Book Review Subproblems of Semantic Memory: A Review of “ Human Associative Memory” by

In the first place, I liked the title; human conceptual memory is associative, and it is nice to see that assertion right up front in the title of this important book. I have always considered the issue of whether any memory system was associative or nonassociative to be fundamental. The first memory paper I ever wrote (Wickelgren, 1965) presented a definition of one type of associative memory and one type of nonassociative memory and asserted that the evidence favored the assumption that verbal short-term memory is associative. Since then, about half a dozen subsequent papers of mine were also concerned with this issue and related issues concerned with the associative character of verbal long-term memory (Wickelgren, 1972) and the nonassociative character of visual sensory memory (Wickelgren & Whitman, 1970). Partly because the general notion of associative memory has been around since Aristotle, the most common reaction to my work on this topic has been largely “ho hum.” Also, the decade of the 60’s was not a good time for definitions, arguments, and evidence favorable to the assumption that human conceptual memory is associative. Computer models and transformational generative grammar were “in,” and, for completely illogical reasons, associative memory was “out.” The notion that memory is associative suffered from “guilt by association.” Nearly universal acceptance of the hypothesis of associative memory throughout the early history of psychology led to the ridiculous notion during the 60’s that the assumption of associative memory was directly linked to a noncognitive, operationist, crassly empirical, S-R approach to psychology. As a consequence, a lot of psycholoinguists and cognitive memory researchers threw out the baby with the bath water and went off developing theories of the human mind that either ignored memory altogether or worked with some