Plumbing the many mysteries of memory

Henry L. Roediger studies how the mind stores and retrieves knowledge

Ask scholars what led them to their chosen academic fields and many will mention a special teacher, course or other educational experience in college or high school.

Ask this question of Henry L. Roediger III, Ph.D., chair of the Department of Psychology in Arts and Sciences, and he points, a bit uncomfortably, to an event much earlier in life -- the death of his mother when he was 5 years old and living in Danville, Va.

"That event changed my life drastically," said Roediger, now the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor. "I was determined to hold on to my memories of her, to relive the past by remembering them. At a very early age, I spent a lot of time thinking about memory and how it works."

Henry L. Roediger III, Ph.D., talks with recent graduate Ameet Parikh about his research.

Born in 1947, Roediger has been known ever since as Roddy, a nickname bestowed on him by a maternity ward nurse who kept mispronouncing the family surname as "Roddy-ger." Now one of the world's leading authorities on how the mind stores and retrieves knowledge, Roddy "Roe-digger" has spent decades exploring the mysteries of memory, seeking answers to questions that haunt us all.

Why can't we remember events from when we were 3 or 4 years old? Why are some painful events so easy to remember (even if we don't want to) and other events so hard to recollect? How do cues sometimes unlock memories that seemed long forgotten? And, why do our memories sometimes play tricks on us, when we remember events differently from the way they happened?

Although these conundrums of memory have made us all pause and wonder, Roediger takes them into the laboratory, devising experiments to explore conditions that enhance and harm memory and to test theories of memory function.

His research on human learning and memory has been cited so often that a 1995 study by the Institute of Scientific Information named him as the person whose work had the greatest impact on the field of psychology from 1990 to 1994.

He is best known for research on implicit memory, how past experience can be expressed in behavior without a person's intention or awareness; and on memory illusions, why people sometimes remember events quite differently from the way they happened, and in dramatic cases, how people can come to have vivid memories of events that never happened.

Roediger and his mother, May (Wertz) Roediger. His determination to hold on to her memory after her death led to his life's work in human memory.

"The idea that our memories hold a literal record of our past like a video recorder is wrong," Roediger said. "Rather, remembering is a constructive process and illusions of memory are the result of our struggle to weave the remembered pieces of our past into a coherent narrative story."

Roediger's own narrative includes a bachelor's degree from Washington & Lee University and a doctorate from Yale. He taught several years at the University of Toronto and more than a decade at Purdue University, where he is remembered as a mainstay on the campus squash club.

A new challenge

"The psychology department was very good when I arrived," Roediger said. "But with the outstanding new building and the support of the administration, it is poised to make a significant move forward."

Roediger and family are now comfortably settled in a home just a five-minute walk from campus and within easy bike range of Forest Park. He and his wife, Mary, until recently an executive editor for West Publishing Co., have two children, Kurt and Rebecca, both of whom are students at John Burroughs School.

"There is no doubt that he is highly respected as both a scientist and as a leader in professional organizations," said David Balota, Ph.D., professor of psychology and associate chair, "and these qualities are nicely reflected in his past two years as chair of the department. We've added five excellent new faculty since his arrival, and we are currently recruiting for three more."

While Roediger is proud of new faculty recruits, others describe his own recruitment as a major building block for the department.

His reputation is manifest in his election to various regional and national leadership positions in psychology. He is president of the Midwestern Psychological Association and chair of the governing board of the Psychonomic Society, one of the nation's leading organizations of experimental psychologists.

He also has been elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and is a member of the Society of Experimental Psychologists. In 1994, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to begin writing a book on memory illusions.

Roediger is the founding editor of Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, which under his leadership became a highly respected outlet for new research. He also was longtime editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, another top outlet for human cognitive work. He has served on the editorial boards of eight other journals.

Despite mounting administrative duties, Roediger remains committed to his own research and teaching. On the research front, Roediger is engaged in several new projects with Kathleen McDermott, Ph.D., a former student of his at Rice now here as a research associate in radiology and a research assistant professor in psychology.

He has taught both undergraduate and graduate psychology courses here and continues to advise doctoral students.

"Roddy is very involved in just about everything -- journal editing, teaching, advising, research and chairing the department," said David Gallo, a second-year doctoral student who came here specifically to work in Roediger's lab.

"Despite all his interests," Gallo continued, "I've never had a problem finding time to talk to him, even about mundane things. He is very sincere, but also laid back. He gives us graduate students lots of freedom to set our own hours and develop our own ideas."

Along with its strengths in research and graduate education, psychology also holds the distinction of being one of the largest and most popular undergraduate programs in Arts and Sciences.

"I think it's crucial for even the most senior people in the department to be in the classroom," Roediger said. "Teaching is the reason I got into this occupation, and I think it's important that our students have access to everyone on the faculty."

Textbook author

In his lectures on memory function, Roediger offers convincing examples of how the human mind easily falls prey to various illusions of perception, a phenomenon that can be easily demonstrated. Using an array of projected images, he shows how various shapes, sizes and shadings can be juxtaposed to send visual miscues to the perceptual processing system, causing audiences to reach distorted and entirely false conclusions about images still before their eyes.

At Riverside Military Academy, Lt. Colonel Ellis C. Vander Pyl, USAF, awards Roediger the Legion of Valor Cross, an honor given to one student each year for exemplary service in an ROTC program in the Southeastern United States, home to most of the nation's military schools.

If the human mind can be tricked into misinterpreting data currently being processed by the perceptual system, why then, asked Roediger, should we not expect similar cognitive miscues to occur as the mind reconstructs past experiences? "Just as the perceptual system can bend and distort visual images," he said, "our memory system can bend and distort images of the past."

Learning psychology first hand

"I went there because I thought it would be interesting, but a lot of other kids were sent there by the courts or by parents who thought they needed discipline," Roediger said. "I was a good student, so the people in charge viewed me as a role model. I was always assigned to room with some of the students who presented the administration with challenges."

He recalls sharing a room one year with two older students from New York -- one had stolen a car and the other had assaulted an older woman and stolen her purse.

"It was an interesting year, and I learned a whole lot about human nature," joked Roediger, adding that "the experience of dealing with those roommates still helps me in being a department chair."

Roediger graduated from Riverside as valedictorian and commander of the corps of cadets in 1965.