ABSTRACT
Psychology has existed as an experimental science, distinct from philosophy and biology, for only a little more than a century. Its history has been characterised by a series of fashions in terms of approaches to human nature, methods of investigation, and the problems that have been thought appropriate for psychologists to investigate. Neuropsychological evidence also favours the three-stage sequence of familiarity-identity-names. Prosopagnosic patients find all faces unfamiliar, an apparent failure of the first stage. The distinction between a short-term store and a long-term store was supported by a double dissociation between different types of memory disorder. Whereas patients suffering from amnesia tended to have a normal short-term digit span but impaired long-term memory, some other patients with language rather than memory disorders were observed to have impaired digit span but normal learning.
