Book reviews 105

ing use of hypnosis by police departments especially in the US. In most cases, these police hypno-technicians have received a brief course in which un- founded claims (especially concerning the nature of memory) are presented as facts. As they show by a review of a large number of court cases, this has led to several instances of confabulated recall being presented as testimony in court. Although in the cases reported the testimony has not been accepted by the courts, it is quite likely that there have been miscarriages of justices that have not been detected. As a result of this, it is now generally accepted (at least in the research community) that testimony from hypnotized witnesses should be excluded on the grounds that they are incompetent to testify. At the very least, the use of hypnosis in legal situations should be regulated by a number of safeguards, such as described in the Orne guidelines (included in an appendix). This implies that the fact that hypnosis has been used should always be reported by the police, a requirement that is probably not always obeyed.

All in all, Laurence and Perry have provided a very well-researched critical analysis of the history of hypnosis and its uses in legal proceedings. Apart from being an excellent source of information, it is also remarkably funny, especially when they describe some of the rather obscure ideas that were common in the 18th century. To give just one example, they describe the experiments of Lafontaine who tried to hypnotize a number of lizards. One day, however, he had placed a lizard in a jar on a window, in the sun. Unfortunately (especially for the lizard) he had to leave and forgot it there. When he came back several hours later, he found the poor lizard fried: it had been burnt by the sun. The authors comment: ‘This may be one of the first recorded admissions of an investigator not merely throwing out data, but of cooking it as well.’

Jeroen G.W. Raaijmakers TN0 Institute for Perception

P.O. Box 23 3 769 ZG Soesterberg

The Netherlandr

William C. Gordon, Learning and Memory. Brooks/Cole, Pacific Grove, CA, 1989. 358 pp., E14.95.

Over the last thirty years the fields of ‘learning’ and ‘memory’ have gradually drifted apart. The study of learning processes as defined here is concerned with basic conditioning paradigms using primarily non-human subjects. Memory research, on the other hand, is based on the information processing paradigm and uses almost exclusively human subjects. This state of affairs that is reflected in separate courses, research groups, and textbooks, is

106 Book reviews

deplored by the author and is the motivation for writing this textbook that presents both topics at an (advanced) undergraduate level.

The eleven chapters deal with all the conventional issues that one would expect in such a textbook: classical, instrumental and operant conditioning, verbal learning and transfer, generalization, discrimination and concept learn- ing, memory storage, organization in memory, retrieval processes, and forget- ting. The treatment of these topics is quite conventional but not very up-to-date (this is especially true for the chapters on memory). Many recent issues (such as repetition priming and implicit memory) are not discussed. The most surprising omission is the recent work on neural networks. This is remarkable because the studies in this area try to bridge the gap between traditional associative conditioning concepts and the type of cognitive performance studied by memory psychologists.

If one accepts these limitations, this book might serve quite well as a textbook. It is easy to read, clear, and will give students a good overview of the basic findings and theories in these two fields.

Jeroen G.W. Raaijmakers TN0 Institute for Perception

P.O. Box 23 3769 ZG Soesterberg

The Netherlands

Guy Tiberghien (ed.), Advances in Cognitive Science: Vol. 2: Theory and Applications. Ellis Horwood Ltd., Chichester, 1989. 204 pp., E39.95.

According to the preface it is the aim of this book ‘to offer a comprehensive view of experimental and theoretical research representing the present state of Cognitive Science’. If this was indeed the case, the attempt cannot be said to have been very successful. However, I doubt that this was the primary aim. The editor has made a deliberate attempt to include largely research from French laboratories. This rather parochial attitude is defended on the grounds that linguistic barriers have prevented international exposure of research in the French-speaking community. It must be said, however, that the present collection of authors have managed quite well. As I will explain, there may be other aspects involved in the failure to get a fair share of international exposure.

The present volume starts with an introduction by the editor in which he defines the terms ‘Cognitive Psychology’ and ‘Cognitive Science’. The first is defined in the same way as in the classic monograph by Uhic Neisser (1967): it is the psychology of human information processing. The definition of ‘Cognitive Science’ is much less clear. Tiberghien writes: ‘Cognitive Science implies the theoretical and experimental study of coding, storing and manipu-