Levels of Processing in Human Memory
Abstract
Throughout my professional career as a cognitive psychologist, I have been interested in the topics of memory, attention, perception, and thinking – how best to characterize them, how they relate to each other, and how they change over a person's lifespan. In everyday life, these mental activities are usually considered to be rather different from each other – remembering meeting someone a month ago seems different from seeing the person in front of you – and this separation is often echoed in psychology textbooks, in which perception, memory, and decision-making are treated in different chapters. Much of the current thinking in cognitive psychology has reacted against this commonsense view, however, suggesting instead that these areas of study are better regarded as closely related and interacting aspects of one general processing system. This latter position was one starting point for the formulation of the levels of processing (LOP) framework for memory research proposed by Robert Lockhart and myself in 1972. The LOP article with Lockhart, plus a later empirical article with Endel Tulving in 1975, are my most-cited pieces of published research, and may therefore be regarded as my best-known scientific contributions to cognitive psychology. Additionally, the general ideas in which the LOP framework was embedded – for example, that remembering should be regarded as an activity of mind rather than a collection of structural “memory traces” waiting to be revived – have always…
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