Effects of Elaboration of Processing at Encoding and Retrieval: Trace Distinctiveness and Recovery of Initial Context
Laird S. Cermak, Fergus I.M. Craik · Psychology Press eBooks · 2014
The theme of the conference is levels of processing, and the authors have been asked to discuss its possible relation to language comprehension. This is a difficult assignment, because the concept of processing levels has figured only minimally in language comprehension research and theory. The "levels" concept was proposed not as theory but as metatheory. It was intended as an alternative metaphor to the multistore models that figured so prominently in the short-term memory research of the 1960&s;s. The reverse trend obtains in psycholinguistics, where comprehension has never been equated with exact recall. Comprehension is viewed as changing the input somehow. Probably the most conspicuous is the effort to exploit commonalities between information-processing machines and human information processors to extend our knowledge of human cognition. Information-processing psychology typically parallels human cognition to aspects of nonliving systems. The climb would be less steep if there were wide spread dissatisfaction with the conceptual apparatus of information processing.