ABSTRACT
The history of science is full of examples of mutual misunderstanding among scientists belonging to different schools of thought or adhering to different scientific paradigms. Roediger and Gallo, in the previous chapter of this Festschrift, provide a nice illustration: What is generally known today as the levels-of-processing (LOP) effect, had been in the early 1960s attributed to “number of differential responses.” Two (cognitive) memory experts from the late 20th century simply cannot accept an interpretation proposed by (neobehaviorist) experts of the middle of the century. The cognitive approach to memory experienced several paradigmatic switches itself. During its first decades, it was dominated by the computer metaphor and, ipso facto, by the multistore models of memory. Craik and Lockhart (1972) strongly contributed to the abandonment of these early structural models. The dominating idea of cognitive research of the last 20 years has been, and still is, that of domain-specific processing which led in its extreme formulation to the hypothesis of modularity of mind (Fodor, 1983). In the psychology of memory, one often speaks today about different memory subsystems and about local, domain-specific effects such as transfer-appropriate processing.
