Stage Theories Refuted

Abstract

This chapter examines the stages of processing meta-theory (SPM) that has guided construction of theories in psychology during the past 350 years, from philosopher René Descartes in seventeenth-century France to neuropsychologists Carl Wernicke and Paul Broca in nineteenth-century Europe to psychologists Dominic Massaro and Alan Baddeley in late twentieth-century America and Britain. The most basic SPM assumptions are that processing and storage of information take place within a finite number of autonomous modules or stages, and that some stages are sequentially ordered with respect to others. Flowcharts typically summarize these assumptions. The traditional stages of processing for verbal information are comprehension, storage, retrieval, and production. SPM flowcharts can add new stages and can alter old labels to represent new types of information processing, but whatever the labels, the stages must be finite in number, distinct, independent, and sequentially ordered between input and output.

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