ABSTRACT
Eliot Smith's article, “Content and process specificity in the effects of prior experiences,” is timely and important. It is another in a series of landmark reviews documenting the importance of specific prior experiences. Earlier reviews established the importance of specific experience in episodic memory (Hintzman, 1976), semantic memory (Landauer, 1975), explicit and implicit memory (Jacoby & Brooks, 1984), categorization and category learning (Brooks, 1978; Jacoby & Brooks, 1984; Medin & Smith, 1984), problem solving (Ross, 1984), judgments of normalcy (Kahneman & Miller, 1986), and automatization (Logan, 1988). Smith's article adds significantly to the series, introducing new paradigms and new theoretical issues in which specific experiences have influence, and providing ways to integrate them with existing theory and data. Smith is a theorist of broad vision, aiming to create a cognitive psychology that covers social phenomena as well as the nonsocial, using his extension of Anderson's (1983) ACT* theory to capture the important effects (see Smith, 1984).
