THE ECOLOGICAL STUDY OF MEMORY

The study of memory has long been dominated by the structural traditio n, and especially by the experimental analysis of mechanisms of inform ation processing. That dominance may soon be brought to an end by the progress of neuroscience, which offers more direct ways of studying th e mechanisms in question. At that point functional issues may move to centre stage. Those issues include the act of remembering and its soci al functions, the skills and presuppositions of the rememberer, the in teraction of those skills and presuppositions with the particular mate rial being remembered, and the determinants of accuracy and confabulat ion in recall.