Did Alan Baddeley invent the term "working memory" or someone before him?

-- Harry Whitaker (hwhitake@nmu.edu), October 05, 2001

Answers

I just asked Gus Craik (of "levels of processing" fame) about this, and he sent me the following answer:

"An interesting question! I had a dim memory to the effect that Atkinson and Shiffrin had also used the term working memory, although as a description of activities rather than as a defenitive label, and I have just checked their 1971 paper in Scientific American, and they DO use it. I then went back to the original Atkinson and Shiffrin chapter, which was in Spence & Spence (Eds) The Psychology of learning and Motivation Vol 2, 1968, and indeed they use it again there, in the sense that short term memory "is the subject's working memory" where information from the senses interacts with information retrieved from long-term memory.

"So Baddeley was not the first to use the term, although he obviously put forward a particular model which has been very influential.

"It's quite possible that others have used the term descrptively too..........OK, I just looked at Anderson & Bower (1974) Human Associative Memory (the book) and they use the term in that sense a LOT....5-6 refs in their index...so if your correspondent wants to check it further back, he or she could do so in earlier cognitive books....Neisser (1967) for instance."

-- Christopher Green (christo@yorku.ca), October 05, 2001.

I just had a look at Neisser's _Cognitive Psychology_ (1967) as Gus Craik suggested, and found no reference to "working memory" in either the index, the table of contents, or the concluding chapter "A cognitive approach to memory and thought".

-- Christopher Green (christo@yorku.ca), October 05, 2001.