Review by Choice Review
In an extension of her doctoral dissertation, Gillespie enters the current lively debate regarding metatheoretical assumptions in cognitive psychology, on the side of contextualism, a view of experiences grounded in historical events with social, political, and moral contexts and with a communal perspective that Gillespie dubs "the mind's we." This approach is contrasted to reigning mechanistic, laboratory research-based, information processing models that isolate the perceiver, "the mind's I," from the environment. Aside from her engaging narrative analyses and attempts to relate contextualism and feminist theory, Gillespie offers few new insights. However, she does a credible job of characterizing traditional mechanistic approaches to perception, memory, and categorization, then rallying support for the alternative voices of contextualists, particularly extolling Jim Gibson's ecological approach to visual perception, the contextualist memory research of James Jenkins, John Bransford, and Ulric Neisser, and the dynamic categorization models of George Lakoff and Eleanor Rosch. Unfortunately, only passing references are made to David Rumelhart's parallel distributed processing connectionist model. Advanced undergraduate and graduate students will find this a thoughtful critique of the psychological and philosophical theories shaping cognitive research in this decade. T. J. Thieman; College of St. Catherine
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
