Nelson Cowan is a cognitive and developmental psychologist with research interests in working memory, attention, intelligence, individual differences and their development across the life span. He earned his B.S. from the University of Michigan in 1973 with an independent major in the neurosciences, and his Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Wisconsin in 1980. He is currently Curators’ Professor of Psychology at the University of Missouri at Columbia and an associate editor of the European Journal of Cognitive Psychology. In the past he has served as associate editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition and of the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. In addition to research articles, he has written two books: Attention and Memory: An Integrated Framework (Oxford Press, 1995) and Working Memory Capacity (Psychology Press, in press), and he has edited The Development of Memory in Childhood (Psychology Press, 1997). He is married with a son in high school and an older stepson and stepdaughter.