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Marigold Linton (born 1936) is a cognitive psychologist and member of the Morongo Band of Cahuilla Mission Indians. In 1974 she co–founded the National Indian Education Association. Her research in long term memory is widely cited in psychology. She is director for mathematics and science initiatives in the University of Texas system, where she is responsible for bringing minority students into those two fields. She has been president of the Society for Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science.[1][2]

Biography
A great-great granddaughter of Antonio Garra, war chief of the Cupeno who organized an 1847 Indian insurrection against Agoston Haraszthy, San Diego County's first sheriff,[3] Marigold Linton was born on the Morongo Reservation in Southern California in 1936. Her grandfather was Sadakichi Hartmann.[4] Raised in poverty, she overcame hardship and adversity to become in 1954 the first Indian from a California reservation to attend college. As a child, she attended school off the reservation. From a young age, Linton naturally excelled in school [5]. Linton’s goal of attending college was sparked when she was in the eighth grade. White teachers typically did not visit the reservation, but her eighth grade teacher, Mrs. Adams, visited Linton’s parents on the reservation to tell them that they needed to ensure she attend college because of how bright she was [6]. Though no one on the reservation could even tell her what college was, Linton remembered that advice, which gave her a goal. Attending the newly opened University of California, Riverside, she earned straight As to obtain her B.A. in Experimental Psychology and completed two publications by the time she entered graduate school at the University of Iowa, eventually obtaining her Ph.D. from UCLA in 1964.[7]

Linton’s first job was in San Diego as a half-time counselor and half-time teacher of psychology [8]. Though she had no experience in counseling, it was considered appropriate for her as a woman. While working at San Diego State University, Linton began the activist work that would continue throughout her life [9]. She worked with others to found the National Indian Education Association, which works to ensure that Native peoples have a voice in their own education. She later became a founding member of SACNAS, the Society for Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science, which encourages minorities to achieve high levels in science careers. In later years, Linton accepted a position at Arizona State University, where she directed several programs that were designed to improve education for American Indians [10]. Further, when her husband accepted a position at the University of Kansas in 1998, Linton accepted the position of Director of American Indian Outreach and developed a partnership between the University of Kansas and Haskell Indian Nations University with the goal of improving Native American education in the sciences.

Activism
As the 17th American Indian to receive a PhD in any field, and the first American Indian to earn a PhD in psychology, Linton has served as a role model and activist for American Indians and other minorities hoping to attend college [11]. She has been involved in several roles dedicated to improving education for minorities, including founding the National Indian Education Association and serving as Director of American Indian Outreach at the University of Kansas [12].

Long Term Memory Research
After earning her doctorate, Linton focused her efforts into cognitive psychology. Since then, her research has specialized in very long term memory and has been recognized internationally [13]. In 1972, she undertook an experiment to study very long term memory, using herself as the subject [14]. When she started her study, it had been over 100 years since Ebbinghaus had done a long-term study of memory on himself. Her research on her own memories contributed a great deal to our understanding of which types of events we remember and how we attribute importance and emotionality to these events.

One of Linton’s published works, titled “Transformations of Memory in Everyday Life,” reflects upon the implications of this long-term memory study [15]. In this work, Linton begins by describing her experiment conducted so many years ago. For six years, she recorded two salient events from each day in a brief, yet descriptive, manner [16]. Each event was unique, in an attempt to prevent confusion. At the end of every month, she randomly drew items from the event pool and attempted to reconstruct their date, as well as their importance and emotionality. Over time, she found that a transformation from episodic to semantic memory occurred [17]. For instance, a series of committee meetings resulted in her being able to remember and report a great deal of information about the committee and their work overall, but very little about each particular instance of the committee meeting. She found that increased experience with particular types of events results in increased semantic, or general, knowledge about the event, while episodic knowledge decreases. Further, while Ebbinghaus found a “forgetting curve,” Linton found more of a linear function of forgetting, which may suggest that “real world” memories are more durable than Ebbinghaus’ laboratory-induced memories [18]. Finally, Linton found that emotionality ratings of events often change as they are repeated or our perspectives change. This publication documented six years’ worth of information. As she states in an interview, American Indians have a “completely different time frame,” which allowed her to conceive of the study in the first place [19]. This different perspective resulted in a different and important understanding of how long term memory works in the “real world,” rather than in laboratory-induced conditions.

Published works
Linton, M. (1982) 'Transformations of memory in everyday life', in Neisser, U. (ed.) Memory Observed: Remembering in Natural Contexts, San Francisco, Freeman.

Linton, M. (1986) 'Ways of searching and the contents of memory', in Rubin, D.C. (ed.) Autobiographical Memory, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.