The San Diego Union-Tribune wrote a feature on Richard Atkinson, one of the most distinguished and influential memory researchers of all time. The feature highlights a few of his major accomplishments and positions in academia as well as his focus in present day. The article opens with a mention of a project that I’m working on. To quote the lede (with a link to the full-text existing below), “At 96, Richard C. Atkinson talks with interest and enthusiasm about a young professor’s research on reading skills, the same enthusiasm that he has embraced his entire life.”
That “reading skills” project is one that I’m working on under Dr. Angela Nelson-Lowe. In that project, we work to adapt the SARKAE model of memory (Nelson & Shiffrin, 2013) to handle language learning models in order to help explain the role of memory in developing the ability to read. We call that adapted SARKAE model, “SARK-R.” We will be presenting SARK-R (and simulations using SARK-R) at the 25th iteration of the Annual Summer Interdisciplinary Conference (ASIC) conference in Saint-Gervais-les-Bains, France at the end of June.