Mark McDaniel, a professor emeritus of psychological and brain sciences and the Director of the Center for Integrative Research on Cognition, Learning, and Education (CIRCLE), has been named a 2027 winner of the James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award from the Association for Psychological Science.

The lifetime award recognizes APS members who have made outstanding contributions to applied psychological research. 

McDaniel is an expert in memory and learning. He has studied ways to enhance memory storage and retrieval, learners’ cognitive processes, prospective memory, and the effects of aging on memory. 

Throughout his career, McDaniel has worked to apply his research in educational settings. For example, he identified two basic tendencies among learners: Exemplar learners focus on memorizing specific examples and details, whereas abstraction learners are more interested in the underlying rules and general concepts. He has also identified specific memory retrieval techniques that can enhance classroom learning.

 “This Lifetime Achievement Award is a great honor, and I’m grateful for the opportunities that allowed me to pursue a lifelong passion,” McDaniel said.  “I like to think that I’ve carried the baton from James McKeen Cattell’s seminal research exploring individual differences in mental processes, with his commitment to objective measures of those differences. Our research distinguishing individual differences in concept-learning tendencies has shown that these differences are associated with STEM students’ learning performances.” 

McDaniel has served as president of the Society for Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Science. He is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, the American Psychological Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Society of Experimental Psychologists.