September 12


1902 

Karen Machover was born.  Machover is best known for devising the Draw-A-Person Test, a projective personality assessment instrument.

1903 

The first American book on child development, Irving King's Psychology of Child Development, was published.

1922 

Mark R. Rosenzweig was born.  Rosenzweig's studies of the effects of early environmental enrichment on brain weight and production of acetylcholine are well-known.  More recent activity has focused on the biochemistry of memory and the international promotion of psychological science.  APA Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award, 1982.

1928 

Robert P. Abelson was born.  Abelson has contributed to the understanding of human behavior in its social and political context.  His "script theory" is an attempt to characterize shared knowledge in forms accessible to computer simulation. APA Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, 1986.

1934 

Ivan Pavlov attacked Robert Yerkes and Wolfgang Köhler for their insight doctrines.  The topic was the subject of three of Pavlov's "Wednesday meetings." Pavlov ridiculed Köhler for asserting that apes were intelligent on the basis of evidence that they sit for a period of time without doing anything before successfully performing difficult tasks.

1934 

Carl Murchison's A Handbook of General Experimental Psychology was published.

1936 

Michael I. Posner was born.  Posner is best known for his chronometric studies of the internal constituents of thought and his work in information processing and selective attention.  His books Chronometric Explorations of Mind (1978) and Cognition: An Introduction (1974) exemplify his work.  APA Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, 1980.

1944 

The reorganized APA was approved, merging with the American Association for Applied Psychology, establishing the current Council of Representatives and creating the first 19 divisions.  Robert Yerkes, John Anderson, Leonard Carmichael, and Edwin G. Boring devised the plan.  The dues were raised to $15 and included subscriptions to the membership register, the American Psychologist, Psychological Bulletin, and Psychological Abstracts.
1966 Murray Glanzer and Anita Cunitz's article "Two Storage Mechanisms in Free Recall" was published in the Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior.
1966 Endel Tulving and Zena Pearlstone's article "Availability Versus Accessibility of Information in Memory for Words" was published in the Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior. In 1979, this article was featured as a "citation classic" by the journal Current Contents."
1967 Ulric Neisser's book Cognitive Psychology was published.
1967 The first congress of the International Association for the Scientific Study of Mental Deficiency began in Montpellier, France.
1990 The Cincinnati Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology was founded.  Oliver W. Birckhead was elected first president of the organization.