Koriat & Goldsmith's distinction between the correspondence and storehouse metaphors is valuable for both memory theory and methodology. It is questionable, however, whether this distinction underlies the heated debate about so called “everyday memory” research. The distinction between experimental and naturalistic methodologies better characterizes this debate. I compare these distinctions and discuss how the methodological distinction, between experimental and naturalistic designs, could give rise to different theoretical approaches.

Koriat & Goldsmith provide an excellent analysis of the flexibility of retrieval processes and how they are situationally dependent. I agree with their emphasis on functional considerations and argue that the traditional laboratory experiment motivates the subject to be accurate. However, I disagree with their strong claim that the quantity–accuracy distinction implies an essential discontinuity between traditional and naturalistic approaches to the study of memory.

The correspondence view is consistent with a theory of direct remembering that assumes continuity between perception and memory. Two implications of direct remembering for correspondence are suggested. It is assumed that forgetting is exponential, and that remembering at one time is independent of factors influencing remembering at another. Elaboration of the correspondence view in the same terms as perception offers a novel approach to the study of memory.

This paper investigates the origins of the Oral Theory as formulated by Milman Parry in Paris during the late 1920s by reexamining the scholarship on which it rests. Parry's Oral Theory compared the texts of oral performances in Yugoslavia with the Homeric texts in order to shed light on the presumed oral origins of the latter. His work integrated the work of the linguist and Indo-Europeanist Antoine Meillet, the linguist and scholar of oral poetics Matthias Murko, and the anthropologists Lucien (...) Lévy-Bruhl and Marcel Jousse. (shrink)

This paper investigates the origins of the Oral Theory as formulated by Milman Parry in Paris during the late 1920s by reexamining the scholarship on which it rests. Parry's Oral Theory compared the texts of oral performances in Yugoslavia with the Homeric texts in order to shed light on the presumed oral origins of the latter. His work integrated the work of the linguist and Indo-Europeanist Antoine Meillet, the linguist and scholar of oral poetics Matthias Murko, and the anthropologists Lucien (...) Lévy-Bruhl and Marcel Jousse. (shrink)

This paper investigates the origins of the Oral Theory as formulated by Milman Parry in Paris during the late 1920s by reexamining the scholarship on which it rests. Parry's Oral Theory compared the texts of oral performances in Yugoslavia with the Homeric texts in order to shed light on the presumed oral origins of the latter. His work integrated the work of the linguist and Indo-Europeanist Antoine Meillet, the linguist and scholar of oral poetics Matthias Murko, and the anthropologists Lucien (...) Lévy-Bruhl and Marcel Jousse. (shrink)

To understand the impact which the newly self‐conscious technology of information is likely to have, and to develop that technology effectively, it is necessary to appreciate two previous revolutions in information technology, those which followed the introductions of writing and of printing. Understanding the role which these technologies have in our intellectual lives may help to avoid the misconceptions which are generated by the temptation to think of the instruments of communication as having a life independent of the use to (...) which humans put those artifacts. (shrink)

Classical antiquity provides not just the storehouse metaphor, which postdates Plato, but also parts of the correspondence metaphor. In the fifth century B.C., Thucydides (1.22) considered the role of gist and accuracy in writing history, and Aristotle (Poetics1451b, 1460b 8–11) offered an explanation. Finally, the Greek for truth (alêtheia) means “that which is not forgotten.”.

The correspondence metaphor is useful in developing functional models of memory. However, the storehouse metaphor is still useful in developing structural and process models of memory. Traditional research techniques explore the structure of memory; everyday techniques explore the function of memory. We illustrate this point with two examples: amnesia and metamemory. In each phenomenon, both metaphors are useful.

Teaching is hypothesized to be a species-typical behavior in humans that contributed to the emergence of cumulative culture. Several within-culture studies indicate that foragers depend heavily on social learning to acquire practical skills and knowledge, but it is unknown whether teaching is universal across forager populations. Teaching can be defined ethologically as the modification of behavior by an expert in the presence of a novice, such that the expert incurs a cost and the novice acquires skills/knowledge more efficiently or that (...) it would not acquire otherwise. One behavioral modification hypothesized to be an adaptation for teaching is ostensive communication—exaggerations of prosody and gesture that signal intent to transmit generalizable knowledge and indicate the intended receiver. On this view, the use of ostensive communication in conjunction with the transmission of generalizable knowledge constitutes evidence of teaching. Oral storytelling appears to meet these criteria: Indigenous peoples regard their traditions as important sources of ecological and social knowledge, and oral storytelling is widely reported to employ paralinguistic communication. To test this hypothesis, descriptions of performed narrative in forager societies were coded for the use of 14 ostensive-communicative behaviors and the presence of generalizable knowledge. Although biased toward North America, the study sample comprised 53 forager cultures spanning five continents, 34 language families, and diverse biomes. All cultures evinced the predicted behaviors. Results suggest that foragers use storytelling as a mode of instruction, thus providing cross-cultural evidence of teaching in forager populations. (shrink)

The research guided by the correspondence metaphor is lauded for its emphasis on functional analysis, but the term “correspondence” itself needs clarification. Of the two terms in the relationship, only one is well defined. It is suggested that behavior at acquisition needs to be analyzed and that molecular principles from the learning laboratory might be useful in doing so.

Koriat & Goldsmith propose that the correspondence metaphor captures the essence of everyday memory research. We suggest that correspondence is often not at issue because objective assessments of everyday events are frequently lacking. In these cases, other questions arise, such as how individuals evaluate the validity of memories and the significance they attach to those evaluations.

Investigations of metacognition – and also the application of the storehouse and correspondence metaphors – seem as appropriate for laboratory research as for naturalistic research. In terms of measurement, the only quantitative difference between the “input-bound percent correct” and “output-bound percent correct” is the inclusion versus exclusion (respectively) of omission errors in the denominator of the percentages.

Koriat & Goldsmith are right in their claim that the “ecological” and “traditional” approaches to memory rely on different metaphors. But the underlying ecological metaphor is notcorrespondence(which in any case is not a metaphorical notion): it isaction. Remembering is a kind of doing; like most other forms of action it is purposive, personal, and particular.

Plato’s Ion can be read as exposure of the relationship between text and performance. It’s a philosophical dialogue that exploits performative arguments and situations. I’ll make explicit these dramatic assumptions in the following translation of the Plato’s text.

Koriat & Goldsmith's thesis is provocative but has three problems: First, quantity and accuracy are not simply related, they are complementary. Second, the storehouse metaphor is not the driving force behind contemporary theories of memory and may not be viable. Third, the taxonomy is incomplete, leaving unclassified several extremely influential methods and measures, such as priming and response latency.

This commentary deals with criteria for assigning truth values to memory contents. A parallel with perception shows how truth values can be assigned by considering subjects' beliefs about the truth state of the memory content. This topic is also relevant to the study of processes of control over retrieval.

The value of accuracy and quantity as memory measures is assessed. It is argued that (1) accuracy does not measure correspondence (monitoring) because it ignores omissions and correct rejections, (2) quantity is confounded with monitoring in recall, and (3) in recognition, if targets and foils are unequal, both measures, even together, still ignore correct rejections.

Zusammenfassung Seit der Entdeckung des Gilgamesch-Epos am Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts wird von der Forschung angenommen, dass dieses Epos den Inhalt der homerischen Epen beeinflusst habe. Der Beitrag legt dar, wann und auf welchem Wege der kulturelle Transfer zwischen Mesopotamien und Griechenland stattgefunden haben kann. Ferner werden mehrere Passagen aus den homerischen Epen diskutiert, in denen die Forschung eine Beeinflussung durch das Gilgamesch-Epos erkennen möchte. Gezeigt wird, dass diese Ansicht zum Teil subjektiv ist und zum Teil auf veralteten Ausgaben des (...) Gilgamesch-Epos beruht. In einem Exkurs wird zuletzt eine aktuelle These zur Datierung der Ilias analysiert. (shrink)

I propose an adjunct to the two models presented in the target articles, a function of music that is ubiquitous and would have solved a clear adaptive problem, that of transmitting important survival information among pre-literate humans. This class of knowledge songs uniquely preserved cultural, botanical, medical, safety, and practical information that increased the adaptive fitness of societies.

Against any obscurantist stand, denying the interest of natural sciences for the comprehension of human meaning and language, but also against any reductionist hypothesis, frustrating the specificity of the semiotic point of view on nature, the paper argues that the deepest dynamic at the basis of meaning consists in its being a mechanism of ‘potentiality navigation’ within a universe generally characterized by motility. On the one hand, such a hypothesis widens the sphere of meaning to all beings somehow endowed with (...) the capacity of moving and/or perceiving movement. On the other hand, through a new evolutionist interpretation of the concept of generativity, such a hypothesis preserves the peculiarity of human meaning, meant as essentially founded on a certain intuition of infinity. Two corollaries stem from this hypothesis: first, religiosity can be considered as a matrix of grammars of infinity, aiming at regimenting its flight of potentialities. Second, non-genetic transmission of cultural information exerts determinant influence also at the level of that very deep mechanism of the human predicament that is the cognitive navigation of motor potentialities. A re-reading of the structuralist epistemology, scientific literature on the nervous cells of jellyfish, and some recent experiments on the mirror neurons of dancers, as well as certain intuitions of Teilhard de Chardin, are the main arguments of the paper. (shrink)

The correspondence view of memory is not a metaphor. However, correspondence is the essential feature of the archaeology metaphor, which harks back to Freud and Neisser. A modern version of this metaphor and some of its implications are briefly described. The archaeology metaphor integrates the idea of stored traces in a nonmechanistic framework.

In contrast to its aims, Koriat & Goldsmith's article vividly demonstrates(1) the complementarity of ecological and traditional approaches and (2) the difficulty of characterising the growing diversity of memory research with a single set of distinctions. Moreover, the contrast between correspondence and storehouse metaphors is important enough to stand alone without reference to an everyday/laboratory controversy, which is neither acute nor necessary.

The novel correspondence metaphor outlined by Koriat & Goldsmith offers important advantages for studying critical issues of memory-accuracy. It also fits well with the current emphasis on the reconstructive nature of memory and on the role of cognitive, metacognitive, and motivational factors in memory performance. These positive features notwithstanding, the storehouse/correspondence framework faces potential perils having to do with its implied linkage to the laboratory/real-life controversy and its proposal of studying correspondence issues in isolation from memory phenomena captured by the (...) storehouse paradigm. (shrink)

Our response to the commentators covers four general issues: (1) How useful is our proposed conceptualization of the real-life/laboratory controversy in terms of the contrast between the correspondence and storehouse metaphors? (2) What is the relationship between these two metaphors? (3) What are the unique implications of the correspondence metaphor for memory assessment and theory? (4) What are the nature and role of memory metaphors in memory research? We stress that the correspondence metaphor can be usefully exploited independent of the (...) real-life/laboratory controversy, but that a variety of other metaphors, including the storehouse, should also be utilized in order to more fully capture the myriad facets and functions of memory in everyday life. (shrink)

The study of memory is witnessing a spirited clash between proponents of traditional laboratory research and those advocating a more naturalistic approach to the study of “real-life” or “everyday” memory. The debate has generally centered on the “what” (content), “where” (context), and “how” (methods) of memory research. In this target article, we argue that the controversy discloses a further, more fundamental breach between two underlying memory metaphors, each having distinct implications for memory theory and assessment: Whereas traditional memory research has (...) been dominated by thestorehousemetaphor, leading to a focus on thenumberof items remaining in store and accessible to memory, the recent wave of everyday memory research has shifted toward acorrespondencemetaphor, focusing on theaccuracyof memory in representing past events. The correspondence metaphor calls for a research approach that differs from the traditional one in important respects: in emphasizing the intentional –representational function of memory, in addressing the wholistic and graded aspects of memory correspondence, in taking an output-bound assessment perspective, and in allowing more room for the operation of subject-controlled metamemory processes and motivational factors. This analysis can help tie together soine of the what, where, and how aspects of the “real-life/laboratory” controversy. More important, however, by explicating the unique metatheoretical foundation of the accuracy-oriented approach to memory we aim to promote a more effective exploitation of the correspondence metaphor inbothnaturalistic and laboratory research contexts. (shrink)

Koriat & Goldsmith restrict their definition of memory to “being about some past event,” which causes them to ignore the most common use of memory: everyday visual-motor tasks. New techniques make it possible to study memory in the context of these natural tasks with which memory is so tightly coupled. Memory can be more fully understood in the context of these actions.

Pāṇini's fourth century BC Sanskrit grammar uses rewrite rules utilizing an explicit formal language defined through a semi-formal metalanguage. The grammar is generative, meaning that it is capable of expressing a potential infinity of well-formed Sanskrit sentences starting from a finite symbolic inventory. The grammar's operational rules involve extensive use of auxiliary markers, in the form of Sanskrit phonemes, to control grammatical derivations. Pāṇini's rules often utilize a generic context-sensitive format to identify terms used in replacement, modification or deletion operations. (...) The context-sensitive rule format is itself defined using Pāṇini's more general method of auxiliary markers, the latter used to define many dozens of linguistic categories and rules controlling derivations of Sanskrit sentences through the manipulation of ‘non-terminal’ and ‘terminal’ symbols. This technique for controlling formal derivations was rediscovered by Emil Post in the 1920s and later shown by him to be ca... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Myth, Song, and Music Education:The Case of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and Swann's The Road Goes Ever OnEstelle R. Jorgensen (bio)In this article I explore how myth and song intersect in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy—The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King—and Donald Swann's song cycle setting of Tolkien texts, The Road Goes Ever On.1 (...) In so doing I am drawn back to Tolkien's The Hobbit, the novel from which The Lord of the Rings grew,2 and in the way of myth, I go back to the beginning to see what is there. After sketching some important themes in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and commenting as I go on Swann's musical setting of Tolkien's poems,3 I note several implications for music education.Why this particular tale? There are several reasons for my interest. Penned as a novel a half century ago, it was reborn at the turn of the twenty-first century in a widely circulated and highly acclaimed film trilogy. Its pagan and northern European roots are likewise intriguing, pointing back to a distant and imagined past. This extended historical tale can be seen as an epic journey in the genre of The Iliad and Beowulf.4 Such stories of other times were often sung as well as spoken, and Albert Lord describes the process whereby the telling and retelling of stories would be accommodated to the needs and interests of listeners, all of whom could be presumed to more or less know the story and identify with its characters.5 In a mass-mediated and technologically driven society in which attention is often focused on the present, evocations of the past fill a human need to know, individually and collectively, the story of how we came to be here. They prompt important philosophical questions such as those regarding the nature of good and [End Page 1] evil, ways to live a happy life, the role of supernatural events in human existence, and our responsibility to technology and the environment. And when studied in the context of a song cycle, we may better understand how myth and song intersect and be able to better reflect on what can be learned from this intersection for music education and its place in general education.Swann's song cycle evokes the cyclical journeys undertaken by Bilbo and Frodo, beginning with a party at home and ending triumphantly at home, although their pilgrimages generate yet others as ends become new beginnings. There is no end to this story; its beginning culminates yet others chronicled in The Hobbit and The Silmarillion, and its end commences another tale yet to be told. The rings in Tolkien's novel are figurative of these cycles: three rings for the elves, seven rings for the dwarves, and nine for mortal men. Bilbo's ring chronicled in The Hobbit is unveiled in The Lord of the Rings as the strategically most powerful one. Numerology, or the ancient study of numbers and their mythic significance, serves as a frame for the dense narrative that follows in Tolkien's texts. Swann sets a song cycle comprised of six songs, offering yet another number (whether intentional or not) in counterpoint to Tolkien's.The HobbitWithin this narrative are to be found various mythic qualities: a pilgrim on a quest, the band of travelers bound together in friendship by a common objective, the climactic but eventually successful journey, the struggle between good and evil, the crucial role of elemental natural forces and the interventions by powerful supernatural persons and forces in shaping events, the blurring of the natural and supernatural worlds, the inevitable tests that must be overcome in order to achieve the journey's objectives, the frailties of character demonstrated by the protagonist and his fellows, and the transformative quality of the journey on all those who undertake it.6 The action is set at a particular time and in a particular place with its own languages and kinds of writing (including runes or archaic angular writing that... (shrink)

The author argues that Michael Polanyi’s philosophy of science can be understood as an (unconscious) attempt to recapture elements of experience largely forgotten or repressed in modernity. Specifically, the author argues that Polanyi’s epistemology appears to draw on elements of oral—aural experience that have been relatively ignored by the heavily visual sensory orientation typical of modern Western societies. The author does this by first deriving the primary features of the modern objectivist conception of knowledge from Polanyi’s critique of objectivism and (...) then using the anthropological literature on the differences between oral and literate cultures to demonstrate that these same aspects of the objectivist paradigm correspond closely to typical features of literate, visual consciousness while Polanyi’s alternative formulations correspond to a more oral—aural orientation. (shrink)

Verbal narratives provide incomplete information and can be very long, yet readers and hearers often effortlessly fill in the gaps and make connections across long stretches of text, sometimes even finding this immersive. How is this done? In the last few decades, event-indexing situation modeling and complementary accounts of narrative emotion have suggested answers. Despite this progress, comparisons between real-life perception and narrative experience might underplay the way narrative processing modifies our world model, as well as the role of the (...) emotions that do not relate to characters. I reframe narrative experience in predictive processing and neural networks, capturing continuity between fiction, perception, and states like dreaming and imagination, enabled by the flexible instantiation of concepts. In this framework, narrative experience is more clearly revealed as a creative experience that can share some of the phenomenology of dreams. (shrink)

This inquiry explores the terms yogakshema, sampradaya, and manodharma sangita, as well as theories and practices of improvisation and innovation in music and other fields of Hindu culture. It considers the ways Hindu traditions play out the human contradiction—that life must always combine both old and new; the ways improvising is part of the Hindu frameworks in Vedic chanting, and the performance of ragas and other cultural activities in India. Both set patterns and nuanced interpretations in literary and musical works (...) present processes which suggest models of progress and renewal in various fields of human endeavor. I am unpacking the scholar V. Raghavan’s ideas about how traditions in Indian culture can adapt creatively in time. (shrink)

Do you see now why it feels so good to be a critical mind? Why critique, this most ambiguous pharmakon, has become such a potent euphoric drug? You are always right! When naïve believers are clinging forcefully to their objects... you can turn all of those attachments into so many fetishes and humiliate all the believers by showing that it is nothing but their own projection, that you, yes you alone, can see. But as soon as naïve believers are thus (...) inflated by some belief in their own importance, in their own projective capacity, you strike them by a second uppercut and humiliate them again, this time by showing that, whatever they think, their behavior is entirely determined by the action of powerful causalities coming from objective reality they don't see, but that you, yes you, the never sleeping critic, alone can see. Isn't this fabulous? Isn't it really worth going to graduate school to study critique? (shrink)

In this research I aim to contribute to a better understanding of transitionality in poetic language by applying for the first time the hypotheses recently developed by pioneers in the emerging field of cognitive poetics to a living tradition. The benefits of working with a living tradition are tremendous: it is easy to establish the literacy level of the authors and the mode of recording of poetic text is also easy to elicit or, when necessary, to control. I chose a (...) living poetic tradition originating from the Jbala (Morocco). Although it is not epic and local poets create only relatively short poetic texts, memorisation is also used; it has been demonstrated that oral improvisation and the use of memory are not mutually exclusive. This suggests that research on the living Jebli tradition holds promise for our understanding of oral poetry, and for revisiting the intriguing question of formulaic language. (shrink)

In this article I continue reading oral traditional poetry from a cognitive perspective. This time I use findings obtained empirically from my previous research on the living short improvisational poetic genre ayyu from Morocco (Gintsburg 2017, 2019a) and turn my attention to kopla zaharrak, another short oral improvisational poetic genre, which once existed in the Basque Country but is now extinct and almost forgotten. In order to better understand how this genre once functioned, I first apply to it the notions (...) of frames, or topics or themes, and scripts, or possible scenarios manifested at least partly in form of formulaic language, which are triggered by them. The analysis reveals that on the cognitive level kopla zaharrak offer a structure similar to the ayyu, where the first two lines work as a frame and the last two lines as a script. In the second part of my research, I compare examples of kopla zaharrak and ayyus and conclude that, despite obvious cultural and linguistic differences, the way both traditions make use of images of the natural world and connect them to human situations has demonstrable similarities. (shrink)

The Homeric Hymns are commonly taken to be religious poems in some general sense but they are often said to contrast with cult hymns in that the latter have a definite ritual function, whereas "literary" hymns do not. This paper argues that despite the difficulty in establishing a precise occasion of performance for the Homeric Hymns, we are nevertheless in a position to identify their ritual function: by intoning a Hymn of this kind, the singer achieves the presence of a (...) god before participants in a public festival. The key mechanism by which the hymnist does this is the evocation of a god via the elaboration of a typical unit of traditional hymnic discourse, what I call the "theme of recognition ." The pragmatic operation of narrative such as this is similar to the device known in the study of magical texts as the historiola, or short narrative that serves as a verbal model for a desired outcome in the patient's world. This kind of operation is called, in this paper, "symbolic action," a term borrowed from the rhetorician Kenneth Burke. The theme of recognition is traced in the fabric of the expansive Hymns , and the paper further argues that an important generic marker in the Hymns, the greeting of the god , discloses their pragmatic function, the hymnist's skillful deliverance of the god before his hearers. (shrink)

Type-scenes have been studied and analysed for over seventy years. This paper presents a more detailed analysis of one type-scene, the 'recognition scene', than has previously been attempted, with the aim of moving towards a better-structured understanding of the 'syntax' of type-scenes generally. The structure of the recognition scene is dissected into motifs and 'moves', all of which are tabulated; this is the core of the analysis. The ensuing points of clarification elaborate on the definitions and assumptions built into the (...) analysis. Following this is an assessment of the 'syntax' and quantifiable elements of the recognition scene. The discussion closes with a general assessment of the more literary face of recognition scenes, discussing them in the context of the plan of the second half of the Odyssey. (shrink)

Everyday memory tasks often require that researchers focus on output-bound measures of memory. As a result, nonmemorial processes (e.g., report option and grain size) may influence recall accuracy. These nonmemorial processes, usually eliminated by laboratory researchers, have the potential to explain some anomalous results and may even be useful to enhance everyday recollection.

As museums begin to revisit their definition of ‘‘expert’’ in light of theories about the local character of knowledge, questions emerge about how museums can reconsider their documentation of knowledge about objects. How can a museum present different and possibly conflicting perspectives in such a way that the tension between them is preserved? This article expands upon a collaborative research project between the Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology at Cambridge University, University of California, Los Angeles, and the A:shiwi A:wan Museum (...) and Heritage Center to compare descriptions of museum objects by multiple expert communities. We found that narratives and objects in use are key omissions in traditional museum documentation, offering us several possibilities to expand our concept of digital objects. Digital objects will allow members of indigenous source communities to contribute descriptive information about objects to support local cultural revitalization efforts and also to influence how objects are represented in distant cultural institutions. (shrink)

Parallel to Koriat & Goldsmith's accounting of human memory, there are two distinct approaches in animal learning. Behaviorist approaches focus on quantitative aspects of conditioned response probability, whereas cognitive and ethological approaches focus on qualitative aspects of how memory is used in real life. Moreover, in animal research these distinguishable measures of memory are dissociated in experimental amnesia.