Abstract

The most influential effect of Csaba Pléh’s mentoring on me was what I here will call “taking the historian’s stance”. I describe three of our empirical projects that were directly shaped by the historian’s stance: one on iconic memory, a second one on story recall, and our most recent one on mental effort. Then, in the appendix, I recollect some of my thoughts on how Csaba fostered this historian’s stance in us, and what this meant to me in the context of American scientific education that I have been the part of for more than 20 years. I conclude with some thoughts on how to introduce the historian’s stance to psychology students, based on Csaba’s mentoring.