Gordon H. Bower facts for kids

Gordon Howard Bower (born December 30, 1932 – died June 17, 2020) was a smart scientist who studied how people think and remember things. He was a cognitive psychologist, meaning he looked at how our brains work. This included memory, understanding language, feelings, and changing habits.

He earned his highest degree, a Ph.D., from Yale University in 1959. His studies focused on how we learn. He later became a respected professor at Stanford University. Besides his own research, Dr. Bower was a great mentor. He guided many students who became famous psychologists themselves, like John R. Anderson and Robert Sternberg.

He was even ranked among the top 50 most important psychologists of the 20th century. In 2005, he received the National Medal of Science, a very high honor for scientists in the U.S.

Understanding the Mind

Gordon H. Bower was a psychologist who studied how our minds work. His main interests included human memory and how we remember things. He also looked at special tricks to help memory, like mnemonic devices. He studied how we retrieve information and how we learn to group things into categories.

Dr. Bower was interested in how our thinking processes, feelings, and imagination affect memory. He also explored how language and reading comprehension connect to memory. He was married to Sharon, who started a company that helps people with communication. They had three children together.

Early Life and Education

Gordon Bower was born on December 30, 1932, in Scio, Ohio. His father owned a grocery store, and his mother was a teacher. In high school, his teachers encouraged him to become a psychiatrist.

He received a scholarship to play baseball at Western Reserve University. During his first year, he started working at a mental hospital. To avoid being drafted into the military, Bower decided to go to graduate school. However, his experiences at the mental hospital made him change his mind about being a psychiatrist.

While studying at Yale, he found a passion for learning theory. He presented his research on how rewards and punishments affect learning in rats. He also worked with Bill Estes to improve a model about how people make choices. Gordon Bower married Sharon Anthony on January 30, 1957.

A Career in Psychology

Bower earned his Ph.D. in psychology from Yale University in 1959. Soon after, he joined the Psychology Department at Stanford University. For several years, he continued his animal research. But when Bill Estes and Dick Atkinson joined the faculty, he started focusing on mathematical models of memory.

They created models to explain how people learn simple classifications. After a while, Bower shifted his focus to short-term memory. This is the memory that holds a small amount of information for a short time. He worked on a team that developed models to describe how items might be lost from short-term memory. This happens before they can be stored in long-term memory, which holds information for a long time.

This research led to studies on how special techniques could increase the capacity of short-term memory. Normally, we can only remember about seven items at once. A popular memory trick Bower researched is chunking. This is when you group items together to remember them better. For example, remembering a phone number as three chunks of numbers instead of ten separate digits.

His work also showed the great benefits of using memory aids. He found that these aids are often turned into visual images in our minds. He also studied how we remember stories and how our memory is affected by our emotional state.

In 1979, the American Psychological Association gave him an award for his important scientific contributions. In 2005, Bower retired from Stanford. That same year, he received the President's National Medal of Science.

Gordon Bower passed away on June 17, 2020, at his home in Stanford, California.

See also

• List of psychologists