Levels of Processing in Human Memory

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,…