OUTLINE OF HISTORY OF WORK ON HUMAN MEMORY

The Early Stages

1.  The beginning of experimental work on learning and memory
a. Thinking about learning and memory in the 1880's
b. Thinking about changes in performance.  The contributions of Ebbinghaus
and Thorndike
c. The development of laboratory paradigms
2.  verbal learning (1940-1963) accomplishments
a. we cannot separate current learning from previous learning, nonsense
syllables are not nonsense, Miller's work on approximations to English
sentences,  learning of associates, Bartlett
b. retroactive and proactive interference
c.  methodological issues in transfer
3. Theoretical Thinking
a. concept of stimuli and responses
b. association
c. explaining one task in terms of another (e.g., explaining paired
associate learning as classical conditioning)

The Cognitive Revolution

1.  The dawn of the cognitive "revolution"
a. Melton's distinction between storage, retention and retrieval
b. Underwood's frequency theory of verbal discrimination learning
c. the rediscovery of short-term memory
d. rediscovering imagery and mediators
e. organisation  (includes free recall of unrelated words and the recall of
paragraphs and stories)
2. Theoretical Thinking
a. Markov models of learning and memory
b. box and arrow models
c. signal detection theory
d. chunking and schemas
e. depth of processing
f. the search metaphor (Kintsch's distinction between recognition and recall)
g.  nodes in a network
h. episodically unique memories
3. accomplishments of the  cognitive revolution
a. understanding the differences between recall and recognition and between
item and associative/relational information
b. memory codes especially in short term memory
c. the importance of control processes
d. the episodic semantic distinction
e. direct and indirect memory tests (implicit vs explicit)
f. working memory

Current and Future Trends

1. relatively little formal work in the symbol processing tradition but box
and arrow models still common
2. The new associationism of the global matching models
a. SAM
b. MINERVA II
c. TODAM
d. The Matrix Model
2. Connectionist models
a. the rapid binding problem
b. forming representations (organisation and chunking revisited)
c. the control problem
3. Alternatives to mediationism
a. encoding specificity principle and transfer appropriate processing
b. functional analysis
c. intermediate levels of description
4. rational models of memory
5. the study of everyday memory
6. neural imaging