A little History

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A little History

• Psychology 3717

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History is almost the coolest discipline around

• Well besides psychology.
• 19th century
• Wilhelm Wundt
• Didnt really study memory
• But he started experimental psychology
• Sensation / perception
• Elemental processes

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Ebbinghaus

• Well, these were all great ideas, but had not
  been tested.
• Cue Hermann Ebbinghaus
• Strangely, both the behaviourists and the
  cognitive types claim him as their own
• Nonsense syllables

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Ebbinghaus

• Studied himself
• Found savings
• Repetition was key
• Classic forgetting curve
• Contiguity
• Reversal was detrimental, so it was not just
  contiguity but also contingency

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More on ebby

• Also found interference
• Found the magic 7
• Figured out that chunking would happen
• Massed vs. distributed practice
• Not bad for a career eh!
• But some dispute his importance
• They are idiots.

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William James

• Stream of consciousness
• Thought is personal
• Thought is changing
• Thought is continuous
• Thought deals with objects independent of itself
• It is interested in some things and not others

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Bill was smart

• Talked about primary and secondary memory
• Talked about memory without awareness
• Got lots of stuff wrong but again, not bad eh

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Alfred Binet

• Developed the first real intelligence test
• Was interested in application in a classroom
  context so he used more naturalistic stimuli
• Free recall
• Found serial position effect
• Looked at errors, early, acoustic, later, semantic

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Another smarty pants

• Found the importance effect with prose memory
• Found that phrases remembered better than single
  words
• First to find the importance of gist
• See again, not so bad eh

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Early 20th century

• The eclipse of cognition (at least in North
  America)
• Introspection if fine done Wundts way
• Trained observers
• Very simple events
• People working with Titchener too it too far
• You cant prove or disprove data from my
  introspections, you are not me

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Behaviourism

• Watson
• Interested only in the observable
• Consciousness cannot be observed
• Then, neither can memory
• S-R
• Basically became all of what psychology was for a
  long time, well into the 1950s

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Some resisted

• The Gestalt psychologists
• Didnt like the reductionism of the behaviourists
• Bartlett was a Brit that fought the good fight
• Talked about construction

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Cognitive Revolution

• Psychology started started to outgrow
  behaviourism
• Personality (style)
• Motivation (dissonance)
• Linguistics
• Information theory

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The revolutionaries become the establishment

• Atkinson Shiffrin model
• Brenda Milner and HM
• So there was a model and there was physiological
  evidence too, pretty much all sewn up

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Today

• By the 1970s memory was studied all over the
  world
• Tulving
• Craik
• Lockhart
• Slamecka
• MacLeod
• Moscovitz
• Schacter
• Jacoby
• Roediger
• Squire
• Loftus

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