Perspectives on human memory and cognitive aging: essays in honour of Fergus Craik. M. Naveh-Benjamin, M. Moscovitch, & H. Roediger III (Eds.). Psychology Press, New York, NY, 2001. No. of pages 422. ISBN 1-84169-040-6. Price £46.95 (hardback)

✍ Scribed by Allison Wright

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2003
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 34 KB
• Volume: 17
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0888-4080
• DOI: 10.1002/acp.943

✦ Synopsis

The inspiration for this book arose during a conference that was held at the University of Toronto to commemorate the retirement of Fergus Craik, one of the most renowned and prolific researchers in the fields of human memory and cognitive aging. It represents a collection of 31 different essays from several highly esteemed authors and is indeed a tribute to Craik's vast legacy.

The overall aims of this book are to 'reflect on the past and to evaluate the current status of the various issues that have been of interest to Craik throughout his career' and to 'discuss future directions of concepts and ideas related to human memory and cognitive aging'. It delivers on all these counts. In addition to offering comprehensive discussions about Craik's theories and insights into the academic climate in which these theories were received, it examines many of the recent empirical studies that support, extend and challenge Craik's work, and includes various considerations about furthering research in memory and cognitive aging. Several of the contributors have also woven the occasional personal reflection about Craik into their discourse, which lends the volume a very welcome human quality.

Perspectives on Human Memory and Cognitive Aging is divided into four sections. The first of these is composed of seven chapters that draw on both empirical and theoretical evidence to examine the strengths and weaknesses of Craik and Lockhart's influential (1972) 'levels of processing' framework. For instance, Tulving (Chapter 2) eloquently questions Craik's proposal that memory traces are formed as a by-product of perception, rather than as the result of a distinct, separate 'encoding' process. Similarly, Roediger and Gallo (Chapter 3) assert that by simply envisioning processing in terms of concrete 'levels' or 'depths' one cannot adequately explain the basic effect of orienting tasks on recall and recognition. They instead exhort the academic community to think of encoding as a 'spreading' or 'elaborative' phenomenon. Velichkovsky (Chapter 4), on the other hand, uses evidence from a wide range of empirical sources to address some of the common criticisms about the levels of processing theory. Likewise, Gardiner et al. (Chapter 5) respond to arguments which suggest that the presence of levels-of-processing effects is not a valid measure for distinguishing between incidental/implicit and intentional/explicit memory retrieval. Finally, in Chapter 6, Levy draws on research about text-reading and re-reading, to remind the reader that inasmuch as processing affects memory, so too can memory affect processing.

As Daneman (Chapter 13) maintains in her commentary, the ten papers presented in the second section of this book, which deals with working memory and attention, are not clearly linked together by a single, over-arching theme of discussion. This is hardly a fault, however, as the wide variety of subjects covered provides the reader with a broad appreciation of the research conducted in the area. Baddeley (Chapter 9) begins this section by outlining the relationships between working memory and long-term memory, while Shallice (Chapter 10) looks at some of the processes involved in episodic memory retrieval and discusses where these occur in the brain. In Chapters 11 (McDowd) and 12 (Park and Hedden), the effects of aging on selective attention and working memory are considered. Chapters 14 and 16 (written by Moscovitch et al., and Anderson, respectively) move on to discuss the role of attention in encoding and retrieval. Naveh-Benjamin (Chapter 15) complements this work, by considering some of the possible mechanisms responsible for the detrimental effects of divided attention at encoding.

Section three is composed of eight papers which present a general overview of current research into the global and specific changes that underlie memory and cognitive deficits in old age, and discusses this research in light of Craik's work on cognitive aging. Specifically, Light (Chapter 25)