The ecological study of memory.

The study of memory has long been dominated by the structural tradition, and especially by the experimental analysis of mechanisms of information processing. That dominance may soon be brought to an end by the progress of neuroscience, which offers more direct ways of studying the mechanisms in question. At that point functional issues may move to centre stage. Those issues include the act of remembering and its social functions, the skills and presuppositions of the remembered, the interaction of those skills and presuppositions with the particular material being remembered, and the determinants of accuracy and confabulation in recall.