Verbal Learning and Memory
| Autor: | L Postman |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 1975 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Annual Review of Psychology. 26:291-335 |
| ISSN: | 1545-2085 0066-4308 |
| Popis: | The last review of memory and verbal learning by Tulving & Madigan (180) painted a deeply pessimistic picture of the theoretical and experimental progress during the nearly 100 years of the post-Ebbinghaus era. As these critics saw it, tireless investigators compiled endless measurements of performance in labora tory tasks which bear little or no relation to the complexities and subtleties of human memory. For the most part, the experiments demonstrated and quantified what Aristotle expounded in the remote days of antiquity-that memory is likely to reflect the contiguity and similarity of past events. While that proposition may have some empirical validity, it offers no purchase on the dynamics of remem bering. Yet the students of learning and memory were excruciatingly slow to break out of the constraints imposed by the pretheoretical schema of mechanical chaining of mental representations. A discouraging manifestation of the futility of it all was the fact that laboratory procedures, such as serial and paired-associate learning, which obviously can be no more than a means to an end, became an object of experimental and theoretical analysis, i.e. an end by themselves. Thus it came about that in the middle of the twentieth century, man still thought "about his own memory processes in terms readily translatable into ancient Greek" (180, p. 437). It is only fair to add that the picture painted by Tulving and Madigan was not one of unrelieved gloom. They saw many promising leads as attention shifted away from the traditional problems of association to questions about the processing, storage, and retrieval of the multiplex information to which man is exposed both inside and outside the laboratory. This chapter is being written about 5 years after the last review, but the lines of historical development appear quite different to the present writer, and not only |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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