ABSTRACT

Roddy Roediger’s research career has touched on many aspects of memory, but a careful analysis suggests that it divides into three relatively distinct stages. Stage one, lasting for roughly a decade from 1975–1985, focused on phenomena illustrating that memory performance can be surprisingly good (hypermnesia; e.g., Roediger & Payne, 1982) or perplexingly poor (inhibitory effects of cueing and the act of recall on subsequent memory; e.g., Roediger, 1978). Stage two stretched across the next decade and focused on priming and related implicit memory effects that reflect retention of previously studied information in the absence of conscious recollection (e.g., Roediger, Weldon, & Challis, 1989; Roediger, 1990). The third stage runs from 1995 to the present, and is characterized by a focus on false memories, that is, remembering events that never happened (e.g., Roediger & McDermott, 1995). All three stages have been highly productive, although the fruits of the latter two stages are perhaps better known than those of the first.