My research career really began with my arrival at the Medical Research Council Applied Psychology Unit (APU) in Cambridge. I myself am very much at the explorer end of the continuum, but I fully accept the importance of the skills of the architect if theory is to develop. I suggest that any complete theory is likely to require explorers in its initial stages and architects to turn the broad concepts into detailed models. Newton claimed that his success resulted from “standing on the shoulders of giants,” who no doubt stood on the shoulders of lesser mortals like ourselves. It is an approach I have followed ever since.īut what is the answer to our original question, should theorists be architects, building elegant structures such as Newton did, or should they be explorers, gradually extending the theory on the basis of more and more evidence, as in the case of Darwin? Clearly both Newton and Darwin got it right, but for fields at a different stage of development. I resolved at that point that if I myself were to develop a theory, it would be based very closely on the evidence, which would survive even if the theory proved totally wrong. Neither side was able to deliver a knockout blow, and people simply abandoned the research area. Alas, by the time it was published, the whole field of learning theory seemed to have collapsed. My own first published study ( Baddeley 1960) attempted just such a crucial experiment, predicting that rats would be smarter than they should be according to Hullian theory, and demonstrating, to my own satisfaction at least, that this was the case. This approach was closer in spirit to Hull than to Tolman. The dominant answer to that question, in the United Kingdom at least, was provided by Karl Popper (1959), a Viennese-trained philosopher who argued strongly that a valid theory should make clear, testable predictions, allowing the rival theories to confront each other in the all-important “crucial experiment” that settles the issue. This raised the crucial question as to how you might decide between the two apparently opposing views. Edward Tolman in Stanford had a view of learning in rats that fitted this model, using it to challenge Hull's neo-behaviorist approach. Within psychology, the Newtonian model was explicitly copied by Clark Hull in his attempt to produce a general theory of learning, principally based on the study of maze learning in the albino rat.Īn alternative model of theorizing came from Oxford, where Stephen Toulmin (1953) argued that theories were like maps, ways of organizing our existing knowledge of the world, providing tools both for interacting with the world and for further exploration. The first, championed by Cambridge philosopher Richard Braithwaite (1953), regarded Newton's Principia as the model to which scientific theories should aspire, involving as it does postulates, laws, equations, and predictions. Typical questions included, is psychology a science? if so, is it cumulative or are we doomed to keep on asking the same questions, as appeared to be the case in philosophy? What would a good psychological theory look like?Īs students we were offered two answers to this question. This in turn led to a renewed interest in the philosophy of science as applied to psychology. As a result, prewar issues such as the conflict between Gestalt psychology and neobehaviorism began to be challenged by new data and new ideas, some based on cybernetics, the study of control systems, with others influenced by the newly developed digital computers. I entered psychology as a student at University College London in 1953, a very exciting time for the field of psychology, which had benefited greatly from developments during the Second World War, where theory was enriched by the need to tackle practical problems. My first draft would have filled the chapter page allowance with references I apologize to all of those whose work should have been cited and is not. What follows is a partial, as opposed to impartial, account of the origins of the concept of multicomponent working memory (M-WM) and of my own views on its subsequent development. The topic of working memory has increased dramatically in citation counts since the early years, not all of course related to or supportive of my own work, but a recent attempt to review it ( Baddeley 2007) ended with more than 50 pages of references. I was honored, pleased, and challenged by the invitation to write this prefatory chapter, pleased because it offered the chance to take a broad and somewhat autobiographical view of my principal area of interest, working memory (WM), but challenged by the potential magnitude of the task. WORKING MEMORY: THEORIES, MODELS, AND CONTROVERSIES
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