In Honor Of…David E. Meyer
Honoring scientists who have made important and lasting contributions to the sciences of mind, brain, and behavior.
David E. Meyer, PhD
Professor of Mathematical Psychology and Cognitive Science
University of Michigan
David E. Meyer is the Clyde H. Coombs and J. E. Keith Smith Distinguished University Professor of Mathematical Psychology and Cognitive Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences; has been honored with the 2008 William James Fellow Award from the Association for Psychological Science; and has received the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award. He is being honored for fundamental empirical, theoretical, and applied contributions to the science of cognition.
Professor Meyer was born in Louisville, Kentucky, and received a BA from Wittenberg University in 1964. He received his Ph.D in Mathematical Psychology from the University of Michigan in 1969, after which he worked under Saul Sternberg as a member of the Technical Staff at Bell Telephone Laboratories. He returned to the University of Michigan in 1977 to join the faculty, where he has been ever since.
In his early research on semantic retrieval from long-term memory, he developed and popularized (with his collaborator, Roger Schvaneveldt) the Lexical Decision Task, a powerful paradigm for investigating the nature of human memory. His research quickly extended beyond the organization of semantic memory to many other areas of the psychology of human performance, in which he has made numerous groundbreaking contributions. These including motor and speech production, aimed movement, mental chronometry, speed-accuracy trade-offs, psychophysiology, cognitive neuroscience, error detection, multi-tasking and time-sharing, and individual differences. These broad and comprehensive contributions to the basic science of human performance culminated in the development (with collaborator David Kieras) of a computational unified theory of cognition, Executive-Process Interactive Control (EPIC), which is both an encapsulation and integration of basic scientific models of human performance and a useful applied tool for human factors psychology and engineering.
Individuals Honoring David Meyer:
Richard Abrams, Washington University in St. Louis
Kent Berridge, University of Michigan
Cerita Bethea, Kimberley-Clark
Natalie Davidson, University of Michigan
William Gehring, University of Michigan
Darren Gergle, Northwestern University
Jennifer Glass, Eastern Michigan University
Leon Gmeindl, Johns Hopkins University
Jonathan Kopecky, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab
Sylvan Kornblum, University of Michigan
Deanna Larus
Janet R. Meyer, Kent State University
Shane Mueller, Michigan Technological University
Allen Osman
Joshua Rubenstein, Army Research Laboratory
Eric Schumacher, Georgia Institute of Technology
Roger Schvaneveldt
Eric Stone, Wake Forest University
* FABBS would like to thank Dr. Shane Mueller and Dr. Eric Schumacher for nominating Dr. Meyer for this honor and for leading the effort.
