Science of memory: Concepts. Henry L. Roediger III, Yadin Dudai, and Susan M. Fitzpatrick (Eds.). Oxford University Press, New York, 2007. No. of pages 464. ISBN 978-0-19-531044-3. (Paperback)

✍ Scribed by Jean-Francois Delvenne

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2009
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 36 KB
• Volume: 23
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0888-4080
• DOI: 10.1002/acp.1533

✦ Synopsis

In September 2005, leading memory scientists met in Palisades, New York, to analyze and discuss a series of fundamental concepts that underlie different research traditions representing the field of learning and memory. Among those approaches, there are neurobiology, behavioural and computational neurosciences, animal learning and cognition, human cognitive psychology, to mention only the most prominent ones. The aim of the conference was to initiate a new science of memory by bringing these various research traditions together in order to reorient the field and lead to a more unified understanding of the topic. The result of this exciting and ambitious project is the publication of this comprehensible edited volume named Science of Memory: Concepts, edited by Roediger, Dudai and Fitzpatrick. The text provides what it set out to achieve: it clearly elucidates and (when feasible) integrates the most important concepts in memory from various perspectives.

The book is divided into 16 main sections, one for each core concept that is crucial to our understanding of memory such as plasticity, encoding, retrieval, etc. For each concept, 2-4 short position papers describe how the concept is viewed and understood in the author's particular experimental tradition. At the end of each section, a chapter summarizes the various viewpoints offered on the section's concept and elucidates key points of agreement and disagreement. The aim of those integrative comments, but also of the book itself, is in no way to reach a consensus among researchers for a particular concept. Rather, they are to be seen as a clarification of the differences and possible areas of overlap among the individual points of view. The book reveals that although there is general agreement among scientists from different research traditions and levels of analysis for some concepts, there remains disagreement and much controversy for others.

The book begins with an introductory chapter by Dudai, Roediger and Tulving on Memory concepts that exposes the reasons for choosing those 16 particular core concepts. The two metaconcepts of Memory and Learning are then introduced in Sections 1 and 2, respectively. It makes rapidly clear that even the term Memory (Section 1) itself can be defined in different ways referring to different underlying constructs. For instance, neuropsychological views define memory as a process that occurs only at the time of retrieval whereas neuroscience-oriented views consider it as internal representations in the brain. A common definition of the concept of Learning (Section 2) encounters even more disagreement among leading researchers from different perspectives and the question of whether it is fruitful to define learning at all is debated. Concepts referring to memory formation are discussed in the next 5 sections of the book. The question of how information is coded and represented in the brain is considered in Section 3. A consensus among researchers appears to emerge on the fact that myriads of ongoing neuronal changes related to mental experiences and their memory representations occur in the brain all the time. However, as Tsodyks points out in his integrative comments, we are light years away from having a 'translation table' between neuronal and cognitive processes and this also invariably confronts us with the most fundamental issues in human science, such as the brain-mind relationship. Related to that is the concept of Plasticity (Section 4). Plasticity is a broad concept used at all levels of analysis in neuroscience, from molecules through networks to behaviour, in order to describe changes in systems.

Context (Section 5) is another broad concept used at many different levels of analysis. Smith (p. 111) perhaps summarizes best the difficulty of having a single definition of context: 'How context as a general concept should be defined is not clear because there are so many different types of context, including (. . .) perceptual context, mood, story plots, tasks, drug states and so on'. There seems to be more of an agreement on the concept of Encoding (Section 6) which is defined as 'the set