Underwood, Benton (1915-1994)

Underwood, Benton (1915-1994)

Benton J. Underwood was one of the preeminent leaders in the postwar development of research on the acquisition and retention of verbal materials (Keppel, 1997, p. 469). He studied verbal learning and memory in the 1940s at the University of Missouri, then later at the University of Iowa, under such important figures as Arthur W. Melton (Missouri), John A. McGeoch, and Kenneth W. Spence (both at Iowa). In 1946, Underwood took a teaching position at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where he remained until his retirement in 1983. Over four decades he did groundbreaking work in associative learning, verbal discrimination, transfer of training, distribution of practice, interference and forgetting, and the composition of memory.

Antecedents

Hermann Ebbinghaus carried out the first systematic study of verbal learning and memory in 1885. Acting as both experimenter and subject, he learned lists of nonsense syllables (e.g., cak, roq) and then tested his retention of them. His efforts provide our first picture of an empirically generated forgetting curve. Ebbinghaus's curve revealed substantial forgetting in the hours immediately following original learning. Why was there so much forgetting so soon after learning? This puzzle Underwood later helped to solve.

At the start of the twentieth century, William James's work was the chief influence on American psychology.

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