ABSTRACT
The contribution of the Geneva school to the study of the development of memory is, in many respects, still very relevant today. Perhaps the main idea underlying the work on memory by Piaget and Inhelder (1973) is the need to connect the general development of intelligence with the specific development of memory. This idea goes against one that was peculiar to the Ebbinghaus tradition, where one attempted to study the associative laws of memory at a pure level by abstracting them from all intervening variables. In this respect, Piaget and Inhelder (1973:360-362) point out:
Among the ideas proposed by Piaget and Inhelder (1973, first French ed., 1968), I wish to emphasise the distinction between memory tasks and memory systems. These authors distinguished between activities involving the subject’s system of knowledge (called “mémoire au sens large”) and those involving the retrieval of specific episodes (called “mémoire au sens strict”) (such a distinction is similar to the one proposed by Tulving, 1972, four years later). Examples of the “mémoire au sens large” are the perceptive recognition of a stimulus and also the relearning activity as schematic knowledge is used by the subject in the task. Examples of the “mémoire au sens strict” are the recall or memory recognition of specific information characteristic of time and space. There are, however, great differences between recall and memory recognition tasks. Memory recog nition is more primary and cognitively simpler than recall and is present in inferior invertebrata. In addition, it varies only moderately with develop ment, since it does not require the support of higher attentive and expressive functions. Recall ability, on the other hand, appears later and requires a clear search effort and the use of expressive-communicative channels that testify what the subj ect has retrieved. As Piaget and Inhelder observe, there is a close relationship between memory and semiotic mechanisms of both a figurative nature (images, symbolic play, etc.) and of other kinds (language), because these mechanisms are based on memory, and recall especially requires that the subject masters them at least partially.
