Daniel Schacter

Daniel Schacter (born 1952) is an American psychologist and the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. His research concerns the psychological and biological sides of human memory and amnesia, with special attention to the difference between conscious and nonconscious forms of memory, and more recently to how the brain supports memory distortion and the imagining of future events. He studied at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and took his doctorate at the University of Toronto in 1981 under Endel Tulving, and his methods combine cognitive testing with brain imaging such as positron emission tomography and functional magnetic resonance imaging. His books include Searching for Memory (1996) and The Seven Sins of Memory (2001), which names seven ways memory fails: transience, absent-mindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, persistence and bias.