Arthur Weever Melton (August 13, 1906 – November 5, 1978) was an American experimental psychologist, researcher, and professor. He served as the editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology for twelve years.
Background
Arthur "Art" Weever Melton was born in Fayetteville, Arkansas on August 13, 1906. At 18 years old, he began undergraduate studies in Psychology at Washington University in St. Louis where he worked with John A. McGeoch, a functionalist, who performed studies exploring how the distribution of practice, rest, and interpolated learning affects the formation and loss of association. Melton received a BA in psychology in 1928. He went on to graduate school at Yale University under the mentorship of Edward S. Robinson, another functionalist, whose research focused on verbal learning. Melton obtained his PhD in experimental psychology.in 1932.
Career
Museum research
After receiving his PhD, Melton stayed at Yale as an instructor for three years. During this time, he worked on a project with Robinson at the Philadelphia Museum of Art & Buffalo Museum of Science which was funded by the Carnegie Corporation and the American Association of Museums. He published two important monographs: Problems of Installation in Museums of Art (1935 ) and Experimental Studies of the Education of Children in a Museum of Science (1936). Melton examined the influence of variables such as the spacing of an art piece in a display on subsequent interest in the piece by museum visitors, by quantifying the amount of time spent looking at a specific piece of art and the total number of pieces observed.
University of Missouri
In 1935, Melton obtained a position as the chairman of the Department of Psychology at the University of Missouri Under Melton's leadership, the department established a highly regarded, nationally recognized and rigorous master's degree program that ensured automatic admission to a PhD program at any university upon completion. Further, Melton established a five-credit-hour, lecture-laboratory introductory psychology course, that was adopted as an option in the science requirement of the college, although with resistance from other basic science departments. These advances solidified Melton's reputation as an administrator.
During this time, Melton began his lifelong research on human learning and memory using a functional approach. He combined this functional approach with process ideas to show the mental operations that are not directly observable. He published two seminal pieces, one with Jean McQueen Irwin (1940) on interpolated learning and with W. J. von Lackum (1941) on the two-factor theory of retroactive interference. Melton and Irwin had subjects learn a word list of associated words, then recall the words after varying numbers of trials on a second word list. They subtracted the number of overt intrusions (newly learned words from list two) from the total amount of retroactive interference (the amount of interference of memory for list one words as a function of the number of trials of list two). They found a phenomenon, which they called Factor X, that was large and systematically increased with the amount of interpolated learning of list two. They found that, at low levels of list one learning, the interference was largely due to overt intrusions, but with increased learning of list one, interference appeared be due to factor X. Over time, the number of intrusion errors decreased. They postulated that this was similar to the unlearning of an association suggested by Clark L. Hull during extinction. They suggested that errors in memory, forgetting, are a result of commission and omissions errors due to new learning. Factor X was responsible for the weakening or unlearning of first-list association during the learning of an interpolated list. With these papers, Melton extended prior work to show that forgetting was due to both response competition and unlearning, which was dubbed the two-factor theory of retroactive interference. Notably, the use of subtraction methods to reveal underlying processes would become a prominent method in studies of short-term memory and cognition after World War II.