Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 1985, Vol. I I , No.

3, 436-438

Copyright 1985 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 027 8-739 3/8 5/S00.75

Ebbinghaus's Century
John R. Anderson
Carnegie-Mellon University The last century of research on memory has largely been in Ebbinghaus's tradition of trying to understand basic memory processes. Although profitable, that research is reaching a point of diminishing return. More attention needs to be given to how memory is used in the rest of the cognitive system. We are all constrained by the intellectual environment in which we live. I wonder what Ebbinghaus's research contribution would have been if he had grown up intellectually in a world of computers rather than in the world of associationism. Computers have memories and they have programs. Most people would concede that computers gather their interesting properties more from their programs than from their memories. This is not to deny the importance of memory; after all, the programs reside in these memories and operate on them. The point is that what is important is not to study the memories in isolation but rather in terms of how they are used. This is also not to deny that humans have more interesting memory systems than computers, but they also have more interesting mental programs. The nonsense-syllable criticism of Ebbinghaus is so frequent and obvious that one is almost embarrassed to repeat it, but it is to the point. People do not normally learn nonsense syllables and when they do, they seldom learn them free of prior associations. The argument is not that Ebbinghaus did not learn about some basic properties of memory; rather, it is that there are a lot more interesting things to be learned. To bring up an issue slightly less obvious, let us consider Ebbinghaus's concept of the representation of a serial list. Slamecka's (1985) discussion of remote associations versus chaining misses the great thing that we have learned in modern cognitive psychology (not to deny it was known before): Lists are hierarchically organized into chunks (Broadbent, 1975; Chase & Ericsson, 1981; Johnson 1970; Lee & Estes 1981; Wickelgren, 1979). Without recognizing that structure there is a multitude of uninterpretable data. Many of the recent advances in the study of human memory have come because we have recognized that human memory is structured and not a passive record of experience. This is not to say that associationism cannot be made compatible with the evidence for structure in memory; however, that is more a testimony to the vacuousness of associationism than to anything else. Slamecka is wrong in saying that Anderson and Bower (1973) showed that associationism is not limited by the terminal meta-postulate (Bever, Fodor, & Garrett, 1968). If anything we argued to the opposite conclusion; however, our major point was that associationism as a whole is too amorphous for anything so precise to apply. A rich set of mental processes impose an elaborate structure on experience, and that structure is reflected in our memory for those experiences. Research trying to uncover basic properties of memory which ignores these processes is in perilous danger of promoting confusion. Despite the warning just mentioned, most would concede that the research of the past 100 years had made some real headway in uncovering the basic properties of human memory. In fact, I would like to argue that, although there is still some gold left in the mine, it may be starting to be mined out and we may be reaching the point of diminishing returns in our study of basic properties of

Preparation of this article was supported by National Science Foundation Grant BNS-82-0889. I would like to thank Peter Pirolli, Lynne Reder, and Brian Reiser for their comments on this article. Correspondence should be sent to John R. Anderson, Department of Psychology, Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15213.

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human memory. We are running up more and more against issues that we cannot resolve given our current methods. Evidence of the diminishing returns in research on basic memory is our inability to make headway in some of the fundamental issues such as the status of short-term memory or the issue of parallel versus serial processing. It can be very discouraging how opposing theories can use the same data to support their positions. Just to make it clear that I am not pointing fingers, I should point out that I have been involved in some equally unresolvable, if lesser, controversies such as the relation between recognition and recall (Anderson & Bower, 1974), the issue of configural propositional traces and all-or-none recall of propositions (both discussed in Anderson, 1976), and the distinction between semantic and episodic memory (Anderson & Ross, 1980). In small part these unresolvable controversies are a result of the incompleteness and vagueness of the competing theories, but more fundamentally they occur because we are pushing the barriers of behavioral data. It should be no surprise that something as basic as basic memory will require physiological data to help resolve the issues. And as we know, adequate data are not soon to be forthcoming from that source. We should back off the hopeless cat and mouse game of trying to do the decisive experiment or formulate the decisive argument to settle these controversies. The interesting observation is that by hook or crook these opposing theories have been brought to agreement on most of the major phenomena. For instance, everyone agrees that access to information is lost according to the same basic forgetting function. Whether this is read as evidence for a separate short-term memory or for a single memory is almost a matter of taste. Having memory characterized at this level is sufficient to move onto the interesting enterprise of seeing how it is used to achieve human cognition. This is not an argument for ecological validity per se, just for understanding how the cognitive system works. My argument is basically an extension of Simon's (1969) that we only need a functional characterization of the basic properties of the operating system to begin interesting explorations of how it is used. The reason is that

much of its behavior is determined by the structure of its use. It is interesting, for instance, to look at memory for text material and notice how little of those data was determined by the nature of memory and how much by the nature of text processing. For instance, the Kintsch and VanDijk (1978) model clearly involved assumptions about basic memory, but the assumptions about text structure and processing were what most determined the structure of their predictions. It is worthwhile to consider a couple of significant developments in the area of human memory that would never have been discovered by practitioners of Ebbinghaus's tradition. One is the work of Chase and Ericsson (1981) on development of memory span skills. If one took the view that there were just basic parameters of a memory system to be discovered and memory was not a skill that could be developed in a specific area, one would never have gone down their research path, and one would never have discovered that basic assumptions about memory are wrong. A second development is our growing understanding of the importance of knowledge both to human expertise and artificial intelligence expertise (e.g., Anderson, 1985; HayesRoth, Waterman, & Lenat, 1983; Larkin, McDermott, Simon, & Simon, 1980). Essentially, we find that the contents of human memory can take on a set of principles at a level above the basic parameters of the memory system. These two areas are interesting because they have stressed an experimental methodology (emphasis on single subjects) more like Ebbinghaus than his successors. Where they parted from Ebbinghaus was in the questions they asked about memory. If one inquires about how memory participates in larger cognitive systems, we find enormously interesting issues on which our behavioral methodology can make great headway (though perhaps not always simple measures of reaction time and percent correct). There are ample instances in the literature besides the two domains cited earlier. I would include Jeffries and Anderson on the relation betwen memory failures and problem solving (Anderson & Jeffries, in press), Reder on the role of strategic judgments in memory (Reder, 1982, in press), Ross on the role of memory in skill acquisition (Ross, 1984), and

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JOHN R. ANDERSON Hayes-Roth, F., Waterman, D. A., & Lenat, D. B. (1983). Building expert systems. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Johnson, N. F. (1970). The role of chunking and organization in process of recall. In G. H. Bower (Ed.), Psychology of language and motivation (pp. 172-247). New York: Academic Press. Kinstch, W, & VanDijk, T. A. (1978). Toward a model of text comprehension and production. Psychological Review, 85, 363-394. Larkin, J. H., McDermott, J., Simon, D. P., & Simon, H. A. (1980). Expert and novice performance in solving physics problems. Science, 208, 1335-1342. Lee, C. L., & Estes, W. K. (1981). Item and order information in short-term memory: Evidence for multilevel perturbation processes. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 7, 149169. Reder, L. M. (1982). Plausibility judgments vs. fact retrieval: Alternative strategies for sentence verification. Psychological Review, 89, 250-280. Reder, L. R. (in press). Beyond association: Strategic components in memory retrieval. In D. Gorfein (Ed.), Human memory: The Ebbinghaus centennial conference. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Reiser, B. J. (1983). Contexts and indices in autobiographical memory. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Yale University, New Haven, CT. Reiser, B. J., Black, J. B., & Abelson, R. P. (in press). Knowledge structures in the organization and retrieval of autobiographical memories. Cognitive Psychology. Ross, B. H. (1984). Remindings and their effects in learning a cognitive skill. Cognitive Psychology. 16, 371-416. Simon, H. A. (1969). The sciences of the artificial. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Slamecka, N. J. (1985). Ebbinghaus: Some associations. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 11, 414-435. Wickelgen, W. A. (1979). Chunking and consolidation: A theoretical synthesis of semantic networks, configuring in conditioning, S-R versus amnesic syndrome, and the hippocampal arousal system. Psychological Review, 86, 44-60.

Reiser on autobiographical memory (Reiser, 1983; Reiser, Black, & Abelson, in press) to name a few instances that are in one way or another close to home. So, in conclusion Ebbinghaus has had his century and we have learned a fair bit about basic memory from his seminal work and the research that followed, I have participated in that research and continue to mine for some of its gold. However, we should be looking beyond this to issues of how memory is used. References
Anderson, J. R. (1976). Language, memory, and thought. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Anderson, J. R. (1985). Cognitive psychology and its implications, Second Edition. New \brk: W. H. Freeman & Company. Anderson, J. R., & Bower, G. H. (1973). Human associative memory. Washington, DC: Hemisphere Press. Anderson, J. R., & Bower, G. H. (1974). A propositional theory of recognition memory. Cognition & Memory, 2, 406-412. Anderson, J. R., & Jeffries, R. (in press). Novice LISP errors: Undetected losses of information from working memory. Human-Computer Interaction. Anderson, J. R., & Ross, B. H. (1980). Evidence against a semantic-episodic distinction. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 6, 4 4 1 466. Bever, T. G., Fodor, J. A., & Garrett, M. (1968). A formal limitation of associationism. In T. R. Dixon & D. L, Horton (Eds.), Verbal behavior and general behavior theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Broadbent, D. E. (1975). The magic number after fifteen years. In R. A. Kennedy & A. Wilkes (Eds.), Studies in long-term memory. New \brk: Wiley. Chase, W. G., & Ericsson, K. A. (1981). Skilled memory. In J. R. Anderson (Ed.), Cognitive skills and their acquisition. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Received December 7, 1984