Book review: Memory in the real world. 2nd Edition. Gillian Cohen. Psychology Press, Hove, 1996. No. of pages: 353. ISBN 0-86377-728-7. Price £29.95 (Hard cover).
✍ Scribed by Val Wynn
- Book ID
- 101278421
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1998
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 61 KB
- Volume
- 12
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0888-4080
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Scribner's work re¯ected the combination of her varied interests, which extended outside the normal range of cognitive psychologists.
This book is organized into ®ve separate sections of articles written at dierent times in Scribner's life. The editors suggest that the sections have dierent conceptual emphases. A strength of Scribner's work is what appears to be the seamless interweaving of the themes discussed above throughout all her research. Thus, the dierences among the ®ve sections are more apparent than real.
Part 1, `Psychology as a Social Practice', contains seven papers written relatively early in Scribner's professional life. they cover a range of topics: establishment of a mental health program, the ®eld of community psychology, relation between social class and mental illness, the need for research to be grounded in a functional understanding of everyday experiences, and a critique of Arthur Jensen's research. Scribner was one of the ®rst to discuss problems in conducting research on social class and ethnic group dierences. Her insights are still valuable today as researchers attempt to develop methods of inquiry relevant for people with dierent life experiences.
Part 2, `Thinking and cultural systems', contains what may be the most commonly cited of Scribner's ideas. It is in these papers that she presents some of her research on the logical reasoning processes used by the Kpelle people as a means of illustrating the need for psychological research to incorporate sociocultural factors. A particularly interesting paper is one on the uses and misuses of intelligence tests. Scribner compares a medical and educational approach to assessment to illustrate how intelligence tests may be both documenting lower competence in certain groups of children as well as causing the lower competence.
Part 3 is entitled `Literacy: Mind and Society'. The lead paper in this section considers the relation between written language and cognition. This well-conceptualized paper, which was written almost 30 years ago, is consistent with current theorizing on literacy development. The remaining papers address the relation between literacy and society by considering the educational system in China, the nature and use of literacy among the Vai people (a society where most of the population has completed little formal schooling), and the use of literacy in a work environment.
Part 4 is entitled `Cognitive development: Sociohistorical perspective'. These conceptual papers consider the importance of using a sociohistorical lens to study cognition.
In Part 5, `Thinking at Work', Scribner discusses her research at the Greenspring Dairy in Baltimore, Maryland. According to Scribner practical thinking is characterized by both adaptive ¯exibility and by economical modes of solution. Scribner's work is a nice example of how the algorhythms taught in school may be replaced with heuristics born of necessity. In these studies she once again has successfully combined ethnographic approaches with more standard experimental ones.