2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Informative but not a easy read, October 9, 2011
Overall opinion
As I read this book with little or no prior knowledge about these concepts, I felt that it is better suited to be a reference book rather than an introduction to the concept of interference and inhibition. As a reference, however, I would highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in the research of cognitive processes. The purpose of my review is lay out the highlights and issues of the book so other readers can better appreciate the book.
About the book
Interference and inhibition are basic concepts that have regained their popularity due to their function in cognition. Interference is the phenomenon where some memory is forgotten or altered due to interfering effects of older or newer memories. Inhibition is the mechanism that reduces the interference effects in cognition. This book explores scientific theories and empirical research on several topics pertaining to these concepts. It is primarily written to present the current theoretical landscape of interference and inhibition and also serve as a catalyst for future research on these concepts.
Explanation of the style and structure
The book is structured in three parts with a total twelve chapters. The first chapter is on historical perspective, the next five chapters on developmental perspective and the last six chapters on adult perspectives. The developmental perspective on interference and inhibition includes Fuzzy-Trace theory analysis, interference or facilitation on infant memory, the case of cognitive triage, evolution of inhibition mechanisms, and the development of cognitive inhibition. The adult perspectives includes selective attention and negative priming, memory interference and misinformation effects, skilled suppression, catastrophic interference in neural networks, inhibitory processes in cognition and aging and final comments on new perspectives.
The style of the book varies for each chapter and the chapters are written by different researchers. Most chapters delve into their topic without providing a proper introduction. This makes it difficult to understand the position of the author and their domain of research. However, they do provide relevant headers for each sub-section. Another problem that I faced was the overall cohesiveness of book. Even with the unifying theme of interference and inhibition, it felt as though I was reading multiple books due to the lack of connections between the chapters. However, I don't mean to discourage any readers as the information in the book is too valuable to just take the style of the book into consideration.
Synopsis of certain interesting or important parts of book
The book begins with a historical perspective of interference in cognition and discusses the classical interference theory and its decline due to its lack of relevance to everyday. Following this period, there was a mix of theories cognitive interference theories and developmental psychology theories as the effects of interference and inhibition seemed to vary from infancy to adulthood.
The second part of the book discusses the developmental perspectives of interference and inhibition. An interesting developmental psychology theory on interference effects on memory is the fuzzy-trace theory, in which information is stored in multiple representations such as "gist" and "verbatim" memory forms. This theory proposes that the two memory representations are often colliding especially in young children, and produces interference effects as a result. However, interference decreases with age and adults have the ability to process both representations simultaneously.
Another developmental perspective is studies of interference and facilitation on infant memory. Studies used the infants' ability to selectively attend to stimulus that do not match any of their existing internal representations and found retroactive interference effect in memory retrieval. An interesting finding from these studies was that sleep helps to retrieve forgotten memories and decreases the potential sources of interference. In general, information learned before or after the learning process will either interfere or facilitate in memory retrieval depending upon the reason for the memory retrieval and also on the time of encountering new information.
The next topic is my most favorite part of the book and it covers evolution of inhibitory mechanisms and their relation to human cognition and behavior. Inhibitory mechanisms correlate with specific response patterns that are learned in connection to sensory input and contribute higher cognitive processes. "The connections [in the enlarged neocortex] afforded greater voluntary inhibitory control over sexual and aggressive behaviors, which in turn lead to enhanced social harmony". For me, this quote says it all about how inhibitory mechanisms evolved along with the neocortex and its significant role in creating our current society. Cognitive inhibition plays a huge role in clearing unnecessary actions or paying attention to irrelevant stimuli by suppressing previously activated processes and preventing interference from other processes. Inhibition process keeps our strong emotional urges in check so we can assess the implications of our actions before doing them. Researchers point to the associative areas of the prefrontal cortex as the primary locus of neural basis of inhibition. I highly recommend reading further details on the neurophysiology and evolution of inhibitory mechanisms that are explained in the book.
The third part of book covers adult perspectives on inhibitory concepts like negative priming, misinformation effect, skilled comprehension and suppression, inhibitory process in aging, and final conclusion. Negative priming is the phenomena where "responses to an object may be slower or less accurate if a related object has recently been ignored". There is evidence of negative priming effects in a variety of "real world tasks" and is perceived to aid in selective attention. The misinformation effect in memory is nothing but distortion of memory after it is formed. Some factors that contribute to the distortion are memory strength of original event, delay and poor encoding of the event. Memory can also "be strengthened by immediate tests prior to misinformation" to reduce the misinformation effects.
I found the mechanism of skilled suppression to be very interesting as it is the underlying principle of comprehension. The goal of "comprehension is to build coherent mental representations or structures" while skilled suppression helps to reduce interference by "active dampening of activation" from inappropriate, incorrect or irrelevant information.
Research on inhibitory mechanisms in aging includes investigation of sensory processes, learning and semantic activation. The data suggest that older adults have deficits in inhibitory function and are in general less selective information processors than young adults. I was expecting to learn more about ways to prevent or slow these deficits and was disappointed as none were mentioned. As for the conclusion, the unifying theme of all the chapters is the concept of inhibitory mechanism to resist interference. I wish that book started with this theme in the beginning as it would have tied all the chapters together in context.
Opinions on book
As I mentioned earlier, I would suggest this book to anyone who is interested in learning about the research and theories of interference and inhibition. It is however not an easy read for someone starting to learn about these concepts. Despite these circumstances, I did enjoy the reading as the information was enlightening and interesting. There were some parts of the book that were very technical with scientific jargon in terms of the research and experiments. There was also little or no explanation for those terms and I had to rely on other research to understand. However, I believe that researchers of the same field will not face this problem and will benefit more from the experimental details for their own future research.
One of the requirements for valid theories on interference and inhibition is the relevance to real world activities. However, the book rarely used real world examples to explain the concepts. Despite being a scientific collection of theories and empirical research, I expected real world examples in both theories and in explanations of concepts. I felt that that would have made the book more interesting rather than just stating the information.
This book is also a great challenge to our brains. The authors simply state the conclusions from their research and do not explain every step of their reasoning. I find this very tactful as the reader can find the information necessary to reason on their own and form conclusions. This provides room to analyze and perhaps improve the existing theories and research experiments. As one of the purposes of the book is to act as a catalyst for new research, the book provides the resources necessary to create your own theories. I often found myself performing some of the experiments on myself in order to understand the results and conclusions.
Apart from the individual chapters, I found the preface and the concluding chapter to be important and useful. The preface gives a nice and short introduction to the book and a few sentences about each of the chapters. Similarly, the concluding chapters unifies the chapters together and points out new directions for research with specific issues to address. I did feel that the unifying themes would have better suited the preface as it would help to keep the chapters in context of the unifying theme.
Recommendation for Readers
I might be repeating but I recommend this book for people who have some prior knowledge about interference and inhibition and...
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