Baddeley's (1990
Baddeley's ( , 1997) )
Human Memory: Theory and Practice provided an authoritative and readable text for a generation of yesterday's students. Now we have a new Baddeley text, this time jointly authored with Michael's Eysenck and Anderson, both distinguished researchers in the field. The new volume comes with all the pertinences expected of a modern textbook: The dedicated website, electronic links to relevant articles and those invaluable aids for the hard-pressed lecturer, ready-made Power Point slides and MCQs. As with the earlier text, the new book provides an up-todate and synoptic coverage of all the major areas of contemporary memory research, enlivened by a wealth of coloured illustrations and figures of a number and standard unusual in a UK-originated text. In addition, all three authors have an attractive and accessible style which I am sure will tempt the palates of even the most jaded of today's students. One attractive feature is their frequent use of illuminating anecdotes on the qualities and frailties of memory, sometimes autobiographical. This supports the old adage that psychologists invariably study the things they are bad at! What will the student (or tutor) studying pure and applied memory in the noughties and beyond find in this book which was not available to those in the nineties? After the semi-obligatory 'what is memory?' chapter, the new book opens with a review of short-term memory and STM's smarter younger brother, working memory. Here the big news is yet another sub-system of working memory, the episodic buffer, which interacts with all the other sub-systems of working memory: A sort of cognitive glue that holds the system together. The other news is the role that working memory appears to play in the development of reading and maths: Children with low working memory scores tend to be inattentive in class and are over-represented among those with special educational needs. As Baddeley is the first to emphasise (the three contributors are named authors on different chapters), the problem is to pin down cause and effect. The working memory chapter also brings out another major theme which pervades this new book: The hunt to link psychological concepts to particular locations or sub-systems within the brain: The new phrenology. The last decade has seen a rapid increase in the availability of brain-imaging technology to memory researchers, though to judge from these accounts, the findings which emerge generally hint at fresh complexities to age-old controversies.
The standard chapter on learning is enlivened by recent work linking the functionalist approach of the 1940s and 1950s, long thought of as a theoretical blind alley, to performance on multiple-choice tests and vocabulary learning. The chapters, too, on organisation and memory and semantic memory cover some well-trodden ground, but again with the novel infusion of functional MRI studies. The section on autobiographical memory has a much fresher feel with a useful discussion of both normal and abnormal (psychogenic amnesia) autobiographical memory, though we have to wait for Anderson's chapter on forgetting to find a fascinating account of a woman described by Parker, Cahill and McGaugh (2006) who appears to retain a clear and instant memory for every day of her adult life. One downside of her remarkable memory is that every argument or personal slight stays fresh in her mind: She cannot forgive and forget. This emphasis upon the benign aspects of memory loss is on show in the chapter devoted to forgetting, with a special focus on recent work on retrieval-induced forgetting: Efforts at retrieving one target item in memory lead to other associated items becoming functionally less accessible. There is also a useful chapter devoted to retrieval processes, which reflects the modern emphasis upon contextual cueing and source monitoring as essential to effective and accurate remembering.
Anderson is also responsible for what, for me, is the stand-out chapter of this text: The chapter on motivated forgetting. It tackles the thorny issue of recovered and false memories, using a judicious mix of experimental cognitive research and studies with patients. It challenges the sceptics who argue APPLIED COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY