Robert Allen Bjork

Professor Bjork, Distinguished Research Professor of Psychology at the University of California in Los Angeles, has served the field of cognitive science with unusual distinction, making fundamental contributions to understanding how humans learn and remember, versus how they think they learn and remember. His research changed the perception of forgetting from an unfortunate tendency of a limited system to the necessary consequence of an adaptive one. He demonstrated that retrieving information acts as a memory modifier, meaning that using our memories shapes our memories, and illustrated that humans are prone to faulty mental models of learning, meaning that optimizing instruction requires unintuitive innovations, including introducing desirable difficulties for learners. His service to the field includes serving as Editor of Memory and Cognition ;Editor of Psychological Review, co-Editor of Psychological Science in the Public Interest; and Chair of the National Research Council's Committee on Techniques for the Enhancement of Human Performance. He is a past president or chair of the Association for Psychological Science (APS), the Western Psychological Association (WPA), the Psychonomic Society, the Society of Experimental Psychologists, the Council of Editors of the American Psychological Association (APA), the Council of Graduate Departments of Psychology, and the Department of Psychology at UCLA. He is a recipient of UCLA's Distinguished Teaching Award, the American Psychological Association's Distinguished Scientist Lecturer and Distinguished Service to Psychological Science Awards, and the American Physiological Society's Claude Bernard Distinguished Lecturership Award. He is a recipient of the Norman Anderson Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Experimental Psychologists.