ABSTRACT
A historical perspective may help to place this pressing issue in memory research in a larger context. There are two opposing strategies for asking questions about the nature of memory, depending on how one handles content. The first strategy is to ask questions about memory processes or outcomes independent of the content of the information to be remembered. The second strategy mistrusts information equipotentiality. Its goal is to design theories about how memory is inferred from what one knows about the kind of information in question. Piaget assumed that this development in the history of science–from mixed mathematics to pure mathematics–is recapitulated in ontogeny. B. F. Skinner's laws of operant conditioning were designed to be content-independent; that is, to hold true for all stimuli and responses. The experiments by J. Garcia and his colleagues showed the limitations of this approach.
