Benton J. Underwood

BENTON J. UNDERWOOD was one of the pre-eminent leaders in the post-World War II development of research on the acquisition and retention of verbal materials, frequently referred to at the time as the study of verbal learning and memory. Underwood is recognized for his extensive contributions to the experimental and theoretical analysis of this field and for a career as an innovator and a pacesetter in a rapidly growing and changing domain of research. Between 1941 and 1982, he amassed nearly 200 publications, including 10 books and 5 research monographs. Approximately 85 percent of his articles and monographs consisted of reports of experiments. His most ambitious research effort was his study of massed and distributed practice, which spanned over 17 years and included 26 empirical reports and theoretical articles.

Underwood was born on February 28, 1915, in Center Point, Iowa. He received his primary and secondary education in Albion, a small town serving the farming community in central Iowa, where his father owned and operated the local lumberyard. His mother was particularly supportive of her children's education, providing each with the opportunity to take special music lessons and expressing great admiration for a new idea, a well-written theme, or a good set of grades. She was particularly proud when Underwood published a short piece in the local paper on the history of Albion.

Upon graduating from high school in 1932, Underwood hoped to become a high-school athletic coach--a position viewed locally, in Underwood's words, "as being little short of aristocratic." With the help of a scholarship, personal loans, and room-and-board jobs, Underwood attended Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa, and graduated in 1936 with majors in education and psychology. After graduation, he found a temporary teaching job in the high school in Clarion, Iowa, and then, a year later, realized his long-term dream by serving for two years as a junior college athletic coach and a part-time academic teacher in Tipton, Iowa. He decided to further his education when he realized that "it was of much greater interest and challenge to teach an academic subject to reluctant minds than to try to teach a pivot shot to would-be athletes lacking in basic coordination." With his new bride, Louise Olson Underwood, the couple headed west, where he planned to enroll in the summer session of 1939 at the University of Oregon. Underwood was experiencing difficulty in choosing between graduate work in education or in psychology, which was resolved when he took a psychology course offered by John Dashiell, who was a visiting professor from the University of North Carolina. After a few weeks in this course, Underwood made the decision to dedicate himself to a career in psychology.

Late that summer, Underwood accepted a position as a research assistant to Arthur W. Melton, chairman of the Psychology Department at the University of Missouri. Under Melton's guidance, Underwood discovered the importance of applying experimental techniques to understand behavior and the excitement of research in Melton's field, verbal learning and memory, the study of which would occupy his entire professional life. After receiving a master's degree in the summer of 1940, Underwood moved to the State University of Iowa, where he became a research assistant to John A. McGeoch, who was then the head of the Psychology Department and a major figure in the field of verbal learning and memory. With the approval of a benevolent draft board, Underwood was permitted to complete his Ph.D. before being assigned to military duty. After McGeoch died in 1941, Kenneth W. Spence guided Underwood in his dissertation research, which was completed in late 1942.

By all accounts, Iowa was a stimulating environment for graduate students to grow and develop. There were theoretical battles being waged on a number of important fronts: hammering out positions in a philosophy of science appropriate to psychology, debating and arguing critical theoretical points in animal learning, and developing research based on Melton's recent proposal of the unlearning of associations. In Underwood's words, "Iowa was a very exciting place . . . and I consider myself to be most fortunate to have been able to participate in it. The interplay between theory and experiment which took place at that time was a very heady experience, one which too few graduate students have." This experience, particularly Spence's creative approach to solving problems in an analytical and experimentally rigorous manner, created a lasting impression on Underwood.

Underwood received a commission in the Naval Reserve in January 1943 and was assigned to the Naval Aviation Psychology Branch of the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery. After the war, he accepted a position in January 1946 as assistant professor at Northwestern University and advanced to associate professor in 1948 and to professor in 1952. In 1976 Northwestern University appointed him Stanley G. Harris Professor of Social Science in recognition of his scholarly contributions to the discipline of psychology and of his service to the university, which included a term as chair of the Psychology Department. He retired from Northwestern in 1983. Except for a visiting year at Berkeley (1958-59), where he collaborated with Leo Postman on a number of research projects, Underwood remained in residence at Northwestern. He respected the faculty of the Northwestern department and enjoyed the general atmosphere of the university. He particularly valued the critical research orientation of his departmental colleagues.

Benton J. Underwood died on November 29, 1994, following a long degenerative illness. He is survived by his wife, Louise, a retired high-school English teacher; his two children, Judith Maples, a librarian, and Kathleen Olson, an author; and six grandchildren.

While the remainder of this biographical note will emphasize Underwood's academic and professional contributions, I would be remiss not to mention some of his personal qualities that endeared him to others. One of these characteristics was his fondness for playful arguments in which he would take a strong position and later admit that he did not necessarily believe the position he had been arguing. He also thoroughly enjoyed hearing about new research findings. Neal F. Johnson, a speaker at Underwood's memorial service, poignantly described Underwood's reaction to a new empirical finding or theoretical analysis: