Henry L. Roediger III

Throughout his career, Roediger has become known for his focus on memory accessibility and retrieval – the ways in which we access and recall memories that we have stored. From this standpoint, he has developed theories, explored phenomena, and pioneered research techniques. He has supervised over 25 students in postgraduate research, and 9 postdoctoral fellows. His former students include Suparna Rajaram, Kathleen McDermott, Jeffrey Karpicke, and Elizabeth Marsh. Also, he has published over 175 articles and has an h-index of over 40. Alongside his academic work, Roediger oversaw the launch of the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest, he has been editor of the journals Psychonomic Bulletin and Review and the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, and also has been involved in the administration of a number of scientific societies, most notably as the 2003–2004 president of the Association for Psychological Science.

Roediger is perhaps most widely known for his research in the area of false memory, looking at why and how people develop memories of events that never happened to them. Throughout the 1990s, he and his colleagues took the methodology from a relatively unknown study by James Deese from 1959 and worked to develop it into one of the most widely used tools in human memory research; the DRM Paradigm. In a typical DRM experiment, a subject listens to a list of related words, for example; Thread, Pin, Eye, Sewing, Sharp, Point, Prick, Thimble, Haystack, Torn, Hurt, Injection, Syringe, Cloth, Knitting, and is then tested on their memory for this list. Typically, subjects will recall or recognise an associated, but unpresented lure word (Needle). Roediger and Kathleen McDermott asked people whether they actually remembered hearing this unpresented word, or if they merely felt like they had heard it. Participants often reported remembering hearing the word, illustrating memory for an event that never occurred.

The 1980s saw an increase in research on implicit memory – memories that we have without being aware of them. The norm among researchers in this area was to test implicit memory using some task that required the subject to unintentionally remember previously learned information, such as completing a word fragment (E_E_ _ A _ T to ELEPHANT) or an anagram (PNLEHETA to ELEPHANT), as compared with testing for memories that we are aware of (explicit memory) using direct instructions to remember. These researchers found that the intentionally learned information was better remembered in an intentional remembering test, and unintentionally learned information was better remembered in an unintentional remembering test.

Roediger was one of the first scholars to see the value of studying how humans retrieve memories. As Roediger started his career the cognitive revolution was in full swing. Human memory researchers had been predominantly focusing on memory storage, and were only beginning to look at memory encoding. However, inspired by his graduate advisor at Yale, Robert G. Crowder, Roediger began to see the importance of a retrieval-based approach to memory research. Since his doctoral dissertation, much of Roediger's research through the 1970s focused on retrieval based inhibition – the idea that retrieving an item reduces the subsequent accessibility of other stored items. This phenomenon is more commonly experienced when we try to remember a list of items and find that we keep thinking of the ones we have already recalled, rather than the ones we still need to remember. Roediger was able to show, under certain conditions, that recall cues can inhibit recall, which seemed inconsistent with previously widely accepted research findings showing that cues aid recall. Close to a decade of research helped to define the situations in which cues can aid recall and the situations in which cues can inhibit recall. In 1978 Roediger concluded that this dissociation occurs because, although some cues can facilitate recall, other cues provide irrelevant information, which hinders recall. Most importantly, Roediger showed that the accessibility of one memory biases the process of searching for another memory.

Born in Roanoke, Virginia, and raised in Danville, Virginia, Roediger received his undergraduate education from Washington and Lee University, graduating magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in 1969. He went on to study at Yale University, receiving his PhD in 1973 with his dissertation "Inhibition in recall from cueing with recall targets". After receiving his doctorate he joined the faculty at Purdue University, where he stayed for fifteen years (except for two appointments as a visiting assistant professor at the University of Toronto: 1976–1978, and 1981–1982). In 1988 he was appointed as the Lynette S. Autrey Professor of Psychology at Rice University, and in 1996 he moved to Washington University in St Louis where he was the Chair of Psychology until 2004. Since 1998 he has been the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Psychology at Washington University.

Henry L. "Roddy" Roediger III (born July 24, 1947) is an American psychology researcher in the area of human learning and memory. He rose to prominence for his work on the psychological aspects of false memories.