Inspiration and Perspiration: Genius at Work on Cognition

Reviews the book, Language, Memory, and Thought by John R. Anderson (see record 1977-07130-000). This is an important book, filled with interesting new ideas and experiments and clean, concise, insightful summaries of related work. The focus of the book is on semantic memory--the most rapidly advancing area of psychology at the present time. The focus of Language, Memory, and Thought is on a new theory of the mind (ACT) invented by John Anderson, one can get an enormous amount of knowledge and intellectual stimulation from the book regardless of one's opinion of that theory. The most fundamental feature of any theory of the mind is its partitioning of knowledge between declarative and procedural components. At the end of the book, Anderson presents most of the significant criticisms of his theory: (a) the inelegant separation of activation from other cognitive processes, (b) the complexity due to an overly detailed level of description of the cognitive processes in the production system (there are potentially thousands of them), (c) the resulting communication and empirical-testing difficulties. However these criticisms of ACT are as much a compliment to the theory as its successes. Anderson does a good job of explaining the essence of his ideas in the less technical sections of the book. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)