A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Estes as the 77th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
After Estes got out of the U. S. Army at the end of World War II, he established his reputation as one of the originators of mathematical learning theory.
In honor of his impact within the field of psychology, Estes received the National Medal of Science on December 16, 1997, from President Bill Clinton.
The stimulus-sampling theory also aids as a heuristic device for discovering effective truisms about changes in response probabilities.
[4] A natural extension of SST theory provides explanations of discrimination, generalization, temporal processes, and even motivational phenomena.