Wayne K. Kirchner

Introduction

Wayne K. Kirchner was an American psychologist whose best-known experiment asked people to watch a row of twelve lamps and press the key beneath whichever lamp had lit several steps earlier. The report of that procedure, published in 1958 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, is the ancestor of the n-back task, now among the handful of standard ways to load working memory in a laboratory, inside a scanner, and in clinical assessment. Kirchner spent almost none of his career in academic psychology. After a Fulbright year at Cambridge he joined the 3M Company in 1955 and stayed until he retired in 1987, working as company psychologist, publishing in the applied literature, and largely disappearing from the experimental record.

That split defines him. His experimental papers, a small cluster from the early 1950s, ask whether advancing age limits how fast a person can deal with information that keeps changing, and they are why his name still circulates in working memory research sixty years later. His applied papers cover supervisor appraisals, forced-choice personality checklists designed to resist faking, textbook writing, and eventually a survey of managerial attitudes across fifteen countries. The connecting thread is a Minnesota training in applied psychology under Donald G. Paterson and a persistent interest in what makes people too slow to keep up.

Early Life and Education

Kirchner grew up in Minneapolis and graduated as valedictorian of his class at Patrick Henry High School. He enlisted in the United States Navy and served a little over two years during the Second World War, then returned to Minneapolis and entered the University of Minnesota, where he took his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D., all in psychology. He played intramural basketball there, and later at Cambridge.

At Minnesota he worked inside the group around Donald G. Paterson, the applied psychologist who built what came to be called the Minnesota Tradition in differential, counseling, and industrial psychology. Paterson supervised eighty-three doctoral students at the university between 1921 and his retirement in 1962, though he never held a doctorate himself. Kirchner's first published article came out of that setting: Attitudes toward the employment of older people, written with Theodore R. Lindbom and Paterson in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 1952. It is a study of what employers say about hiring older workers, and it establishes six years before the famous experiment that the question occupying him was how age constrains a person's usefulness at work.

He then won a Fulbright scholarship to St John's College, Cambridge, spent a year in England, and married Bonnie there in 1955. Returning that year, he joined 3M in St Paul. His family's obituary, published in the Star Tribune in January 2008 when he died at eighty-one, records that he held a Diplomate in professional psychology. No full biographical study of Kirchner exists; what follows is assembled from that obituary, from his own publications, and from the memoir his principal collaborator left behind.

Academic and Professional Career

Kirchner was a psychologist at 3M from 1955 until his retirement in 1987, thirty-two years inside a single manufacturing company. Marvin D. Dunnette, who preceded him there and later returned to a Minnesota chair built partly on that work, recalled that Kirchner joined him shortly after he arrived and that the two functioned as internal consultants to the company's divisions. Dunnette's list of what they did is a portrait of applied psychology practised without academic supervision: job analysis, performance appraisal, validation studies for sales, clerical, research and development, and managerial jobs, individual assessment, measurement of job satisfaction, consumer reactions to products, and human factors work on highway safety for the company's reflective products division. Everything was written up as internal technical reports as well as for outside publication.

Two papers from 1962 show the applied work at its characteristic grain. Differences between better and less-effective supervisors in appraisal of subordinates, written with Donald J. Reisberg in Personnel Psychology, asked what distinguishes managers who rate their staff well from those who rate them badly. With Dunnette, Jean McCartney and Howard C. Carlson, he published a study of faking on a forced-choice self-description checklist, asking whether the format really protects personality measurement when candidates want to look good. This was the standard validity question of its decade, and Kirchner's contribution belongs to the practical branch of it: instruments that survive contact with people trying to game them.

The collaboration produced a textbook in 1965, Psychology Applied to Industry, written with Dunnette for Appleton-Century-Crofts. Its chapter list is effectively the syllabus of mid-century industrial psychology: personnel selection, training and development, counseling in industry, engineering psychology, motivation in industry, organizational psychology, the psychology of labor-management relations, and survey research. It is unusual mainly for having been written from inside a company rather than a department.

By the end of his career the scope had widened from persons to countries. He is the last author of a 1980 paper in the Academy of Management proceedings, with Rodger Griffeth, Peter Hom and Angelo DeNisi, that extended the well-known Haire, Ghiselli and Porter study of managerial attitudes to 1,768 managers from fifteen Western nations employed by a single multinational company — almost certainly his own employer. His family credited him with more than a hundred articles in industrial psychology, a figure no bibliography confirms but one consistent with a three-decade applied career in which much of the output existed only as internal reports.

Major Contributions to Psychology

The 1958 experiment itself

The apparatus was simple and physical. Twelve lamps sat in a row, each with a key beneath it. A light moved rapidly along the row, and the subject's task was to press the key under whichever lamp had lit one, two, or three positions earlier, according to the condition. Loads ran from zero-back, which is simple reaction, up to three-back. Younger adults and older adults both performed it.

The results were reported in terms of how long each group could hold on. Older participants slumped sooner than younger ones, both relative to their own starting performance and in absolute terms, and as they fell behind they produced more errors of omission and more random guessing. Kirchner's own conclusion was that the older group's problem was not that they lost the material but that they could not organise incoming and outgoing information fast enough to keep pace with the display. That is a claim about throughput and about the coordination of perception with response, not a claim about how many items can be held at once.

From aging study to working memory paradigm

Nothing in the 1958 paper says working memory. The construct did not exist: Baddeley and Hitch's model was sixteen years away. What Kirchner described was a speeded perceptual-motor task used to compare age groups, and for about thirty years that is all it was. The task re-entered psychology in 1989, when Archie Dobbs and Brendan Rule cited it and adapted it for aging research; it then spread with cheap computing and with functional imaging, which found in it a reliable way to light up dorsal and lateral prefrontal cortex. Accounts of its origin differ in detail — some trace earlier variants to dissertation work on pilot fatigue in the early 1950s — but Kirchner's paper is the one the lineage is universally traced through.

Applied psychology inside one organisation

His durable applied contribution is less a finding than a demonstration of where profession-level work can be done. The 3M years produced validated selection instruments for jobs from clerical to managerial, procedures for appraisal, and cross-national data on managerial attitudes at a scale that academic budgets rarely allowed at the time. The trade-off is visible in the record too: nearly everything was published in applied journals or not at all, so the work reached practitioners while having little influence on the academic literature it drew from.

Major Publications

• Kirchner, W. K., Lindbom, T. R., & Paterson, D. G. (1952). Attitudes toward the employment of older people. Journal of Applied Psychology, 36(3). https://doi.org/10.1037/h0056361
• Kirchner, W. K. (1958). Age differences in short-term retention of rapidly changing information. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 55(4), 352–358. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0043688
• Kirchner, W. K., & Reisberg, D. J. (1962). Differences between better and less-effective supervisors in appraisal of subordinates. Personnel Psychology, 15(3). https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.1962.tb01624.x
• Dunnette, M. D., McCartney, J., Carlson, H. C., & Kirchner, W. K. (1962). A study of faking behavior on a forced-choice self-description checklist. Personnel Psychology, 15(1). https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.1962.tb01843.x
• Dunnette, M. D., & Kirchner, W. K. (1965). Psychology applied to industry. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
• Griffeth, R. W., Hom, P. W., DeNisi, A. S., & Kirchner, W. K. (1980). A multivariate multinational comparison of managerial attitudes. Academy of Management Proceedings. https://doi.org/10.5465/ambpp.1980.4976130

Impact and Legacy

Kirchner's standing today rests almost entirely on papers written before he turned thirty-five, and almost none of it comes from the purpose for which they were written. The 1958 study is cited now by people measuring working memory, imaging prefrontal cortex, tracking decline in Alzheimer's disease, and testing whether training transfers; Kirchner was comparing two age groups on a piece of apparatus he had built. It is a case of ideas being taken up for reasons their author could not have anticipated.

Three lines of later work qualify what those papers are taken to show. The first is construct validity. The n-back's later popularity was accompanied by persistent doubt about what it measures: its correlations with complex span tasks of working memory are moderate rather than high, different versions of the task (verbal, spatial, single, dual) do not behave as exchangeable forms of one test, and what it gains in imaging reliability it partly pays for in construct clarity. Second, Kirchner's own reading of his aging data — poor throughput, not lost contents — has aged better than a storage-capacity reading would have; subsequent work in the processing-speed tradition, especially Timothy Salthouse's, would put most of the age effect on speeded tasks down to a general slowing rather than to a shrinking store, which is close to what he proposed in 1958. His design, though, was cross-sectional and his samples small, so cohort and health differences cannot be separated from ageing itself.

The third concerns the branch of the lineage that grew furthest from him. In 2008 Susanne Jaeggi, Martin Buschkuehl, John Jonides and Walter Perrig reported in PNAS that dual n-back training raised scores on tests of fluid intelligence, a finding that launched a commercial brain-training industry. Large-sample replications, including a well-known one by Thomas Redick and colleagues in 2013, failed to reproduce the transfer effect, and subsequent meta-analyses have generally concluded that training gains do not generalise beyond the trained tasks. Any honest account of the task's history has to note that the most consequential claim made in its name attaches to a version Kirchner never ran for a purpose he never claimed.

His applied work drew its own criticisms, mostly structural rather than aimed at him personally. The forced-choice formats he studied for resistance to faking were later shown to reduce rather than eliminate faking, and often at a cost to criterion validity, so the practical problem he addressed in 1962 remains unsolved. A career spent inside one employer produced validation evidence that circulated internally and is largely invisible now, which is partly why a thirty-two-year career left less of a public archive than an academic post would have.

Learn More

• The n-back task — the modern family of tasks that traces its method to Kirchner's 1958 apparatus.
• Alzheimer's disease — the condition most often studied with memory-load tasks of this kind.
• Positive aging — current research on what changes in cognition after middle age.
• History of psychology — how mid-century applied and experimental psychology diverged.
• The 1958 paper itself: Kirchner, W. K. (1958). Age differences in short-term retention of rapidly changing information. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0043688

References

• Kirchner, W. K. (1958). Age differences in short-term retention of rapidly changing information. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 55(4), 352-358.