The Mnemic Effects of P. I. Zinchenko

This article presents an overview of the primary works by Piotr Ivanovich Zinchenko on the psychology of memory and explores certain little-known aspects of his biography. It concludes that Zinchenko's theoretical and experimental research places him among the founders of the activity approach to cognitive processes. The great heuristic potential of this approach has contributed to the development of methodology and the empirical study of fundamental memory effects that were independently "discovered" much later by cognitive psychology (including the generation effect and the depth-of-processing effect).