Abstract
Usefully, this book includes both a preface (by the author) and a foreword (by Raymond Nickerson of the rather brilliant long-term memory for a common object fame (Nickerson, Adams, & Beranek, 1979) and the author’s colleague at the same institution). The preface to this book ends with the author’s wish-list of who might benefit from this book and the foreword lists approvingly those “venerated psychological concepts” which the author critiques. So how well does the volume itself match up to these plugs?
The foreword acknowledges that this is a densely written book (which is true) and not an easy read, which might rule it out for the general educated audience to which it might appeal (as the author hopefully suggests in his own preface). The foreword is also mildly vital of the lack of coverage given to retrieval inhibition. Although it might indeed be interesting to read Chechile’s analysis of this subject, it is hardly vital in my view. The more traditionally approving noises made within the foreword concern the author’s independence of mind, iconoclasticism and his willingness to question venerated psychological concepts. On the charge of iconoclasticism, I’m afraid this reviewer, at least, was disappointed. The venerated psychological concepts at which Chechile tilts have more than a whiff of the windmill about them. These include the logic of double dissociation (pp. 192-196) which was the subject of a special issue of Cortex—including much critical analysis—way back in 2003 (Dunn & Kirsner, 2003), so it is perhaps not surprising that the author cites no researcher endorsing this logic without reservation any date later than 2001. Even among the earlier advocates cited here there was much public acceptance that the logic was not water-tight (e.g., Shallice, 1988). Other supposedly “venerated” concepts have inspired such opposition that whole principles have espoused the complete opposite (e.g., Surprenant and Neath’s (2009) process-impurity principle is the polar opposite of the process-purity hypothesis critiqued here) or, at the very least, the original data and interpretations have been subject to similar criticism in the past—often these critiques are of long-standing (e.g., “the Yerkes-Dodson law repealed”; Brown, 1965). On the plus side, if it can be called that, a quasi-random selection of introductory textbooks from my own shelves (all dating from at least 2004) revealed that of five introductory cognitive psychology textbooks, although none mentioned the Yerkes-Dodson law, no fewer than three discussed the logic of double dissociation but only one of those pointed to problems with that logic. (One of the two general introductory texts immediately to hand showed the same flaws, but neither of the two specialist memory texts I consulted did so). As the preface specifically suggests that advanced undergraduate classes might benefit from this book this correction must be viewed as a success, although I cannot help but feel that it is a shame that it should be required in the first place.
From the perspective of an advanced undergraduate class then, what value does this book add? The students need to have no fear of equations as there are rather more in here than is usual in memory texts. Received wisdom has it that each equation in any text halves the potential readership and although this might be (perhaps deliberately) overstating things, it is likely to cut the number of students who would voluntarily turn to this book as their first point of reference (to be fair, a strong mathematical underpinning is only to be expected from an author with a distinguished record of contributions to mathematical psychology). The students should also be keen on tree diagrams as, again, these are abundant within this text. For such students there is much to appreciate here.
We start—unusually for a text on human memory—with basic learning theory, including habituation, operant and Pavlovian conditioning and move (rather quickly) through biology to cognitive models and the information-processing framework. A chapter on memory myths is a nice touch and is definitely one for undergraduate tutorials but the choice of technological metaphors (“the myth of videotape memory”) needs updating for 21st-century students who are unlikely, these days, ever to have encountered an actual videotape. Part 2 of the book covers the measurement of memory, with an emphasis on (and critique of) signal detection theory and multinomial processing tree (MPT) models. The author finds MPT models far more palatable than signal detection when applied to memory, not least because the data informing such models are categorical and hence the models side-step the measurement issues covered earlier in this section. These sections strike me as being more appropriate to a beginning postgraduate student, and one with reasonable mathematical aptitude, rather than undergraduate level study. Statements such as “These values are based on a standard Bayesian analysis of the pooled frequencies computed by means of a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling system” (p. 223) are not ones I would necessarily expect an undergraduate to easily follow.
Where this book stands out in comparison with other books on memory is in its commitment to models and to theory-based research. This is not, of course, to deny that many other memory texts do not also cover theory or may, indeed, be theory driven, but the formal (in this case, largely mathematical) models considered reflect a rich research tradition which is well represented in journals but often overlooked in textbooks, arguably because of its mathematical nature. Perhaps inevitably, this means that some other areas (not just retrieval inhibition) are overlooked. Oddly, Nickerson et al.’s (1979) study on long-term memory for a common object—otherwise a staple in memory texts—does not appear in the reference section and more generally memory strategies beyond the obvious (generation, elaboration, organisation, and mnemonics) are covered only superficially. It is perhaps unfair to criticise this volume in particular for not spending more time on considering the functionality of memory in the modern world, including meta-memory and the deliberate distribution of memory across internal representations and external devices. In what seems to have been the introduction of the term “working memory” to cognitive psychology in 1960, Miller, Galanter, and Pribram (1960) noted that the “special place” they denoted as working memory could be in the frontal lobes (quite prescient there!) or on a piece of paper—in other words, “in working memory” was defined entirely functionally. This openness to different substrates to serve identical cognitive aims seems to have gradually disappeared in subsequent years such that it is now not unusual (although not in this volume) to see the phonological loop trotted out as “the sort of memory which is used to remember telephone numbers”—a function nowadays generally served by smartphones for anyone under the age of 40 years. For all its strengths, and there are many, it would have been nice to have seen this volume engage with such issues of remembering in the modern world if only to combat the nagging feeling upon reading it that much of the coverage here is just a little bit old-fashioned in its preoccupations.