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Book Review: A History of Western Psychology

described walking and reaching, they introduce juggling or piano playing with a sudden flourish, as complex activities somehow to be explained by the concepts and models of simpler activities. Yet Bryan and Harter, writing in the Psychological Review in 1899, showed very clearly that complex skills have emergent properties that have to be described in their own terms. Sheridan, in the present book, argues convincingly that a simplecomplex distinction can be misleading in the context of voluntary movement. Raising a cup of tea to the lips is in its way as complex an action as any. However, complexity of a different kind arises when discrete actions have to be coordinated in continuous sequences, as in skills like speaking, dancing, figure skating, juggling and playing music. A theory of such skills ought to be able to account for discrete (complex) movement as a special case, but the converse may not hold: it would be amazingly prescient if a theory based on the study of discrete or cyclically repeating movements can account for the expressive fluency of serial action. This point is almost completely missed, for example, by Turvey, Kelso and their colleagues writing on a theory of coordinative structures, in Kelso’s book and elsewhere. That group, fully alert to the subtleties of discrete and cyclic movements, seem not to grasp the special problems of serial action. Van Galen and Wing understand the problems much better and provide some interesting descriptions of serial performance, but they have not prepared the theoretical background well enough to give a perspective to the research, and they miss out on the insights obtained from studying such activities as speech. In a rare moment of hyperbole at the end of the book, Smyth and Wing refer to human movement study as an expanding and exciting area. Their editorial policy serves to demonstrate the first rather than the second part of this claim, since they choose to go for breadth of coverage rather than insight. A science becomes exciting when it reveals unexpected phenomena or throws up new abstract ideas, but these are not prominent in the book, because, in the cause of comprehensiveness, they have been embedded in large quantities of indifferent material. Nevertheless, some of the chapters provide excellent compact tutorial reviews of their topics, and considerable care has gone into the overall presentation.