John Wixted
University of California, San Diego
Dr. John Wixted is a professor of psychology at the University of California, San Diego, where he has been department chair since 2003. He is one of the few high profile researchers who has successfully spanned behavioral, cognitive, and neuroscience approaches to the study of behavior. Soon after his undergraduate studies at the University of California, San Diego, he published papers in the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior (JEAB) with Edmund Fantino and Ben Williams. His Ph.D. research at Emory University led to further papers in JEAB and the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, with his mentor J. J. McDowell. Research completed when he was a clinical psychology intern on assessment of child behavior was published with A. M. Gross along with an extensively cited paper with A. S. Bellack and R. L. Morrison on social competence in schizophrenia. Since returning to the University of California, San Diego as an assistant professor in 1988, his research career has risen to stellar heights. Dr. Wixted's many papers on memory in non-human animals include one in JEAB with K. G. White, which won APA's George Miller Award for an outstanding article in general psychology. Much of his research emphasizes a quantitative approach including signal detection theory and the mathematical form of the forgetting function. His current interests lie in the area of human memory. He has examined dual-process models of recognition memory, the modeling of recollection and familiarity, and the neuroanatomical basis of these two processes. He has published scholarly and highly cited reviews and theoretical treatments of memory and forgetting in the Annual Review of Psychology and the Psychological Review. He has served as editor of Psychonomic Bulletin & Review and as associate editor of four different journals, including JEAB. At the same time he was on the governing board of the Psychonomic Society, he was on the board of directors of the Society for the Experimental Analysis of Behavior. Dr. Wixted is also an accomplished teacher. In five different years he has won his university's award for outstanding teaching.