PERSON
Elizabeth Ligon Bjork
American cognitive psychologist whose four-decade collaboration with Robert Bjork produced the New Theory of Disuse and the most systematic experimental investigation of metacognitive illusions—demonstrating that learners not only prefer suboptimal conditions but persist in the preference even after being taught why it is wrong.
Elizabeth Ligon Bjork is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at UCLA and Robert Bjork's closest intellectual collaborator since the 1970s. Her research on metamemory—how people monitor and regulate their own learning—established that the subjective assessments learners make about their progress (judgments of learning, feelings of knowing, confidence ratings) are systematically distorted by fluency, recency, and other cues that correlate poorly with actual retention. Her joint work with Robert Bjork on the independence of storage and retrieval strength provided the theoretical architecture for understanding why massed practice feels effective (it maximizes current retrieval strength) while producing weak learning (it does not build storage strength). Her findings that learners continue to prefer massed over spaced practice even after being taught about spacing's superiority suggested that educational interventions relying on student self-regulation are insufficient—the environment itself must be redesigned.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Elizabeth Bjork's empirical contributions