Abstract
According to the author, this book is about long-term episodic memories. This type of memory is illustrated by an example of remembering sitting in front of the TV and watching an episode of The Lone Ranger. However, most of the book is not about this type of episodic or autobiographical memory, but about learning word lists or other stimuli in the laboratory. So if you had intended to read this book to learn more about why we have extraordinary memories for exceptional events from our personal lives, this is not really the book to turn to. This has nothing to do with the quality of the content, but when I read the title, I expected to learn something about memory for exceptional—and emotional—events such as winning or losing a sports competition or, in the less emotional category of exceptional events, remembering, for example, the unusual situation at a party were one’s rather quiet and shy colleague turned into a Killer on the Dance Floor. This book is not, as its title might imply, an easy-to-read popular science book on remembering emotional or otherwise distinct events from one’s personal past. This book is about the basic mechanisms and basic research that might help explain why we remember some events better than others. The book is for students and scholars in cognitive psychology who want a thorough overview over this area of research.
A general strength of this book is that Schmidt does a very good job at describing and explaining processes directly related to doing research (statistics, methods) and at describing the various problems that can arise from using different methods in laboratory studies. Also, it is a nice touch that Schmidt at times tries to engage the reader in interactive learning, for example, by including a little “do-it-yourself” experiment or by recommending consulting YouTube for visual material. Furthermore, theories are illustrated by examples, and figures are always well explained. Despite these strengths, readers without a background in cognitive or experimental psychology would probably have a hard time following at least the last chapters of the book.
In the first chapter, Schmidt defines extraordinary memories. He introduces the distinction between primary distinctiveness (distinct in the immediate context, but not distinct per se) and secondary distinctiveness (distinct, no matter in what context), and he emphasizes that distinctiveness can be defined by more than just emotional arousal, because events can be distinct without being emotionally arousing. These two theoretical points (two types of distinctiveness: arousing vs non-arousing distinct events) stringently organize the rest of the book. After a comprehensive overviews over different theoretical approaches to the study of memories, the book moves from “real world” emotional events (flashbulb memories) to emotional events in the laboratory, and on to laboratory studies concerned with secondary and primary distinctiveness.
Chapters 3 and 4 seem a bit weaker than the last chapters of the book, which are a truly comprehensive, well written, and well informed tour de force through laboratory studies on all aspects of primary and secondary distinctiveness. First, in the chapter on flashbulb memories, the psychologist Woodworth (1938) is credited with the discovery of the standard forgetting curve. This might seem irrelevant, but it is highly puzzling that Ebbinghaus (1885) is not mentioned for discovering a memory phenomenon that is usually referred to as “the Ebbinghaus Curve.” Second, and more importantly, the chapter on Flashbulb Memories (chapter 3) and the chapter on emotional memories in the lab (chapter 4) lack a major aspect in the study of memories for emotional events. In both chapters, the distinction between the role of positive and negative valence on memory is largely absent. Even though the influence of valence on memory for emotional pictures is briefly mentioned (p. 86), the two chapters never really describe the systematic differences between memories for positive and negative events/words. There exists a whole literature concerned with remembering positive versus negative events, both inside and outside the laboratory that is hardly touched upon in these two chapters. (See, for example, Berntsen’s (2002) study on memory of central and peripheral details for positive and negative events; studies on positive and negative flashbulb memories, Schrauf and Sanchez’ (2004) study on the prevalence of positive and negative words, which has implications for the design of word list studies.)
As mentioned above, the chapters on primary and secondary distinctiveness are very thorough presentations of, as it seems, all laboratory research in all areas concerned with distinctiveness of memories. Finally, the last chapter pulls the main points of the book together, presenting three factors thought to support extraordinary memories, and suggesting future directions for the study of distinctiveness in memory. The book closes with a quote—just like every chapter started with a thought provoking quote. The author expresses his hope that the reader enjoyed these quotes, and, certainly, this reader did. As for the entire book, the reader might not enjoy reading it some of the time, but will certainly get a lot of food for thought from it all of the time.