A Case of Misplaced Nostalgia
Ulric Neisser Emory University
To counter Banaji and Crowder's (1989) claim that the
naturalistic study of memory has not been productive,
this reply cites four significant lines of research: Ross's
(1989) theory of bias in recalling personal traits, Nelson's
(1986) studies of children's event representations, Bah-
rick's (1984) long-term follow-up of school learning, and
new work on "flashbulb memories" by Neisser and
Harsch. Banaji and Crowder's analogy to chemistry is
misleading." In biology, a more appropriate model, the
importance of.field studies is taken for granted. And not
all the progress of the last 12 years has been on the eco-
logical side; "traditional" memory research has now gone
well beyond the limitations noted by Neisser (1978), and
both approaches are now moving ahead together.
I have bad news for Banaji and Crowder (September
1989). It's too late: The good old days are gone, the genie
is out of the bottle. The situation I described and deplored
in 1978 ("If X is an interesting or socially significant as-
pect of memory, then psychologists have hardly ever
studied X," Neisser, 1978, p. 4) will never return, however
much they may long for it. The present state of affairs is
nearly the opposite. Nowadays, if X is an ecologically
common or socially significant domain of memory,
some'body is probably studying it intensively. Estimates
of one's own traits at earlier points in time, memory in
young children (and recollections of childhood), retrieval
of material learned in school, recall of unusual or emo-
tional experiences--these are only a few of the naturalistic
domains in which important findings have recently ap-
peared. The psychologists who made those findings will
surely go on with their work; no amount of nostalgic
grumbling about the proper methods of science is likely
to deter them. This being rather obviously the case, two
questions present themselves: (a) Why does it bother Ba-
naji and Crowder so much? (b) How does it fit into the
study of memory as a whole?
But perhaps it is not the case. Banaji and Crowder
(1989) simply denied it. According to them, the study of
everyday memory (an awkward phrase, I think) has not
produced any important results at all. That claim must
be refuted before we proceed; otherwise my argument
would rest on shaky ground. Luckily, Banaji and Crowder
phrased it so sweepingly that refutation is easy:
No delivery has been made on these claims: No theories that
have unprecedented explanatory power have been produced; no
new principles of memory have been discovered; and no methods
of data collection have been developed that add sophistication
or precision. (p. 1185; all italics added)
34
A single counterexample would suffice to refute null hy-
potheses like these: I will list four for good measure. To
be sure, there is something arbitrary about any such list;
other students of memory in natural contexts have their
own favorite studies, and I do not claim any unique priv-
ilege for mine. Some of the studies mentioned here com-
bine theory and data in a way that should appeal even to
Banaji and Crowder; others have produced results that
would never have emerged from standard laboratory
studies. One (which, of course, I like especially) is partly
my own work. Four should be enough.
1. People often have occasion to recall what they
were like at some earlier point in time. How bad were
my headaches last week? How fast did I read before I
took this study-skills course? Was I happy in my college
days? Michael Ross (1989) developed a systematic theory
of such estimates. In his view they are largely derived
from the trait's present value (my pain today, my reading
speed now, my current happiness), taken together with
an implicit hypothesis about its stability or change over
time. If I have no reason to believe that my headaches
have changed, for example, then recall of last week's pain
will be biased toward today's level. If I have just been
through a treatment program, however, recall of pain lev-
els before it began will be biased upward from today's
level--after all, the program must have done some good!
In a recent issue of Psychological Review, Ross (1989)
reported about a dozen studies, covering a wide range of
personally significant traits, that support his theory. (An
independent measure of the original trait was available
in each case.) This work, which offers unexpected and
yet systematic insights into a commonplace use of mem-
ory, meets every standard methodological criterion.
2. The use of everyday events as targets may be op-
tional in studying adult memory, but it is essential with
young children. Using naturalistic methods, Katherine
Nelson (1986) and her associates showed that recall of
familiar routines as well as of specific episodes can be
elicited from two-year-olds, and perhaps even (Nelson,
1988) from one-year-olds. Such recall is quite sketchy at
first, but interestingly, it is rarely wrong. It takes an in-
creasingly rich narrative form during development, as
parents instruct their children in the social uses of mem-
ory (Hudson, in press). Some characteristics of young
children's m e m o r y - - i t s dependence on external cueing;
its focus on things that adults would take for granted--
may help to explain the "childhood amnesia" that will
overtake their recall later (Fivush & Hamond, in press).
3. Harry Bahrick's (1984) studies of memory for
school-learned material are now well-known. By locating
people who had studied Spanish at various times in th~
January 1991 American Psychologist
Copyright 1991 by the American PsychologicalAssociation, Inc. 0003-066X/91/$2.00
Vol. 46, No. 1, 34-36
 past (and controlling other variables with covariance
techniques), Bahrick was able to trace out 50-year for-
getting functions. Although some aspects of those func-
tions were predictable from traditional theories of mem-
ory (e.g., effects of the level of original learning), others
were not: The rate of forgetting dropped to zero after 5
years or so, producing a 25-year plateau in performance.
These data, which could not have been obtained by stan-
dard laboratory methods, have obvious theoretical and
practical significance.
4. Banaji and Crowder (1989) believe that so-called
flashbulb memories, such as recalling how one first heard
the news of the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger,
"present nothing unexpected to conventional laboratory
work on memory" (p. 1190). They probably mean that
although such memories are roughly accurate, no special
memory mechanism is involved. That is the view of
McCloskey, Wible, and Cohen (1988), whose study they
cited. But recent work suggests that the real puzzle about
flashbulb memories is quite different: Why do people so
often have vivid recollections that are entirely incorrect?
Nicole Harsch and I asked Emory University freshmen,
on the morning after the Challenger disaster, how they
had heard the news the day before (Harsch & Neisser,
1989; Neisser & Harsch, in press). Three years later, 44
of them were asked to recall it again. Most gave very
plausible and confident accounts, but about one third of
those accounts were dead wrong. Although errors do often
occur in eyewitness testimony (Loftus, 1979), neither folk
psychology nor conventional theories of memory had led
us to expect so many utterly false reports. Not all forms
of everyday memory are prone to such errors. For ex-
ample, they do not occur in recall of randomly selected
events (Brewer, 1988). Clarification of these issues will
probably require continued naturalistic research: The
strong emotions and long retention intervals characteristic
of flashbulb memories are not easily established under
laboratory conditions.
Why Does it Bother Banaji and Crowder?
Banaji and Crowder's (1989) use of analogies from chem-
istry and physics is no accident. Despite a rather curious
disclaimer (p. 1191), they obviously believe, as almost
everyone once did, that psychology should seek universal
context-free laws like those of the classical sciences. But
physics is no longer the unchallenged model of science.
Modern biology has demonstrated the enormous power
of functional analysis coupled with naturalistic obser-
vation. Banaji and Crowder asked their readers, mock-
ingly, to imagine doing chemistry without laboratory
controls. Can they imagine evolutionary biology, or ecol-
ogy, or ethology, without field studies? Without some
analysis of the function of body parts and behavior pat-
terns?
Correspondence concerningthis article should be addressed to Ulric
Neisser, Department of Psychology,Emory University,Atlanta, GA
30322.
January 1991 American Psychologist
Perhaps they can; certainly they have no conception
of function in psychology. Discussions of what mecha-
nisms are "good for" leave them frankly puzzled (Banaji
& Crowder, 1989, p. 1191). Fortunately, other psychol-
ogists have found the concept less mysterious. Modern
interest in functional and ecological analysis is not con-
fined to memory alone; it has already influenced research
on perception (Gibson, 1979), conceptualization (Medin
& Wattenmaker, 1987; Mervis, 1987; Rosch, 1978), de-
velopment (Ceci & Bronfenbrenner, 1985), and cognitive
linguistics (Lakoff, 1987). Instead of merely recombining
the elements and testing the hypotheses of a traditional
mental chemistry, as Banaji and Crowder would appar-
ently recommend, such investigators try to study variables
that play functional roles in natural settings. It is hard to
believe that we would be better offwithout the discoveries
that they have made.
Anyway, that is not one of the options. The ecological
approach is here to stay, in the study of memory as else-
where in psychology. There are certain to be more and
more naturalistic studies in the years to come. Many of
them will be less than outstanding in quality, but that's
part of science: No one rejects evolutionary biology out
of hand just because some Darwinian studies are flawed.
I understand Banaji and Crowder's (1989) impatience
with weak studies. My own critique of traditional memory
research (Neisser, 1978) was fueled by impatience of a
similar kind. But it is inappropriate to react, as they did,
by arguing that the only acceptable scientific protocol is
that of the fully controlled laboratory study. There is more
than one way to skin a phenomenon.
Where Does It Fit?
The ecological approach is not the only source of new
ideas about remembering. The "traditional" study of
memory itself has undergone radical changes since I
characterized it so harshly in 1978. At that time it was
chiefly focused on explicit recognition or recall of isolated
items from lists. Today, a glance at the Journal of Exper-
imental Psychology." Learning, Memory, and Cognition
shows that such research has become almost an endan-
gered species. Currently popular topics include implicit
memory, mental imagery, motor skills, story schemata,
social scripts, object recognition, and cognitive maps--
many of them appreciably closer (than the old methods
were) to the sorts of things people do everyday. Whether
laboratory study of such problems will produce what Ba-
naji and Crowder (1989) called "truly generalizable prin-
ciples" (p. 1192) remains to be seen--or rather, to be
tested across the relevant ecological settings. (Taken by
themselves, encapsulated laboratory experiments can
never ensure true generalizability.) But even without such
tests, some of these studies clearly meet what Eugene
Winograd (1988) has called "the one requirement for sci-
entific research we all implicitly follow: our understanding
of memory is enhanced" (p. 18).
Much ecologically oriented work on memory also
meets that test. The research described here is only a
sample. There is not enough space to describe the many
35
e x c e l l e n t studies o f oral t r a d i t i o n , prospective r e m e m -
bering, conversational use o f the past, personal recall, a n d
eyewitness t e s t i m o n y t h a t have also e n h a n c e d o u r u n -
d e r s t a n d i n g i n the last few years. F a r f r o m " c o m p r o m i s i n g
g e n u i n e a c c o m p l i s h m e n t s o f o u r y o u n g e n d e a v o r " (Banaji
& Crowder, 1989, p. 1185), this w o r k is a n i n t e g r a l p a r t
o f those a c c o m p l i s h m e n t s . N o serious s t u d e n t o f m e m o r y
c a n afford to i g n o r e it.
REFERENCES
Bahrick, H. P. (1984). Semantic memory content in permastore: Fifty
years of memory for Spanish learned in school. Journal of Experi-
mental Psychology: General 113, 1-29.
Banaji, M. R., & Crowder, R. G. (1989). The bankruptcy of everyday
memory. American Psychologist, 44, 1185-1193.
Brewer, W. E (1988). Memory for randomly sampled autobiographical
events. In U. Neisser & E. Winograd (Eds.), Remembering reconsid-
ered: Ecological and traditional approaches to the study of memory
(pp. 21-90). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Ceci, S. J., & Bronfenbrenner, U. (1985). Don't forget to take the cupcakes
out of the oven: Strategic time-monitoring, prospective memory, and
context. Child Development, 56, 175-190.
Fivush, R., & Hamond, N. R. (in press). Autobiographical memory
across the preschool years: Toward reconceptualizing childhood am-
nesia. In R. Fivush & J. A. Hudson (Eds.), Knowing and remembering
in young children. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Gibson, J. J. (1979). The ecologicalapproach to visual perception. Boston:
Houghton Mittlin.
Harsch, N., & Neisset; U. (1989, November). Substantial and irreversible
errors in flashbulb memories of the Challenger explosion. Poster pre-
sented at the meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Atlanta, GA.
Hudson, J. A. (in press). The emergence of autobiographic memory in
mother-child conversation. In R. Fivush & J. A. Hudson (Eds.),
Knowing and remembering in young children. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
36
Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, fire, and dangerous things: What categories
reveal about the mind. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Lofius, E. (1979). Eyewitness testimony. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press.
McCloskey, M., Wible, C. G., & Cohen, N. J. (1988). Is there a special
flashbulb memory mechanism? Journal of experimental psychology:
General 117, 171-181.
Medin, D. L., & Wattenmaker, W. D. (1987). Category cohesiveness,
theories, and cognitive archeology. In U. Neisser (Ed.), Concepts and
conceptual development: Ecological and intellectual factors in cate-
gorization (pp. 25-62). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Mervis, C. B. (1987). Child-basic object categories and early iexical de-
velopment. In U. Neisser (Ed.), Concepts and conceptual development:
Ecological and intellectual factors in categorization (pp. 201-233).
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Neisser, U. (1978). Memory: What are the important questions? In
M. M. Gruneberg, P. E. Morris, & R. N. Sykes (Eds.), Practical aspects
of memory (pp. 3-24). London: Academic Press.
Neisser, U., & Harsch, N. (in press). Phantom flashbulbs: False recol-
lections of hearing the news about Challenger. In E. Winograd & U.
Neisser (Eds.), Flashbulb memories: Recalling the "Challenger" ex-
plosion and other disasters. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Nelson, K. (1986). Event knowledge: Structure and function in devel-
opment. Hillsdale, N J: Eribaum.
Nelson, K. (1988). The ontogeny of memory for real events. In U. Neisser
& E. Winograd (Eds.), Remembering reconsidered: Ecological and
traditional approaches to the study of memory (pp. 244-276). New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Roseh, E. (1978). Principles of categorization. In E. Rosch & B. B. Lloyd
(Eds.), Cognition and categorization (pp. 27-48). Hiiisdale, NJ: Erl-
baum.
Ross, M. (1989). Relation of implicit theories to the construction of
personal histories. Psychological Review, 96, 341-357.
Winograd, E. (1988). Continuities between ecological and laboratory
approaches to memory. In U. Neisser & E. Winograd (Eds.), Remem-
bering reconsidered: Ecological and traditional approaches to the study
of memory (pp. 11-20). New York: Cambridge University Press.
J a n u a r y 1991 A m e r i c a n Psychologist