This book describes the first comprehensive experimental research program on an individual who exhibits exceptional memory. Rajan Mahadevan, the subject of these investigations, won a place in the Guinness Book of Records for reciting pi to 31,811 decimal places, can learn matrices up to size 20 X 20, and can produce memory spans above 60 for digits. Utilizing the methodology and theories of modern cognitive psychology, the authors systematically investigated Rajan's memory skills. A wide range of experiments and tests were conducted with Rajan and four control subjects. These include memory span tests for digits and letters, memory for various kinds of non-numeric information, tests of working memory, learning and retention of numeric matrices, memory and visual searches of the digits of pi, and lexical decision tasks with the digits of pi. The authors describe how they came to understand the way Rajan stored and now retrieves the decimal digits of pi, how he learns and retrieves matrices, and how he encodes and retrieves digits in a memory span task. Although his strategy for memorizing and retrieving digits is unique in the literature on people with extraordinary memory, the authors show how their investigations of Rajan contribute to our understanding of memory.

The first comprehensive theoretical formulation of the way people use information they receive about their social environments to make judgments and behavioral decisions, this volume focuses on the cognitive processes that underlie the use of social information. These include initial interpretation, the representations used to make inferences, and the transformation of these subjective inferences into overt judgment and behavior. In addition, it specifies the role of affect and emotion in information processing, and the role of self-knowledge at different stages of processing. The theoretical model presented here is the first to provide a conceptual integration of existing theory and research in all phases of social information processing. It not only accounts for the major portion of existing research findings, but permits several hypotheses to be generated concerning phenomena that have not yet been empirically investigated. Although focused here on the processing of information about people and events, the formulation proposed has implications for other domains such as personnel appraisal, political decision making, and consumer behavior.

Originally published in 1973, this book contains the 1971 William James Lectures at Harvard, the first by that name to be given by a British psychologist. In addition, there are reprints of four shorter lectures which had not been easily available before. Together the resulting collection gave a broad picture of a number of advances in human psychology in the previous ten years. Memory, attention, language, and the processes of decision are discussed, and typical recent ideas and experiments described. Each topic is presented, however, with continual reference to the reasons why the research was done, its implications for philosophy and for scientific method, and its connection with an attitude to politics and life as a whole. The author not only describes little known facts about the way people take decisions or remember, but also argues that we are living through a change in our attitudes to human nature: and that proper concern for human values, or understanding of people with minds different from our own, must demand a more scientific and less intuitive analysis of man. Experiments on human beings still strike many of us as cold-blooded and inhuman; this book tries to explain why some scientists devote themselves to this approach. It makes the connection between measurements of reaction time or of ability to see a written word in a brief flash, and our political and personal beliefs. Donald E. Broadbent is well recognised as a major influence on cognitive psychology today. This reissue is an opportunity to see his exceptional writing in print again and should be read with equal interest by psychologists as well as laymen who would like to know about some of the more practical aspects of psychological enquiry of the time.

This highly readable foundational text for undergraduates provides an overview of the major theories and research on human memory. Grounded in the premise that all psychological processes depend on memory, and that memory is shaped by how people use it, the authors look at the brain-based memory process and discuss the major theories that have been developed to explain how memory functions.

The book examines memory in everyday life-issues such as memorizing facts, when to perform tasks, and remembering life's events-and addresses such intriguing and controversial topics as repressed and recovered memories, using memory in legal testimony, cases of amnesia, and cases of super-memory. It also describes the effects of remembering traumatic events and explores the myths and realities surrounding memory loss. This text, presented in a manner that is scientifically sound yet entertaining, will serve as a valuable, concise introduction for undergraduate students.

Key Features: Provides a concise, easy-to-read, yet scientifically based survey of theory and current research on memory for undergraduate students Based on the concept that memory is foundational to all psychological processes and human experience Includes the most up-to-date research on memory including findings from neuroscience Covers controversial topics including repressed and recovered memories, memory in legal testimony, amnesia, and cases of super-memory

Tip-of-the-Tongue experiences are one of those illusive oddities of human cognition. Like slips of the tongue, deeacute;jaagrave; vu, and visual illusions, TOTs dazzle us with their subjective strength, yet, at the same time, puzzle us with our frustrating inability to retrieve the desired word. This book discusses what little is known about TOTs and speculates about much of the rest of the riddle. Cognitive psychologists know a lot about processes but generally avoid issues of conscious experience and phenomenology. Because the larger goal of this book is to relate the TOT experience to the study of human phenomenology, it goes beyond the conventional cognitive psychology question, "What causes tip-of-the-tongue experiences?" to ask, "Why do we experience TOTs at all?"

In this landmark volume from 1976, Robert Crowder presents an organized review of the concepts that guide the study of learning and memory.

The basic organization of the book is theoretical, rather than historical or methodological, and there are four broad sections. The first is on coding in memory, and the relations between memory and vision, audition and speech. The second section focuses on short-term memory. The third is loosely organized around the topic of learning. The final section includes chapters that focus on the process of retrieval, with special attention to recognition and to serial organization.

Crowder presumes no prior knowledge of the subject matter on the part of the reader; technical terms are kept to a minimum, and he makes every effort to introduce them carefully when they first occur. It is suitable for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses.

In this landmark volume from 1976, Robert Crowder presents an organized review of the concepts that guide the study of learning and memory.

The basic organization of the book is theoretical, rather than historical or methodological, and there are four broad sections. The first is on coding in memory, and the relations between memory and vision, audition and speech. The second section focuses on short-term memory. The third is loosely organized around the topic of learning. The final section includes chapters that focus on the process of retrieval, with special attention to recognition and to serial organization.

Crowder presumes no prior knowledge of the subject matter on the part of the reader; technical terms are kept to a minimum, and he makes every effort to introduce them carefully when they first occur. It is suitable for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses.

There is a growing acknowledgement of the importance of integrating the study of reasoning with other areas of cognitive psychology. The purpose of this volume is to examine the extent to which we can further our understanding of reasoning by integrating findings, theories and paradigms in the field of memory. Reasoning as Memory consists of nine chapters that make explicit links between basic memory process, and reasoning and decision-making. The contributors address a number of key topics including: the relationship between semantic memory and reasoning the role of expert memory in reasoning recognition memory and induction working memory and reasoning metamemory in reasoning. In addition, the chapters provide broad coverage of the field of thinking, and invite the intriguing question of how much there is left to explain in the field of reasoning when one has extracted the variance due to memory. This book will be of great interest to advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers interested in reasoning or decision making, and to researchers interested in the role played in cognition by a variety of memory processes.

Human reasoning is marked by an ability to remember one's personal past and to imagine one's future. Together these capacities rely on the notion of a temporally extended self or the self in time. Recent evidence suggests that it is during the preschool period that children first construct this form of self. By about four years of age, children can remember events from their pasts and reconstruct a personal narrative integrating these events. They know that past events in which they participated affect present circumstances. They can also imagine the future and make decisions designed to bring about desirable future events even in the face of competing immediate gratification. This book brings together the leading researchers on these issues and for the first time in literature, illustrates how a unified approach based on the idea of a temporally extended self can integrate these topics.

Control processes are those mental functions that allow us to initiate, monitor, and prioritize mental activities. They are crucial to normal mental functioning. A better understanding of the nature of control processes and their deficits is important for clinical work and for an adequate theory of consciousness. Previously, control processes have been examined within the frameworks of two parallel but independent paradigms: those of cognitive psychology and of neuropsychology. Cognitive psychologists have stressed the theoretical and empirical nature of normal unimpaired control processes; neuropsychologists have focused on the relationships between damage to specific functional areas of the brain and deficits in specific control processes. Both have contributed extensively to our understanding of control processes. However, they have tended to operate independently, with little if any cross-talk between disciplines, despite the potential benefits such dialogue is likely to generate. This book represents the first attempt to synthesize cognitive and neuropsychological perspectives on control processes. It contains state-of-the-art reports on various aspects of control processes by experts from both disciplines.

This volume provides an overview of a relatively neglected branch of connectionism known as localist connectionism. The singling out of localist connectionism is motivated by the fact that some critical modeling strategies have been more readily applied in the development and testing of localist as opposed to distributed connectionist models (models using distributed hidden-unit representations and trained with a particular learning algorithm, typically back-propagation). One major theme emerging from this book is that localist connectionism currently provides an interesting means of evolving from verbal-boxological models of human cognition to computer-implemented algorithmic models. The other central messages conveyed are that the highly delicate issue of model testing, evaluation, and selection must be taken seriously, and that model-builders of the localist connectionist family have already shown exemplary steps in this direction.

The rapid growth in the numbers of older people worldwide has led to an equally rapid growth in research on the changes across age in cognitive function, including the processes of moment to moment cognition known as working memory. This book brings together international research leaders who address major questions about how age affects working memory:

• Why is working memory function much better preserved in some people than others?
• In all healthy adults, which aspects of working memory are retained in later years and which aspects start declining in early adulthood?
• Can cognitive training help slow cognitive decline with age?
• How are changes in brain structures, connectivity and activation patterns related to important changes in working memory function?

Impairments of cognition, and particularly of working memory, can be major barriers to independent living. The chapters of this book dispel some popular myths about cognitive ageing, while presenting the state of the science on how and why working memory functions as it does throughout the adult lifespan.

"

Working Memory and Aging" is the first volume to provide an overview of the burgeoning literature on changes in working memory function across healthy and pathological ageing, and it will be of great interest to advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers in psychology and related subject areas concerned with the effects of human ageing, including several areas of medicine.

The rapid growth in the numbers of older people worldwide has led to an equally rapid growth in research on the changes across age in cognitive function, including the processes of moment to moment cognition known as working memory. This book brings together international research leaders who address major questions about how age affects working memory:

• Why is working memory function much better preserved in some people than others?
• In all healthy adults, which aspects of working memory are retained in later years and which aspects start declining in early adulthood?
• Can cognitive training help slow cognitive decline with age?
• How are changes in brain structures, connectivity and activation patterns related to important changes in working memory function?

Impairments of cognition, and particularly of working memory, can be major barriers to independent living. The chapters of this book dispel some popular myths about cognitive ageing, while presenting the state of the science on how and why working memory functions as it does throughout the adult lifespan.

"

Working Memory and Aging" is the first volume to provide an overview of the burgeoning literature on changes in working memory function across healthy and pathological ageing, and it will be of great interest to advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers in psychology and related subject areas concerned with the effects of human ageing, including several areas of medicine.

As one of the most hotly debated topics of the past decade, false memory has attracted the interest of researchers and practitioners in many of psychology's subdisciplines. Real-world issues surrounding the credibility of memories (particularly memories of traumatic events, such as sexual abuse) reported by both children and adults have been at the center of this debate. Were the adults actually retrieving repressed memories under the careful direction of psychotherapists, or were the memories being "created" by repeated suggestion? Were children telling investigators about events that actually happened, or were the interviewing techniques used to get at unpleasant experiences serving to implant memories that eventually became their own? There is evidence in the psychological research literature to support both sides, and the potential impact on individuals, families, and society as a whole has been profound. This book is an attempt to cut through the undergrowth and get at the truth of the "recovered memory/false-memory creation" puzzle. The contributors review seminal work from their own research programs and provide theory and critical evaluation of existing research that is necessary to translate theory into practice. The book will be of great value to basic and applied memory researchers, clinical and social psychologists, and other professionals working within the helping and legal professions.

The Foundations of Remembering presents a collection of essays written by top memory scholars in honor of Henry L. Roediger III. The chapters were originally delivered as part of the "Roddyfest" conference held in March 2005 to celebrate Purdue University's awarding of an honorary doctor of letters to Roediger in recognition of his many contributions to the field of psychology. Authors were given a simple charge: choose your own topic, but place your work in historical context. Roediger is fascinated by the intellectual lineage of ideas, so addressing historical "foundations" seemed a fitting tribute. The Chapters contained in this volume help to establish the foundations of remembering, circa the first decade of the 21st century, as perceived by some of the leading memory researchers in the world. Not surprisingly, each of the chapters touches on Roediger's research as well, largely because his work has helped to define and clarify many topics of interest to the memory field. The Foundations of Remembering is intended for a wide audience: students, scholars, and anyone interested in exploring the historical and conceptual roots of modern memory theory.

"Working memory" is a term used to refer to the systems responsible for the temporary storage of information during the performance of cognitive tasks. The efficiency of working memory skills in children may place limitations on the learning and performance of educationally important skills such as reading, language comprehension and arithmetic. Originally published in 1992, this monograph considers the development of working memory skills in children with severe learning difficulties. These children have marked difficulties with a wide range of cognitive tasks. The studies reported show that they also experience profound difficulties in verbal working memory tasks. These memory problems are associated with a failure to rehearse information within an articulatory loop. Training the children to rehearse material is shown to help alleviate these problems. The implications of these studies for understanding normal memory development, and for models of the structure of working memory and its development are discussed. It is argued that the working memory deficits seen in people with severe learning difficulties may contribute to their difficulties on other cognitive tasks.

When this title was originally published in 1981, the information processing approach to perception and memory was dominant in experimental psychology, and the research reported here had major implications for future development. After exploring the shortcomings of earlier work in this field, the author develops a new model which he shows to be capable of accounting for a variety of experimental data connected with human information processing, visual perception and attention. The central theme which is discussed is how we select relevant and discard irrelevant information. The basic assumption is that all incoming information is identified, that is, it reaches and activates the appropriate lexical entries. A piece of identified information is described as a unit consisting of three distinguishable codes: a visual code, a lexical or semantic code and a motor or action code. Identified information decays fast, so selective attention operates by selecting those units which have to be saved from this rapid decay. In a sense, therefore, the human information processor is described as struggling against forgetting.

Originally published in 1979, this book contains papers presented at a conference held in 1977 to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the University of Uppsala. Beyond the commemoration, the main reason for this conference was to get students of memory together to discuss and evaluate the memory research that had already been carried out, was presently underway and to speculate about the type of research in this area that would be carried out in the future. The contributors were specifically asked to concentrate on overall theoretical and metatheoretical questions at the cost of empirical problems. With chapters from many of the leading experts in the field this is an opportunity to enjoy some of their early insights.

As a conceptual framework for the investigation of human memory, the levels-of-processing paradigm had enjoyed immense popularity since its introduction in the early 1970s. It was the impetus behind literally hundreds of experiments and was used as an "explanation" for a wide range of retention phenomena. Consequently, a wealth of data and theory had emerged, and this title assimilates and evaluates this information. Originally published in 1979, the distinguished contributors to the volume - both proponents and opponents of the levels-of-processing framework - present here their latest data and ideas on a viewpoint that has been a tremendous influence in memory research and related areas.

Originally published in 1982, this book brings together two areas of research previously studied in parallel, with little interaction (particularly in the US): normal memory processing and the amnesic syndrome. When trying to document the relationship between the two it became apparent that there was much crossover and duplication of effort in a number of areas: whether long-term memory and short-term memory truly represent independent storage systems, or are simply points on a continuum; trying to determine the primary locus of variables influencing the rate at which information is lost during retention; whether episodic memory and semantic memory represent two different storage systems, or are simply artifacts produced by different kinds of query to a single memory system and finally, whether visual and verbal memory are independent. It was written, following a meeting in 1979, by a small group of investigators, brought together to explore this commonality and to share data and theory, thus beginning the promise of a bright future of interdisciplinary interaction in memory research.

Originally published in 1974, this volume presents empirical and theoretical investigations of the role of meaning in psychological processes. A theory is proposed for the representation of the meaning of texts, employing ordered lists of propositions. The author explores the adequacy of this representation, with respect to the demands made upon such formulations by logicians and linguists. A sufficiently large number of problems are encompassed by the propositional theory to justify its use in psychological research into memory and language comprehension. A number of different experiments are reported on a wide variety of topics, and these test central portions of this theory, and any that purports to deal with how humans represent meaning. Among the topics discussed are the role of lexical decomposition in comprehension and memory, propositions as the units of recall, and the effects of the number of propositions in a text base upon reading rate and recall. New problems are explored, such as inferential processes during reading, differences in levels of memory for text, and retrieval speed for textual information. On the other hand, a study of retrieval from semantic memory focusses on a problem of much current research. The final review chapter relates the present work to other current research in the area at the time.

Originally published in 1993, this book provides the clinician, researcher and student with a comprehensive account of the neuropsychology of the amnesic syndrome. The opening chapter places the amnesic syndrome within the overall context of memory disorders and provides a theoretical basis for understanding the presentation of the clinical and experimental findings which form the major part of the work. The second chapter provides an extensive account of the various methods used to assess memory and associated deficits and provides guidelines as to the most effective assessment strategy. The next five chapters are concerned with the specific aetiologies giving rise to the amnesic syndrome: Wernicke-Korsakoff Syndrome; Thalamic Amnesia; Medial Temporal Lobe Amnesia; Herpes Simplex Encephalitis; and ruptured aneurysms of the anterior communicating artery. Each of these chapters contains an account of the associated neuropathology, descriptions of experimental findings and illustrative case histories from the authors' own experimental and clinical experience. The next chapter provides the reader with an account of some of the more important scientific issues that have arisen from the studies of the amnesic syndrome and a final chapter considers current and future prospects for behavioural remediation of severe memory deficit.

In the ten years prior to its original publication in 1987, cognitive psychology uncovered the increasingly important role of knowledge stored in memory and the integrated nature of cognitive processes. In Memory, Thinking and Language the author takes these three traditional topics and places them within the new cognitive approach. Judith Greene's 1975 book Thinking and Language, proved to be a highly successful student resource. This book provides an equally clear introduction to complex ideas. It also emphasises the practical applications of cognitive psychology for teaching and learning as well as for everyday life.

Many patients with stroke, head injuries or dementia suffer severe memory impairment and in many cases improvement may fail to occur. This book, first published in 1984 followed by this second edition in 1992, offers practical guidelines to the problems and is supported by a discussion of theory about memory systems and functioning. It should enable therapists and psychologists to recognize, understand, assess and manage memory problems arising from injury, accident or infection of the brain. The authors are well-known for their interest in memory and memory therapy. Topics covered in this text include: the relationship between memory and practice, assessment, methods for improving memory, organization of memory therapy, selection of appropriate treatments for individual patients, role of the microcomputer in memory rehabilitation, use of drugs in stimulating memory, development of programmes to improve attention and the treatment of the memory-impaired in groups. This second edition has an update on drugs, electronic aids and assessment procedures, with further evidence of the effectiveness of memory therapy. This book would have been an asset for those professionals involved in the rehabilitation of the impaired memory at the time and can still be of value today.

Originally published in 1977, the chapters in this volume offer a concise review of the research and new direction in the study of alcohol and cognition at the time. Each chapter has been prepared by an eminent researcher who was currently involved in investigating human cognitive behaviour. The chapters contain not just a dry summary of work done in the field, but descriptions of the impetus for the work that was done, problems in doing such work, knowledge that was gained, and suggestions for future research. Many new approaches are presented for the study of alcohol and memory, and for the understanding of results of studies already done. This was a forward-looking volume not only about directions for future research, but with solid contributions that review and integrate major areas of inquiry on the influence of alcohol on memory and behaviour at the time.