Ian Neath

In most areas of scientific research, there exist laws and principles that are the foundation of research and theory within that discipline. In the domain of human memory, however, there are few principles and no widely accepted laws (Roediger, 2008). One reason offered for the lack of laws and principles is that memory is not a unitary system but rather is made up of multiple different systems: Because each memory system has different properties and operates according to different principles, "no profound generalizations can be made about memory as a whole" (Tulving, 1985, p. 385). In contrast, I propose that system-wide principles of memory that apply over different time scales, different tests, and different hypothetical underlying memory systems can indeed be found, and my current research tests the generality of these principles using a combination of behavioural and computational approaches.