Memory

Alan Baddeley, Michael W. Eysenck, Michael C. Anderson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429831294
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The third edition of Memory provides students with the most comprehensive introduction to the study of human memory and its applications in the field. Written by three leading experts, this bestselling textbook delivers an authoritative and accessible overview of key topic areas.

Each chapter combines breadth of content coverage with a wealth of relevant practical examples, whilst the engaging writing style invites the reader to share the authors' fascination with the exploration of memory through their individual areas of expertise. Across the text, the scientific theory is connected to a range of real-world questions and everyday human experiences. As a result, this edition of Memory is an essential resource for those interested in this important field and embarking on their studies in the subject.

Key features of this edition:

• it is fully revised and updated to address the latest research, theories, and findings;
• chapters on learning, organization, and autobiographical memory form a more integrated section on long-term memory and provide relevant links to neuroscience research;
• it has new material addressing current research into visual short-term and working memory, and links to research on visual attention;
• it includes content on the state-of-play on working memory training;
• the chapter on "memory across the lifespan" strengthens the applied emphasis, including the effects of malnutrition in developing nations on cognition and memory.

The third edition is supported by a Companion Website providing a range of core resources for students and lecturers.

CHAPTER 1

WHAT IS MEMORY?

Alan Baddeley

Memory is something we complain about. Why? Why are we quite happy to claim “I have a terrible memory!” but not to assert that “I am amazingly stupid”? Of course, we do forget; we do sometimes forget appointments and fail to recognize people we have met in the past, and rather more frequently we forget their names. We do not, however, often forget important events; if the bridegroom failed to turn up for his wedding he would not be believed if he claimed to have forgotten. Consequently, failing to recognize an old acquaintance suggests that the person was perhaps not of great importance to us. The obvious excuse is to blame one’s terrible memory.

In the chapters that follow, we will try to convince you that your memory is in fact remarkably good, although fallible. We agree with Schacter (2001) who, having described what he refers to as the seven sins of memory, accepts that the sins are in fact the necessary consequences of the virtues that make our memories so rich and flexible. Our memories might be less reliable than those of the average computer but they are just as capacious, much more flexible, and a good deal more user friendly. We forget more than computers, but we are likely to retain what is important and useful and forget unimportant details. We are good at rapidly encoding the context in which an event happens, what happened, when and where, so as to access when appropriate. We are good at remembering patterns of repeating events, a skill that helps us understand the world using this understanding to strip away redundant information and using the core meaning for future planning. Finally, we are very good at coping with forgetting by using knowledge to reconstruct partial memories. For these reasons, computer scientists are beginning to be interested in learning from human memory and importantly forgetting, with a view to potentially building some of these characteristics into computer memory (Mezaris, Niederee, & Logie, in press). Hence, despite their limitations our fallible memories play an absolutely crucial part in our ability to function independently in our complex world. Perhaps the most dramatic evidence for the usefulness of human memory comes from the plight of patients who have lost these capacities as in the case of Clive Wearing who has the misfortune to have had much of his memory capacity destroyed by disease (Wilson, Baddeley, & Kapur, 1995).

Why do we need memory?

Clive is an extremely talented musician, an expert on early music who was master of a major London choir. He himself sang and was asked to perform before the Pope during a papal visit to London. In 1985, he had the misfortune to suffer a brain infection from the herpes simplex virus, a virus that exists in a large proportion of the population, typically leading to nothing worse than cold sores but very occasionally breaking through the blood–brain barrier to cause encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain that can prove fatal. In recent years, treatment has improved, with the result that patients are more likely to survive, although often having suffered from extensive brain damage, typically in areas responsible for memory.

When he eventually recovered consciousness, Clive was densely amnesic and appeared to be unable to store information for periods longer than seconds. His interpretation of his plight was to assume that he had just recovered consciousness, something that he would announce to any visitor, and something that he repeatedly recorded in a notebook, each time crossing out the previous line and writing “I have now recovered consciousness” or “consciousness has now finally been recovered,” an activity that continued for many, many years.

Clive knew who he was and could talk about the broad outlines of his early life, although the detail was very sparse. He knew he had spent four years at Cambridge University, but could not recognize a photograph of his college. He could remember, although somewhat vaguely, important events in his life such as directing and conducting the first modern performance of Handel’s Messiah using original instruments in an appropriate period setting, and could talk intelligently about the historical development of the role of the musical conductor. However, even this selected knowledge was sketchy; he had written a book on the early composer Lassus, but could not recall any of the content. Asked who had written Romeo and Juliet, Clive did not know. He had remarried, but could not remember this. However, he did greet his new wife with enormous enthusiasm every time she appeared, even though she might only have been out of the room for a few minutes; every time declaring that he had just recovered consciousness.

Clive was totally incapacitated by his amnesia. He could not read a book or follow a television program because he immediately forgot what had gone before. If he left his hospital room, he was immediately lost. He was locked into a permanent present, something he described as “hell on earth.” “It’s like being dead—all the bloody time!”

However, there was one aspect of Clive’s memory that appeared to be unimpaired, that part concerned with music. When his choir visited him, he found that he could conduct them just as before. He was able to read the score of a song and accompany himself on the keyboard while singing it. For a brief moment he appeared to return to his old self, only to feel wretched when he stopped playing. Over 20 years later, Clive is still just as densely amnesic but now appears to have come to terms with his terrible affliction and is calmer and less distressed.

One memory or many?

Although Clive’s case makes the point that memory is crucial for daily life, it does not tell us much about the nature of memory. Clive was unfortunate in having damage to a range of brain areas, with the result that he has problems that extend beyond his amnesia. Furthermore, the fact that Clive’s musical memory and skills are unimpaired suggests that memory is not a single simple system. Other studies have shown that densely amnesic patients can repeat back a telephone number, suggesting preserved immediate memory, and that they can learn motor skills at a normal rate. As we will see later, amnesic patients are capable of a number of types of learning, demonstrating this by improved performance, even though they do not remember the learning experience and typically deny having encountered the situation before. The evidence suggests, therefore, that rather than having a single global memory system, the picture is more complex. The first few chapters of this book will try to unpack some of this complexity, providing a basis for later chapters that are concerned with the way in which these systems influence our lives, how memory changes as we move through childhood to adulthood and old age, and what happens when our memory systems break down.

In giving our account of memory, we are of course presenting a range of psychological theories. Theories develop and change, and different people will hold different theories to explain the same data. As a glance at any current memory journal will indicate, this is certainly the case for the study of memory. Fortunately, there is a great deal of general agreement between different groups studying the psychology of memory, even though they tend to use somewhat different terminology. At this point, it might be useful to say a little bit about the concept of theory that underpins our own approach.

Theories, maps, and models

What should a psychological theory look like? In the 1950s, many people thought they should look like theories from physics. Clark Hull studied the learning behavior of white rats and attempted to use his results to build a rather grand general theory of learning in which the learning behavior of both rats and people was predicted using a series of postulates and equations that were explicitly modeled on the example set by Isaac Newton (Hull, 1943).

By contrast, Hull’s great rival, Edward Tolman (1948), thought of rats as forming “cognitive maps,” internal representations of their environment that were acquired as a result of active exploration. The controversy rumbled on from the 1930s to the 1950s, and then was abandoned quite suddenly. Both sides found that they had to assume some kind of representation that went beyond the simple association between stimuli impinging on the rat and its learned behavior, but neither seemed to have a solution to the problem of how these could be investigated.

The broad view of theory that we shall take is that theories are essentially like maps. They summarize our knowledge in a simple and structured way that helps us to understand what is known. A good theory will help us to ask new questions and that in turn will help us find out more about the topic we are mapping. The nature of the theory will depend on the questions we want to answer, just as in the case of maps of a city. The map that will help you travel by underground around London or New York looks very different from the sort of map that you would need if you wanted to walk, with neither being a direct representation of what you would see if you stood at a given location. That does not of course mean that they are bad maps, quite the opposite, because each map is designed to serve a different purpose.

In the case of psychological theories, different theories will operate at different levels of explanation and focus on different issues. An argument between a shopkeeper and customer, for example, would be explained in very different ways by a sociologist, who might emphasize the economic and social pressures, a social psychologist interested in interpersonal relationships, a cognitive psychologist interested in language, and a physiological psychologist who might be interested in the emotional responses of the two disputants and how these are reflected in the brain. All of these explanations are relevant and in principle should be relatable to each other, but none is the single “correct” interpretation.

This is a view that contrasts with what is sometimes called reductionism. This assumes that the aim of science is to reduce each explanation to the level below: Social psychology to cognitive psychology, which in turn should be explained physiologically, with the physiology then being interpreted biochemically and ultimately in terms of physics. Although it is clearly valuable to be able to explain phenomena at different but related levels, this is ultimately no more sensible than for a physicist to demand that we should attempt to design bridges on the basis of subatomic particle physics, rather than Newtonian mechanics.

Key term

Reductionism: The view that all scientific explanations should aim to be based on a lower level of analysis: Psychology in terms of physiology, physiology in terms of chemistry, and chemistry in terms of physics.

The aim of the present book is to outline what we know of the psychology of memory. We believe that an account at the psychological level will prove valuable in throwing light on accounts of human behavior at the interpersonal and social level, and will play an important role in our capacity to understand the neurobiological factors that underpin the various types of memory. We suggest that the psychology of memory is sufficiently understood to...