John Robert Anderson (born August 27, 1947) is a Canadian-born American psychologist. As of 2024, he is professor of

psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both consciousness, conscious and Unconscious mind, unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoughts, feel ...

and

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The institution was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institu ...

Biography

Anderson obtained a B.A. from the

University of British Columbia The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a Public university, public research university with campuses near University of British Columbia Vancouver, Vancouver and University of British Columbia Okanagan, Kelowna, in British Columbia, Canada ...

in 1968, and a Ph.D. in Psychology from

Stanford Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth governor of and th ...

in 1972. He became an assistant professor at

Yale Yale University is a private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701, Yale is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, and one of the nine colonial colleges ch ...

in 1972. He moved to the University of Michigan in 1973 as a Junior Fellow (and married Lynne M. Reder who was a graduate student there) and returned to Yale in 1976 with tenure. He was promoted to full professor at Yale in 1977 but moved to

in 1978. From 1988 to 1989, he served as president of the Cognitive Science Society. He was elected to the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (The Academy) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and other ...

and the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the ...

and has received a series of awards: * 1968: Governor General's Gold Medal: Graduated as top student in Arts and Sciences at University of British Columbia * 1978: Early Career Award of the American Psychological Association * 1989–1994: Research Scientist Award, NIMH * 1994:

American Psychological Association The American Psychological Association (APA) is the main professional organization of psychologists in the United States, and the largest psychological association in the world. It has over 170,000 members, including scientists, educators, clin ...

's Distinguished Scientific Career Award * 1999: Elected to the

* 1999: Fellow of

* 2004: The David E. Rumelhart Prize, for Contributions to the Formal Analysis of Human Cognition * 2005: Howard Crosby Warren Medal for outstanding achievement in Experimental Psychology in the United States and Canada, Society of Experimental Psychology * 2006: Inaugural Dr. A.H. Heineken Prize for Cognitive Science awarded by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences * 2011: Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science,

Franklin Institute The Franklin Institute is a science museum and a center of science education and research in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It is named after the American scientist and wikt:statesman, statesman Benjamin Franklin. It houses the Benjamin Franklin ...

"for the development of the first large-scale computational theory of the process by which humans perceive, learn and reason, and its application to computer tutoring systems." *2016: Atkinson Prize from the National Academy of Sciences.

Research

cognitive psychology Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of human mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and reasoning. Cognitive psychology originated in the 1960s in a break from behaviorism, whi ...

, John Anderson is widely known for his

cognitive architecture A cognitive architecture is both a theory about the structure of the human mind and to a computational instantiation of such a theory used in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI) and computational cognitive science. These formalized models ...

ACT-R ACT-R (pronounced /ˌækt ˈɑr/; short for "Adaptive Control of Thought—Rational") is a cognitive architecture mainly developed by John Robert Anderson and Christian Lebiere at Carnegie Mellon University. Like any cognitive architecture, ACT ...

and rational analysis. He has published many papers on cognitive psychology, including recent criticism of unjustified claims in

mathematics education In contemporary education, mathematics education—known in Europe as the didactics or pedagogy of mathematics—is the practice of teaching, learning, and carrying out Scholarly method, scholarly research into the transfer of mathematical know ...

that lack experimental warrant and sometimes (in extreme cases) contradict known findings in cognitive psychology. He was also an early leader in research on intelligent tutoring systems, such as cognitive tutors, and many of Anderson's former students, such as Kenneth Koedinger and Neil Heffernan, have become leaders in that area.

Intelligent tutoring systems

Anderson's research has used fMRI brain imaging to study how students learn with intelligent tutoring systems. Most of his studies have looked at neural processes of students while they are solving algebraic equations or proofs. Anderson and colleagues generated a cognitive model that predicted that while students were learning an algebra proof, neuroimages showed decreased activation in a lateral inferior prefrontal region and a predefined fusiform region. This decrease in activity showed an increased fluency in retrieving declarative information, as students required less activity in these regions to solve the problems.

Cognitive stages when solving mathematical problems

In a 2012 study, Anderson and Jon Fincham, a colleague at Carnegie Mellon, examined the cognitive stages participants engaged in when solving mathematical problems. These stages included encoding, planning, solving, and response. The study determined how much time participants spent in each problem solving stage when presented with a mathematical problem. Multi-

voxel In computing, a voxel is a representation of a value on a three-dimensional regular grid, akin to the two-dimensional pixel. Voxels are frequently used in the Data visualization, visualization and analysis of medical imaging, medical and scient ...

pattern recognition techniques and

Hidden Markov model A hidden Markov model (HMM) is a Markov model in which the observations are dependent on a latent (or ''hidden'') Markov process (referred to as X). An HMM requires that there be an observable process Y whose outcomes depend on the outcomes of X ...

s were used to determine participants' problem solving stages. The results of the study showed that the time spent in the planning stage was dependent on the novelty of the problem. The time spent in the solving stage was dependent on the amount of computation required for the particular problem. Lastly, the time spent in the response stage was dependent on the complexity of the response required by the problem.

Decomposition Hypothesis

In another study, Anderson and colleagues used a video game task to test the Decomposition Hypothesis, or the idea that a complex cognitive task can be broken down into a set of information processing components. The combination of these components remains the same across different tasks. The study used a cognitive model that predicted behavioral and activation patterns for specific regions in the brain. The predictions involved both tonic activation, which remained stable across brain regions during game play, and phasic activation, which was present only when there was resource competition. The study's results supported the Decomposition Hypothesis. Individual differences were also found in participants' learning gains, which indicated that the rate of learning for a complex skill is dependent on cognitive capacity limits.

Publications

* 1976. ''Language, memory, and thought''. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. * 1980. ''Cognitive psychology and its implications''. San Francisco: Freeman. Eighth edition, Worth Publishers, 2014. * 1983. ''The architecture of cognition''. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. * 1990. ''The adaptive character of thought''. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. * 2000. ''Learning and Memory: An Integrated Approach''. Wiley. * 2007. ''How can the human mind occur in the physical universe?'' New York: Oxford University Press.

References

External links

Personal page at CMU
{{DEFAULTSORT:Anderson, John R. 1947 births Living people 21st-century American psychologists 20th-century American psychologists Computational psychologists Carnegie Mellon University faculty American cognitive psychologists Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellows of the Society of Experimental Psychologists Mathematical cognition researchers Canadian mathematics educators American mathematics educators Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Memory researchers Stanford University School of Humanities and Sciences alumni University of British Columbia alumni Winners of the Heineken Prize Rumelhart Prize laureates Yale University faculty Fellows of the Cognitive Science Society Canadian emigrants to the United States American educational psychologists The Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science laureates APA Distinguished Scientific Award for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology recipients