... A variety of metaphors, often of a special nature, have been used to try and capture the way memory works. Memory has been frequently thought of as a mental space in the brain: Aristotle talked of the memory as a wax tablet, Plato as an aviary and John Locke as a cabinet. More recent metaphors, inspired by technological developments, have likened memory to a telephone exchange system, to an electronic communication system and more recently to a neural network, thanks also to the new technologies of brain scanning (Fulcher, 2003) Memory theorists appear to have been drawn into two opposing approaches. On the one hand, there were scholars such as Baddeley (1974;2000), Broadbent (1958), and Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968) who, following Ebbinghaus (1885), were keen to investigate "pure memory", i.e. the processes of encoding, storing and retrieving information, within a Stimulus-Response framework, free from any subjective interference, such as the ...

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