Cognitive Aspects of Memory and the Self

I regard the memory system as having the primary functions of interpreting the perceptual world and guiding actions. In common with most cognitive psychologists, I regard most of the operation of the memory system as being what I will call ‘pre-conscious’. By this I mean, quite simply, that consciousness (which I myself do not attempt to model) only has access to the product of the processes I describe and not to the processes themselves. The aspects of memory with which we are familiar in ourselves, the conscious ones, I think of as being the final state in a complex and hidden set of operations.

How should we think about memory? The dominant metaphor is that of association. Words and ideas, and emotions too, are seen as being linked together in an endless, amorphous net. That is, indeed, the way our memory can seem to ourselves if we reflect on it only lightly. But it would be a mistake to dwell too much on the products of consciousness and imagine that they represented the inner structure. For a number of reasons I was deeply dissatisfied with theories based on associative nets, and not much happier with theories that were based entirely on schemata. But I had no alternative until, under the influence of a paper by Norman & Bobrow (1979), I faced up to three types of ubiquitous memory event.

We all have the experience of being aware of everything we know about an individual, other than their name. This happened to me quite dramatically a few years ago when I was working in Cambridge. Someone's research was being discussed. The main results were familiar to us both. We knew where the man worked, where he lived, what his wife was called and the last time he had given a talk in Cambridge. We felt certain we would instantly recognize his name and we were certain that the name would have led to the rest of the information. If one's concept of memory was that of a network of interconnected pieces of information, then one would certainly expect that such a