ABSTRACT
I had been directing the Unit for about 10 years when the opportunity to take a three-month sabbatical arose. I justified it on two grounds. My plan was to spend most of the time at Bolt Beranek and Newman, the US institution that most closely resembled the Unit in combining basic and applied research, but which functioned as an independent company, reliant entirely on earning its living through research contracts. It seemed to offer an interesting potential complement to the way in which we organised things, and to offer the long-term potential of possible collaborations. The second aim was to respond to an invitation from a prestigious Oxford University Press series to write a book summarising a decade of research on working memory and attempting to tie it together into a more coherent theoretical framework. In this connection I was pleased to also be offered a link to Harvard by W.K. (Bill) Estes, a very distinguished experimental psychologist who had first established himself in the latter part of the era of rats and behaviourism. He then went on to elaborate his ideas through research on human learning, developing a mathematical approach that provided the foundations to a good deal of current work on human long-term learning and memory.
