www.psychspace.com心理学空间网Douglas Medin's interest in psychology began in eighth grade when his teachers discovered that he couldn't sing.
In Algona, IA, in 1957, children were funneled into two categories depending on whether they sang in the choir. “The kids that sang tended to be brighter, more middle-class,” Medin says. “Students who did not sing tended to come from the wrong side of the tracks.” He was lumped with the non-singers.
However, despite their poor grades, Medin found his rough friends intelligent and interesting. “There were a lot of things they were very curious about,” says Medin, who is now professor of psychology at Northwestern University (Evanston, IL). “And I just became intrigued by why these kids that seemed so motivated outside of school were failing in school.”
His interest in how individual differences affect learning styles led him to study psychology in college, and, later, to explore the interface between psychology and anthropology. In his career, he has striven to move beyond simplistic laboratory models of how the mind operates and to understand how our expertise and cultural background influence our mental picture of the world. His unique approach led the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to induct him into its ranks in 2005. His Inaugural Article appeared in the August 28, 2007, issue of PNAS (1).
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When Medin was a teenager, his family moved to Minnesota, where he attended Minnesota State University in Moorhead (then Moorhead State College). He began as a dual major in psychology and mathematics, but found the psychology teachers more interesting. He would later regret not having pursued more mathematics, but a brush with psychology research as part of a National Science Foundation summer research fellowship spent at the University of South Dakota (Vermillion, SD) got him hooked on studying animal behavior.