15 Facts About Nelson Cowan

Nelson Cowan is the Curators' Distinguished Professor of Psychological Sciences at the University of Missouri.

Nelson Cowan specializes in working memory, the small amount of information held in mind and used for language processing and various kinds of problem solving.

Nelson Cowan's work, funded by the National Institutes of Health since 1984, has been cited over 41,000 times according to Google Scholar.

Nelson Cowan contends that previous models did not sufficiently distinguish between these temporary-storage mechanisms.

For example, Emily Elliott and Nelson Cowan showed that pre-exposure to sounds to be used as distractors reduced their capability to distract.

Simple working memory tasks account for aptitudes better in children too young to apply mnemonic strategies, and Nelson Cowan has made considerable use of a simple task that maximizes the correlation with aptitudes by making the endpoint of a list unpredictable, known as running memory span.

Nelson Cowan was born in 1951 in Washington, DC as the first child of Jewish parents, Arthur Cowan from Boston, an optometrist, and Shirly B Cowan of Baltimore.

Nelson Cowan grew up in Wheaton, Maryland and attended Wheaton High School.

Nelson Cowan's home was within biking distance along Rock Creek Park to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD, and in the summers when home from college, he volunteered there one year, learning computer programming and studying hemispheric laterality, and had a paid assistantship the next summer.

Nelson Cowan subsequently was hired as a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1982, and in 1985, he joined the faculty of the University of Missouri, where he has remained since.

Additionally, Nelson Cowan has served as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Helsinki, the University of Leipzig, the University of Western Australia, the University of Bristol, and the University of Edinburgh, where he served as a professorial fellow.

Since 2017, Nelson Cowan has been the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General and previously was associate editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, and the European Journal of Cognitive Psychology.

Nelson Cowan was awarded honorary doctorates at the University of Helsinki, Finland and the University of Liege, Belgium.

Nelson Cowan is a fellow of the Society of Experimental Psychologists and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Nelson Cowan won the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Science.