ADNG Oral History: Jeroen Raaijmakers

In deze serie worden emeritus-hoogleraren psychologie geïnterviewd over hun carrière, visie en reflectie op de (huidige) psychologie door dr. Vittorio Busato en historicus dr. Jacques Dane. Deze interviews zijn gefilmd en verwerkt door boskamp AV produkties (Ernst Boskamp) en via de site van het ADNG (www.ADNG.nl) af te spelen. Het is nu ook mogelijk de serie als Podcast te beluisteren.

Net als de reeks boeken over Grondleggers van de Nederlandse gedragswetenschappen wil het ADNG met dit project bijdragen de contemporaine geschiedenis van psychologie, pedagogiek en onderwijskunde. Het project kwam tot stand door de financiële bijdrage van het Van Strienfonds.

De interviews zijn in zoverre gestructureerd dat een protocol dat de Society for Research in Child Development eerder hanteerde voor een vergelijkbaar schriftelijk project, voor deze interviews als leidraad diende. Maar ook niet meer dan dat; de interviews moesten vooral ook spontane gesprekken zijn die zo min mogelijk zijn gemonteerd.

Biographical Sketch Jeroen Raaijmakers

After obtaining his Master's at the University of Nijmegen, Jeroen Raaijmakers spent a year at Indiana University on a fellowship from the Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research with Richard M. Shiffrin. During that time, the SAM model was developed which formed the basis for his Doctoral Dissertation (cum laude) at the University of Nijmegen in 1979. Until 1985 he worked as an associate professor at the University of Nijmegen. In 1985 he moved to the TNO Institute for Perception (now called TNO Human Factors) at Soesterberg, first as a senior research associate and later as the head of the Cognitive Psychology Group. In 1992 he came to the University of Amsterdam as (full) Professor in Cognitive Psychology. One of the activities there was the creation of a new interuniversity Graduate Program in Experimental Psychology of which he became the firstdirector. From 1998-2000 he has also been the Director of Research for the Department of Psychology. From 2006-2010, he has been the Director of the Cognitive Science Center Amsterdam (CSCA).
He has published widely on mathematical modeling of human memory as well as a number of other topics. In 1986 he received the Heymans award, the early career award from the Netherlands Institute for Psychologists. Raaijmakers has served as editor and managing editor for Acta Psychologica, Consulting Editor for JEP: LMC, the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, was Member of the Advisory Council of the International Association for The Study of Attention and Performance, Member of the board of the Netherlands Association for Psychonomics, and Member of the Fachbeirat (Advisory Board) of the Max Planck Institut für Psycholinguistik, Nijmegen.

Research Interests

Research interests focus on the human memory, especially the development of formal models for retrieval from long-term memory. Most of this work has been performed in collaboration with Richard Shiffrin from Indiana University. The initial work focused on explicit retrieval from episodic memory but in more recent work we have extended our approach to semantic and implicit memory paradigms. Experimental research focused on a number of more specific issues, including part-list cuing, bias effects in perceptual identification and the formation of new semantic associations.
In addition, I have an interest in a number of statistical issues, e.g. parameter estimation methods, linear and structural relationships, and the language-as-fixed-effect controversy. More applied work focuses on decision making and the early detection of dementia.