Cognitive Psychology and Information Processing: An Introduction

This book makes a serious effort to cover almost every area of cognitive psychology. There are content chapters on: reaction time, attention, episodic memory, multistore models, semantic memory, psycholinguistics, comprehension, discourse processing, and (by James F. Juola) pattern reception. In addition, there are four chapters on metatheoretical matters and on the various fields that have contributed to information-processing psychology. There is a brief epilogue, terminal bibliography, author index, and subject index. Overall, the book is high level (perhaps a bit too much so) and excellent. It is clearly the best single-volume book I have seen that would serve as a graduate text. Undergraduates would find some of it heavy going. Every chapter is outlined and well organized. The writing is clear. Each chapter begins with a 2-3 page outlined abstract of the chapter. These abstracts are superb. They are so helpful that the reader may feel he can skip reading the chapter! I have one minor and one major criticism. The minor one is that the pattern recognition chapter seems out of place. The major one concerns the first four chapters (over 125 pages). In these chapters a great deal is said about philosophy of science, metatheoretical issues, and the importance of paradigms in science in general as well as in psychology in particular. Obeisance is made to Kuhn. This theme of the importance of paradigms, and especially of changes in paradigms, is carried to some extent throughout the content chapters. I totally disagree. I see no relevance at all of the Kuhnian approach to what psychology was, is now, or will become. This book could have been shortened by almost 100 pages (which would improve it) if the first four chapters were reduced to one, a brief one. Other than that, this is an excellent book.