John Robert Anderson (psychologist)

John Robert Anderson ( born August 27, 1947 in Vancouver, British Columbia) is an American psychologist of Canadian origin. He works with a focus on cognitive psychology at Carnegie Mellon University.

Life

Anderson studied from 1964 to 1968 Psychology at the University of British Columbia and obtained his doctorate in 1972 at Stanford University. Subsequently, he taught at Yale University and the University of Michigan. Since 1978 he has been Professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, 1983, he took a chair in there as well to computer science.

Work

Anderson has become especially through the development of the theory Adaptive Control of Thought known. This tries to wear different elements of cognitive psychological research together and so to develop a complex psychological theory of the human mind. This theory is also intended to simulate cognitive architecture as the human mind as a computer program.

Prizes and awards

From 1988-1989 Anderson was president of the Cognitive Science Society. In 2004 he won the David E. Rumelhart Prize for Contributions to the Formal Analysis of Human Cognition, 2006, he was the first recipient of the doped with $ 150,000 Dr. AH Heineken Prize for Cognitive Science of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences. 1999 Anderson was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In the same year he also became a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Department of Psychology he directs since 2001. In 2011 he received the Benjamin Franklin Medal.