ABSTRACT
To start with some personal history, I spent a stimulating and productive year (1968ă69) in the Psychology Department at the University of Toronto, imbibing the wisdom dispensed by Ben Murdock and Endel Tulving, and interacting with a lively group of graduate students and post-docs. The focus of my research was short-term memory, and this broadened out during the year to a consideration of encoding and retrieval processes in long-term or secondary memory. When I returned to Birkbeck College in London, I was intrigued and influenced by the work on selective attention being carried out by Donald Broadbent, Anne Treisman, and Neville Moray. In particular, TreismanÊs (1964) theory of selective attention combined aspects of previous knowledge with perception and attention; it was an exciting possibility that memory encoding and retrieval processes could also be brought into the mix, in the spirit of NeisserÊs (1967) call for an integrated theory of cognitive functions.
