ABSTRACT
The psychological study of human memory has, over the last 100 years, been dominated by two distinct traditions. One of these stems from the work of Ebbinghaus, who emphasised careful measurement of a simplified memory task under rigorously controlled conditions. The great advantage of such an approach is that it reduces the problem of understanding the enormously complex and subtle human memory system to a series of sub-problems of manageable size. This was essential for the start of the empirical study of memory, and it continues to be an important feature of the scientific study of memory; without the willingness to concentrate on tractable questions about human memory, we are unlikely to make progress. The danger that always underlies such an approach, however, is that we may be excluding from our experiments just those aspects of human memory that are the most important and most characteristic. If we understood everything about remembering lists of nonsense syllables, we still would know very little about human memory as it functions outside the laboratory. This was the view argued by the founder of the second great tradition, Sir Frederick Bartlett.
