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Psychology
Review Essays of Academic, Professional & Technical Books in the Humanities & Sciences
Memory
Memory by Alan Baddeley,Michael W, Eysenck, Michael C. Anderson (Paperback) People seem to be intrigued by memory, and by its sometimes spectacular failure in (for example) people with amnesia. However, students of memory sometimes fail to retain this fascination. The reason is clear: in order to study memory we must carry out carefully-designed experiments, which can seem boring even when they are exciting science. Fortunately, we now know enough about memory to relate laboratory studies to the world beyond. In other words, our scientific knowledge of memory and how it works can help us to explain those aspects of memory that most people find of greatest interest. This book presents a thorough, accessible and appealing overview of the field, written with students in mind, by some of the world's leading researchers. It starts with a brief overview and explanation of the scientific approach to memory before going on to discuss the basic characteristics of the various memory systems and how they work. Summaries of short-term and working memory are followed by chapters on learning, the role of organization in memory, the ways in which our knowledge of the world is stored, retrieval, and on intentional and motivated forgetting. The latter half of the book involves the broader application of our basic understanding of memory, with chapters on autobiographical memory, amnesia, and on memory in childhood and aging. After chapters discussing eyewitness testimony and prospective memory, a final chapter addresses an issue of great importance to students - how to improve your memory. Each chapter of the book is written by one of the three authors, an approach which takes full advantage of their individual expertise, style and personality. This enhances students' enjoyment of the book, allowing them to share the authors' own fascination with human memory.
Everyday Memory edited by Svein Magnussen, Tore Helst
(Psychology Press) During the academic year 2003-2004, an
international group of cognitive psychologists was invited to the
Centre of Advanced Study (CAS) at the Norwegian Academy of Science
and Letters in Oslo. The editors of the present volume, whose
proposal "Towards a comprehensive model of human memory" had been
selected by CAS, organized the group. The groups may choose to
proceed in terms of parallel individual projects, collaborate on a
joint project, or a mixture of both. The memory group decided on the
latter solution, and the present volume is the result of the joint
effort.
It soon turned out, as it often does in the course of a
project in progress, that the focus of the project changed from a
"comprehensive model" to "everyday memory". Representing a broad
range of research portfolios, a joint interest of the members of the
group was the application of basic research to memory in everyday
contexts, and precisely because of the range of interests, we
decided that a volume written by the group might cover topics that
are not usually covered by books on human memory. The present
volume was broadly conceived by the editors and planned in detail
by the entire group in the initial workshops, during which the
various chapters were assigned to author teams. In the final
versions, a couple of the author teams recruited collaborators who
originally were not associated with CAS (Chapters 2 and 7). Choices
of themes, as well as chapter drafts, were discussed in joint
sessions. Thus, the present volume should be considered a shared
responsibility of the group.
The book is written for the general reader of cognitive
psychology and memory, a reader interested in how memory works in
everyday situations, familiar with the basics of current psychology
of cognition but not necessarily familiar with the technical details
of the research. Yet, the book does not abstain from going into
details when required or introducing new ideas and viewpoints. As a
textbook it might be useful for courses targeting everyday memory
and those discussing limits and applications of current memory
research.
Excerpt: During the four decades that have passed since the
"cognitive revolution" in psychology, research on human memory has
grown extensively, and memory is by now one of the most intensively
investigated areas in psychology, and perhaps in neuroscience in
general. Cognitive psychology, joining forces with theoretically
motivated patient studies of cognitive neuropsychology, and with the
brain imaging of cognitive processes by PET and fMRI technology, has
produced a wealth of knowledge about the organization of human
memory and the brain mechanisms involved in the encoding, storage
and retrieval processes. This research is covered by most textbooks
on memory and cognitive neuroscience, and will only be touched on
in passing in the present volume. The focus of the present volume is
on the more general aspects of memory that emanate from examinations
of memory in everyday contexts. Thirty years ago, Neisser (1976,
1978) recommended that researchers focus on the relation between the
theoretical and the practical questions in the cognitive
explorations of memory. In the wake of Neisser's critique, there
followed many efforts to examine issues of everyday memory
scientifically. Examples of this line of research are studies of
autobiographical memory, studies of the memory for past and
prospective actions and events, and studies of the memory of
witnesses to dramatic and mundane complex events. And gradually,
the study of memory in everyday contexts changed from studying the
quantity of memory performance — how much is remembered — to
studying the quality of the memory performance and the distortions
and errors contained in the memory reports. These themes will pop up
in several places in this volume.
In planning the book, it soon became clear that the editors
should not aim to cover all aspects of everyday memory, but rather
to cover some aspects of everyday memory that are not covered by
other texts, reflecting the research interests and expertise of this
particular team of authors. We have selected memory domains where
the members of the project group at the Centre of Advanced Study
(CAS), at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters 2003-2004,
have the research background required to match the questions of
everyday memory with the corresponding laboratory research. The
answers to a large-scale survey study, cited in Chapter 1, suggest a
folk psychology of everyday memory. The chapters reviewing and
discussing relevant everyday memory research demonstrate some
overlap but also some disagreements between scientists and lay
people. Where there is agreement, science may serve to explain why
common sense is right; where there are disagreements, research may
correct folk psychology.
The ideas we have and the ways we think about memory will
guide us, not only in scientific research, but also in the choices
and decisions we make in everyday life about the possibilities and
limitations of development and change, in ourselves and in others.
We know something about how memory researchers think about memory,
but we know little about the ideas and opinions that people have in
general. There are two ways of finding this out: We can ask people
what they believe about memory or we can examine how people talk
about memory. Chapter 1 does both, analysing first the memory
metaphors of daily language and of science, and second, discussing
the results of a large-scale public opinion poll carried out during
the planning stage of this book. In this study, a representative
sample of 1000 adult Norwegians were asked some of the questions
about memory that memory researchers are frequently asked privately
in social settings, and by the media. The three chapters closing the
volume follow up the themes introduced by the opening chapter.
Chapter 11 discusses meta-cognitive aspects of memory, the planning
and monitoring of learning, and memory challenges, controlled by our
own conceptions of cognitive capacities and limitations. Chapter 12
reports the results of a study of the relationship between beliefs
about the capacity of own memory performance and the actual memory
performance on relevant memory tasks, measured in the ageing
population, and Chapter 13 concludes the volume by introducing a new
memory metaphor, the concept of memory pathways. The metaphor is
based on the observation that episodic memories sometimes simply pop
out, at times against one's will and wishes, while at other times
they can be surprisingly hard, or even impossible, to get at, even
when one knows that these memories are not lost.
Four chapters on types of memory and five chapters on
individual and social factors in memory follow the opening chapter.
Starting with some typical problems of cognition and memory in
everyday life – reading assembly instructions supplied with
flat-packs of furniture from a major Nordic furniture distributor –
Chapter 2 discusses different ways of using visual information,
examines different cognitive systems for processing such
information, and looks specifically at visual aspects of memory and
thinking. A similar approach is taken in Chapter 3, which, following
a discussion of how people perceive and understand action events,
goes on to examine research on memory for actions, in particular
whether we remember actions in the same way that we remember
visually or verbally presented information. Chapter 4 deals with an
aspect of memory that has received little attention in cognitive
psychology, olfactory memory, and discusses the possible usefulness
of olfactory memory tests in forensic contexts, especially with
children. The eyewitness angle is followed up in Chapter 5, which
reviews research on the development of autobiographical memory and
presents a new model of memory development.
Everyday memory episodes may be recorded privately or under
social conditions, and retrieved privately or under social
conditions. Social context factors may thus affect memory encoding
as well as retrieval, and social factors may or may not be reflected
in the content, quality and accuracy of episodic memory. Chapter 6
on collaborative memory examines the theoretical and practical
implications of research on the episodic memory performances by
dyads and small groups, guided by the question of whether we
remember better or worse when tested with fellow eyewitnesses.
Chapter 7 discusses how memory illusions and false memories may
arise in everyday contexts under the influence of social factors.
It is a common observation that people like to reminisce
about their common past, but there is little systematic research on
the dynamics of this activity. Chapter 8 presents research based on
a new questionnaire constructed to measure proneness to
reminiscence. Chapter 9 takes a different approach to individual
differences in memory, discussing various conceptions of memory
skill and different types of memory expertise, with examples from
several areas that are usually not covered in treatments of
expertise, such as visual learning, orienteering and speech reading.
And what happens when memory fails? This is the topic of Chapter 10,
which discusses different types of compensatory mechanisms, used by
special populations of people who for various reasons have memory
problems.
The authors of this volume come from six different
countries; thus illustrations of everyday memories could be drawn
from and checked against different sociocultural and linguistic
backgrounds. The illustrations cited were chosen to be
representative of everyday situations we all are familiar with, but
there is, in many of the chapters, a distinct Scandinavian-European
leaning in the choice of illustrative examples – examples that might
be novel for the general reader. That should not be a disadvantage.
Memory As a Moral Decision: The Role of Ethics in Organizational
Culture by Steven P. Feldman (Transaction) The
study of management and organization is not known for its
remembrance of things past. In the structure of time‑that is,
pastpresent-future-the past is generally forgotten. Managing the
present and mastering the future receive the lion's share of
attention. Objects of the past, like yesterday's technology or the
stories of the old and retired, are relegated to the status of
museum pieces. In the study of management and organization, of a
piece with modern culture generally, the chain of memory has been
broken. Perhaps nowhere in management has this resulted in more
destructive loss than in the area of ethics. Without the thread of
continuity between the past, present, and future, moral ideals have
decayed; moral commitments have become vague and shallow.
Feldman addresses this loss in the field of management and
organization studies by developing a theory of moral tradition. The
theory of moral tradition is designed to investigate the historical
and cultural context of moral commitment. It is based on the
sociology of culture and the sociology of religion literature. It
focuses on the relations between moral culture, the individual, and
the past. He applies this framework to theories of organizational
culture to investigate their moral assumptions and moral
implications, that is, to explicate and understand the moral life
they imply. Theories of organizational culture, an increasingly
important part of management and organization studies, are
intimately related to ethics because they address the symbolic
resources men/women use to create a working environment of
cooperation, purpose, and, more or less, trust.
Theories of organizational culture, although developed over the past seventy years for different purposes by writers with different backgrounds and personalities, all turn their back on the past as a foundation for moral direction. From one side or another, they incorporate the central oppositions in modern culture‑for example, a hyper-secular rationalism, or irrational reactions against it; the pursuit of individual well‑being, a concern to overcome excessive individualism; and a distrust of or wish to rebuild internal moral and cognitive controls. In a series of seven critical essays, I analyze the main theories of organizational culture to investigate the moral quality of modern culture as it is found in. the field of management and organization studies. For each theory, Feldman identifies explicit and implicit moral assumptions, discuss their implications for society, organizations, and the individual, and provide a historical and cultural evaluation in terms of the theory of moral tradition.
The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers by Daniel L. Schacter (Houghton Mifflin) You've put your glasses down somewhere, and now you can't find them. That is the memory's sin of absent-mindedness. Schacter, chairman of the psychology department at Harvard University, cites that and six other sins of memory: transience, the weakening of memory over time; blocking, the inability to recall a familiar name or fact; misattribution, in which one assigns an item of memory to the wrong source; suggestibility, the implanting of memories through leading questions; bias, the unconscious reshaping of a memory under the influence of later events or opinions; and persistence, the repeated recall of disturbing information or events that one would prefer to forget. Do these aberrations serve a useful function? Yes, Schacter says, they protect against overload, helping the memory "to retain information that is most likely to be needed in the environment in which it operates." Editors of Scientific American
Daniel L. Schacter, chairman of Harvard University's Psychology Department and a leading expert on memory, has developed the Þrst framework that describes the basic memory miscues we all encounter. Just like the seven deadly sins, the seven memory sins appear routinely in everyday life. Although we may hate these difficulties, as Schacter notes, they're surprisingly vital to a keen mind.
Schacter, whose previous trade book, Searching for Memory, was called splendidly lucid (The New Yorker), offers vivid examples of the memory sins -- for example, the absent-mindedness that plagued both a national memory champion and a violinist who forgot that he had placed a priceless Stradivarius on top of his car before driving off. The author also delves into the recent research -- such as imaging that shows memories being formed in the brain -- that has led him to develop his framework. Together, the stories and the scientific findings examined in The Seven Sins of Memory provide a fascinating new look at our brains, and at what we more generally think of as our minds.
The Seven Sins of Memory is a groundbreaking work that will provide great reassurance to everyone, from twenty-somethings who find their lives are too busy, to baby boomers who mutter about early Alzheimer's, to senior citizens who worry about how much (or how little) they can recall.
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