Delos Donald "Wick" Wickens (October 6, 1909 – April 9, 1988) was an American experimental research psychologist, behaviorist, and author.
Over the years, Wickens published his research findings predominantly in the Journal of Experimental Psychology and the Bulletin of the Psychometric Society.
He received a BA from Centre College in 1931 followed by an MA in English literature and a PhD in Psychology at the University of North Carolina in 1933.
It is estimated that during his 35 years at OSU he helped over 1,000 graduate students from all fields of psychology, and 79 psychologists completed their PhDs under his direction.
[3] For the next few decades, Wickens continued to focus on stimuli and responses, though generalization and perceptual factors were increasingly considered.
[4] For the next few decades, Wickens continued to focus on stimuli and responses, though generalization and perceptual factors were increasingly considered.
[2] Wickens's research led him to discover the “release from proactive inhibition.” When consecutive trials involve items from the same conceptual category, there was decreased processing of short-term memory.
However, Wickens showed that when subjects perceive a change in the category of the item to be remembered, there was increased processing of short-term memory.
For example, Wickens’ “Lack of Memory for Nonattended Items in Dichotic Listening” illustrates the relationship between “release from proactive inhibition” and semantic coding.
Lustig, May, and Hasher’s article “Working Memory Span and the Role of Proactive Interference”[9] cites Wickens no less than three times.