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W.E. Hockley and S. Lewandowsky (Eds.), Relating Theory and Data: Essays on Human Memory in Honor of Bennet B. Murdock. Wiley, New York, 1992.

This book is the product of a conference held four years ago in celebration of the 65th birthday of Ben Murdock. The six parts in which the volume has been organized, reflect Murdock's lifelong interests: human memory and its division into three fundamental types of information, i.e., item, associative, and serial-order information. This distinction, which already figured prominently in his 1974 book Human Memory: Theory and Data, reflects a basic (pre)theoretical assumption in Murdock's conception of human memory.

The title of that book also points to one other characteristic aspect of his general approach to memory, i.e., its emphasis on theory which in his view is tantamount to mathematical modeling. This emphasis on quantitative models is especially evident is his more recent work on the Theory of Distributed Associative Memory (TODAM). Not surprisingly, many of the authors of the chapters in this volume relate their findings to this general memory model.

As is the case with most commemorative books, the chapters vary widely in content and scope, and little effort has been put in integrating the chapters into common themes. In fact, only the commentaries on each of the 5 major sections by his colleagues and co-members of the Toronto group (also known as the "Eb- binghaus Empire"), try to present some overall perspective. I found these also to be the most interesting chapters. In fact, while reading these commentaries one begins to regret that our regular journal articles do not provide more of this kind of informal criticism.

As I mentioned above, the several sections contain a collection of papers, often of high quality and by experts in the area, whose only common feature is that the authors have all been invited to attend this conference. The first major section after the introduction, titled "Perspectives on human memory", is such a loose collection that even the commentator, Robert Lockhart, discusses only one of the chapters, that by Hintzman on the usefulness of formal models in psychology. Although this is a very nice defense of formal theorizing, one wonders why it is still the case that this type of work still needs such a defense. I guess that this may still be a heavily debated issue in Toronto and among researchers with a functionalist inclination (e.g. see Lockhart 's commentary or the critiques by Watkins, 1990; and Roediger, 1993). It is somewhat ironic to see Hintzman's critique of functionalistic theorizing followed by a chapter by Nilsson and Gardiner that deals with the Tulving-Wiseman law on the dependency between recognition and recall. As Hintzman has forcefully argued elsewhere, there is every reason to believe that this law is a mathematical artefact, that tells us very litttle about memory. Nilsson and Gardiner make a laudable attempt to relate this "law" to current models of human memory. None of these seem to be able to handle all of the 'boundary conditions' or exceptions to the law. However, their analysis is a bit peculiar since the arguments are not based on any type of proof other than a vague kind of verbal

194 Book reviews

reasoning. Clearly this is not how Murdock would have liked it. To give an example, it is argued that the SAM model cannot handle the retrieval exceptions to the law. Nilsson and Gardiner state: "According to SAM, the only condition that gives rise to exceptions is when single meaning words are used". Not according to my understanding, however. For example, SAM will also predict increased dependence between recall and recognition as the cues become more similar. Clearly, such "derivations" are impossible without an extensive analysis that takes into account all of the features involved, including the subject and item differences. In his commentary Lockhart concludes that the most important role of theory in relation to data is that theory should serve to generate the development of a cumulative data base. This is the functionalistic attitude characteristic of most of experimental psychology, even today. What is not realized here is that it is the gradual development of theory that makes the data cumulative: data by tiaemselves are not cumulative at all.

The next section includes several chapters by leading experts that all deal with the general notion of a short-term memory (one of Murdock's earliest interests). This section might be an excellent starting point for a discussion on the merits of the distinction between short-term and long-term memory. Crowder and Neath reaffirm the arguments put forth earlier by Crowder regarding the "demise of short-term memory" whereas others (Estes and Baddeley) argue in favor of a distinction of some sort. Craik, in his commentary, nicely summarizes the main issues that are at stake.

The next section deals with recognition, the topic where Murdock has been most active in recently. With the exception of the chapter by Mandler that describes his dual process theory, all chapters are centered around the socalled global memory models that currently dominate the field and of which Murdock's TODAM is an excellent example. These models all assume that recognition decisions are based not on the "strength" of a single memory trace but on the overall familiarity evoked by the presented item. In this overall familiarity, all of the items in memory make a contribution (hence the term "global familiarity"). I did not understand why the chapters in the next section by Humphreys and Bain and by Shiffrin and Mumane were not also put into this section. I at least fail to see why those chapters have more in common with the other chapters in their section (that deal with automaticity and memory for text).

The final section contains some excellent papers that are all centered around the theme of Murdock's TODAM model, and especially the assumption that memory may be best described as a distributed, composite memory system. Except for the chapter by Metcalfe that gives a nice historical review of the use of composite photography (although we should be careful not to confuse such techniques with the predictions of the composite memory models), all of the chapters are quite technical and may constitute difficult reading for most memory psychologists unless they are already quite familiar with this type of modelling of memory phenomena. This is also my general overall impression of this volume: it gives an excellent view of some of the best current work in memory but I would not advise it as reading for students unless they are already quite familiar with the field

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and especially with some of the formalized theories that have been developed by various researchers of which Ben Murdock is a leading representative.

Jeroen G.W. Raaijmakers Department of Psychology

University of Amsterdam Roetersstraat 15

1018 WB Amsterdam The Netherlands