Underwood, Benton (1915-1994) | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

Unlike German psychologists, who emphasized the mind's structure and had given birth to a scientific psychology, James stressed the mind's activity. His ideas, combined with those of British philosophers and the American spirit of doing and acting, created a movement called American Functionalism. A student of Underwood's once commented: "To my mind, the term functionalist and the name Underwood are synonymous" (Freund, 1998, p. 318).

The functionalist perspective within the newly developing field of psychology approached problems of learning and memory in associationistic terms. How are associations between verbal items learned and remembered? As Underwood commented, "I am an incurable associationist" (1982, p. 8). It seemed obvious to him that in innumerable instances associations played a dominant role in our learning and retention of verbal material: When did Christopher Columbus discover the new world? Who is the current vice president? Clearly, to answer such questions we must learn an association between initially unrelated facts (e.g., between a name and date). The experimental task given to subjects typically involved paired-associate learning: the presentation of pairs of items to a subject charged with learning an association between the members of each pair to facilitate the recall of the second item upon presentation of the first.

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