The concept of coding in learning-memory theory

The concept of coding, which refers to what is stored in memory during learning, is defended, as an important and necessary conceptual advance in learning-memory theory during the last decade. It is maintained that the concept covers a wide variety of functionally different coding operations, with many specifics of its operation still to be experimentally determined, and that attempts to restrict its meaning to arbitrary transformational coding, as suggested by Restle, should be rejected. The paper comments on the empirical contributions to coding theory by Johnson, Wickens, Martin, and Postman and Bums in the symposium for which it served a discussant function.