduate school, but his experiences in the mental hospital dissuaded him from a career as a psychiatrist.
While Bower was attending Yale for his degree in Experimental Psychology, he discovered a passion for learning theory and presented his findings on dual reward-punishment in rats to the American Psychological Association. During this time, he and Bill Estes also revised Edward Tolman"s vicarious trial and error model to include human choices among commodity options.
Bower married Sharon Anthony on January 30, 1957. 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.
In 1979 he was honored with the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contribution by the American Psychological Association.
(Recent years have witnessed a revival of research in the ...)
Fellow American Psychological Association (executive committee division experimental psychology 1974-1976, president Division 3 1975, Distinguished Science contribution award 1979). Member Western Psychological Association (president 1989-1990, 2005), Psychonomic Society (board governors 1972-1976), chairman governing board 1975-1976, chairman publications committee 1978), Cognitive Science Society (board governors 1982-1988, president 1988), National Academy of Sciences,, American Academy Arts and Sciences, Society Experimental Psychologists, American Psychological Society (board governors 1989-1995), American Philosophical Society.
Married Sharon Anthony, January 30, 1957. Children: Lori, Tony, Julia.