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Gordon H. Bower is a cognitive and cognitive social psychologist currently serving as the Albert Ray Lang Professor Emeritus at Stanford University. His main areas of study include human memory, mnemonic devices, retrieval strategies, recording strategies, and category learning. He is interested in cognitive processes, emotion, imagery, language and reading comprehension as they relate to memory. He earned a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from Yale University in 1959 (Stanford University Website). He is married to Sharon, the founder of a communication consulting firm who has published three self-help books on speech anxiety. Together, they have three children (Bower 2007)

Early Life: Bower was born in 1932 on December 30. His father worked as a grocery store owner and his mother was a teacher. During high school, he was encouraged by his teachers to pursue a career in psychiatry. Out of high school, he accepted a four-year scholarship to play baseball at Cleveland's Western Reserve University and during his freshman year, began working in the Cleveland State Mental Hospital. In order to avoid the military draft, Bower opted for graduate school, but his experiences in the mental hospital dissuaded him from a career as a psychiatrist. While Bower was attending Yale for his degree in Experimental Psychology, he discovered a passion for learning theory and presented his findings on dual reward-punishment in rats to the American Psychological Association. During this time, he and Bill Estes also revised Edward Tolman’s vicarious trial and error model to include human choices among commodity options (Bower 2007).

Career: In 1959, Bower was hired at the Stanford Psychology Department. Until the late 1960’s, he continued the animal research he had begun as a graduate student, but when Bill Estes and Dick Atkinson joined the faculty, his focus shifted to mathematical models of memory. One model they produced explained “hypothesis testing behavior  of subjects  learning  very  simple classifications  (concepts)  in  the  standard  trial-by-trial procedures  that  overtaxed  memory.” After wearying of studying models of memory, Bower shifted his focus to study short-term memory. He worked on a team that created both the time-decay queuing model and the fixed-space displacement model to describe how items in short term memory might be lost before they could be encoded in long-term memory. This spawned into research into how organizational devices could expand the capacity of short term memory past the traditional 7 items. A particular mnemonic device that Bower researched that is still popular today is chunking, in which a person groups objects together to improve memory. (Bower 2007). His works during this time also included the huge benefits of mnemonic aids and how these aids are often converted into visual images, human associative memory and propositional learning (Awards 1980), state dependent memory, connectionist modeling for categorical learning, and how we remember narratives (Bower 2007). In 1979 he was honored with the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contribution by the American Psychological Association (Awards 1980).