Introduction

Alan Baddeley grew up in Leeds in the north of England, finding science rather boring and preferring geography and history, and latterly acquiring an interest in philosophy. His post allowed him to register for a Cambridge PhD, based on his assigned project concerned with the development of memorable postal codes. This led to an interest in applying the newly developing concepts of information theory to memory and language, and to the creation of a set of British postal codes generated using the statistical structure of English words to enhance memorability. At a theoretical level, he was able to show that his information-based measure was a better predictor of performance than standard measures of associative meaningfulness. He was well prepared to engage in the controversy that dominated much of cognitive psychology in the 1960s, the question of how many kinds of memory it was necessary to assume.