Lynne M. Reder

Lynne M. Reder is an American psychologist whose research contributed to our understanding of human memory.

Career

Reder received her undergraduate degree in Psychology at Stanford University in 1972, graduating as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. In 1976, she earned her PhD in Psychology from the University of Michigan. After a two-year NIMH post-doctoral fellowship at Yale University (1976 to 1978), she joined the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University and retired as full professor (Emerita) in 2021.

Her contributions to psychological science and experimental psychology have been recognized through multiple honors and elected positions:

1999: Elected Fellow, American Psychological Association (APA), Division 3 2001: Elected Fellow, American Association for Advancement of Science (AAAS) 2005: Elected Fellow, Association for Psychological Science (APS) 2007: Elected to the Society of Experimental Psychologists 2010: Elected to the Memory Disorders Research Society (MDRS) 2011 - 2016: Elected to the Governing Board of The Psychonomic Society 2013 - 2017: Elected Member at Large, Section J, American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

Selected research and publications

Role of Elaborations and Summaries in Memory Retention

Reder's early work explored the effects of elaborations and summaries on learning. She found that people often learned more from summaries than original texts and that self-generated elaborations improve retention better than elaborations provided by the author

Strategy Selection and Question Answering

Reder showed that people do not default to direct retrieval when attempting to answer a question but rather dynamically choose strategies based on intrinsic question features (e.g., feeling of knowing, partial matching ) and base rates of success.

Source of Activation Confusion (SAC) Model of Memory Reder developed the Source of Activation Confusion (SAC) model, which uses activation-based principles to explain diverse phenomena, including the misinformation effect, contextual fan effects, recognition memory (Remember/Know judgments), and age-related memory differences. Reder's Source of Activation Confusion (SAC) model has been discussed in reviews of computational and dual-process theories of recognition memory and in treatments of familiarity and metacognition.

Role of Hippocampus in Memory

Reder showed that both implicit and explicit memory tasks can rely on the hippocampus, depending on whether the task requires the formation of new associations.

Working Memory and Cognitive Resources

Reder’s contributions to working memory include the development of the Modified Digit Span (MODS) task, which predicts cognitive performance across domains. She expanded her SAC model to incorporate the role of working memory in knowledge construction, emphasizing resource limitations in memory processes showing that resources are consumed/depleted as an inverse function of chunk familiarity and rate of replenishment depends on the rate of input and familiarity of the information to be processed.