Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- I Introducing Cognitive Neuropsychology
- II Converging Operations: Specific Syndromes and Evidence from Normal Subjects
- III Inferences from Neuropsychological Findings
- IV Central Processes: Equipotentiality or Modularity?
- 12 Selective Impairments of Knowledge
- 13 The Allocation and Direction of Processing Resources: Visual Attention
- 14 The Allocation of Processing Resources: Higher-Level Control
- 15 Amnesia: What Is Memory For?
- 16 Modularity and Consciousness
- References
- Subject Index
- Author Index
- Index of Patients Cited
15 - Amnesia: What Is Memory For?
from IV - Central Processes: Equipotentiality or Modularity?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- I Introducing Cognitive Neuropsychology
- II Converging Operations: Specific Syndromes and Evidence from Normal Subjects
- III Inferences from Neuropsychological Findings
- IV Central Processes: Equipotentiality or Modularity?
- 12 Selective Impairments of Knowledge
- 13 The Allocation and Direction of Processing Resources: Visual Attention
- 14 The Allocation of Processing Resources: Higher-Level Control
- 15 Amnesia: What Is Memory For?
- 16 Modularity and Consciousness
- References
- Subject Index
- Author Index
- Index of Patients Cited
Summary
The Amnesic Syndrome
Twenty-five years ago, human memory was a self-contained topic. It had its own laws, its own empirical paradigms, its chain of father figures leading back to Ebbinghaus. Yet in the past 15 years, memory research has been increasingly integrated with other areas of psychology. Short-term memory has almost hived off into perception and language. Semantic memory is now approached from the perspective of general models of cognition. Recently, links have been developed with attention (e.g. Hasher & Zacks, 1979). Before the mid-1970s, research on amnesia had much the same type of isolation as memory itself had had 15 years before. Admittedly, some ideas from the study of normal memory were beginning to be influential, such as ‘levels of processing’, and the phenomena being discussed were of much greater intrinsic interest than the interference paradigms of traditional memory research on normal subjects. Yet amnesia research was still very much a closed world, with debates couched in the conceptual terms of the 1950s. Moreover, there were fierce empirical disputes in the field about whether key results arose from artefacts.
Since the mid-1970s, there has been a great change. As was discussed in chapter 2, the disputes over replication have, to a considerable extent, been resolved. It is now widely accepted that many patients with severe memory disorders have additional damage to other processing systems, which can lead to the existence of observed associations between memory and non-memory disorders that may be functionally misleading.
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- From Neuropsychology to Mental Structure , pp. 353 - 380Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1988