Molly Potter


Molly Potter is an American psychologist and Emeritus Professor of cognitive science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Cognitive Science Society, and the Society of Experimental Psychologists.

Work

Potter was among the scientists who discovered and initially studied Patient HM. Potter's research and the classes she teaches at MIT focus on experimental methods to study human cognition, thereby revealing the implicit data structures and algorithms used by the human brain.

Biography

Potter was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1930. Her father was a university administrator at the American University of Beirut and her mother was a nurse. In 1941, her family moved to Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada during WWII. She returned to Beirut for 10th grade and then spent two years of high school at Northfield Mount Herman School. She then attended Swarthmore College for her BA in psychology, and met her husband David. After graduating in 1952, she attended Harvard University for her PhD. She received the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship in 1956 and spent two years at University College London while her husband was a postdoctoral researcher. She completed her thesis in 1961, and continued as a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard until 1967 when she accepted a full-time position at MIT. In 2017 she received the Norman Anderson Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Experimental Psychologists "for her ground-breaking and impactful discoveries about the human mind's ability to rapidly extract meaning from words, images and visual scenes".