ABSTRACT
There are few areas of psychological study that are so full of competing models and collections of data, which are not always properly understood, as memory. As mentioned in chapter 1, metaphors have been applied to memory since the time of the Greeks. One feature standing in the way of the application of the metaphor of the intuitive statistician is that memory storage has sometimes been considered a passive process in which decision-making is hardly called for. According to those who believe that memory is a passive process, the organism possesses a cluster of habits or memories which are evoked by appropriate stimuli or retrieval cues, and processes such as decision making and hypothesis testing are relatively unimportant. This was the traditional view until the time of the inference revolution, but it is worth asking whether there were any writers prior to the inference revolution who did conceive of the retrieval process as involving inference. First, then, let us briefly survey memory theory as it existed before the inference revolution.
