ABSTRACT
Although I knew Ben Murdock's research in great detail—indeed, it provided much of the empirical basis for the model in Atkinson and Shifrrin (1968), and the model that eventually became the SAM retrieval model (e.g., Raaijmakers & Shiffrin, 1980, 1981)—my first close personal contact occurred at the Interdisciplinary Conference at Jackson Hole, a meeting that we continued each year thereafter. We discussed research and skied together; Ben demonstrated how to do both with style and grace. Later, Ben introduced me to backcountry skiing, which we have managed to survive despite his tendencies to choose sheer and icy bowls for descents. Somehow during those years, perhaps when my back was turned, Ben grew from an outstanding empirical researcher to a renowned mathematical modeler, a leader and innovator in the development of models of memory.
