Working memory, an important posit in cognitive science, allows one to temporarily store and manipulate information in the service of ongoing tasks. Working memory has been traditionally classified as an explicit memory system – that is, as operating on and maintaining only consciously perceived information. Recently, however, several studies have questioned this assumption, purporting to provide evidence for unconscious working memory. In this paper, we focus on visual working memory and critically (...) examine these studies as well as studies of unconscious perception that seem to provide indirect evidence for unconscious working memory. Our analysis indicates that current evidence does not support an unconscious working memory store, though we offer independent reasons to think that working memory may operate on unconsciously perceived information. (shrink)

Working memory is thought to be the psychological capacity that enables us to maintain or manipulate information no longer in our environment for goal-directed action. Recent work argues that working memory is not a so-called natural kind and in turn cannot explain the cognitive processes attributed to it. This paper first clarifies the scope of this earlier critique and argues for a pluralist account of working memory. Under this account, working memory is (...) variously realized by many mechanisms that contribute to the maintenance and manipulation of information across tasks. This view in effect updates one of the earliest pluralist formulations of working memory. Juxtaposing this view against deflationary descriptions allows us to delineate two gradients that help us chart various accounts of working memory and identify their respective theoretical commitments. In turn, we can isolate those accounts that fail to accord with the evidence supporting a pluralist view, and we can begin to rehabilitate working memory as a pluralist, and ultimately more informative, construct. (shrink)

Working memory is a foundational construct of cognitive psychology, where it is thought to be a capacity that enables us to keep information in mind and to use that information to support goal directed behavior. Philosophers have recently employed working memory to explain central cognitive processes, from consciousness to reasoning. In this paper, I show that working memory cannot meet even a minimal account of natural kindhood, as the functions of maintenance and manipulation of (...) information that tie working memory models and theories together do not have a coherent or univocal realizer in the brain. As such, working memory cannot explain central cognition. Rather, I argue that working memory merely redescribes its target phenomenon, and in doing so it obfuscates relevant distinctions amongst the many ways that brains like ours retain and transform information in the service of cognition. While this project ultimately erodes the explanatory role that working memory has played in our understanding of cognition, it simultaneously prompts us to evaluate the function of natural kinds within cognitive science, and signals the need for a productive pessimism to frame our future study of cognitive categories. (shrink)

As an explicit organizing metaphor, memory aid, and conceptual framework, the prefrontal cortex may be viewed as a five-member ‘Executive Committee,’ as the prefrontal-control extensions of five sub-and-posterior-cortical systems: the ‘Perceiver’ is the frontal extension of the ventral perceptual stream which represents the world and self in object coordinates; the ‘Verbalizer’ is the frontal extension of the language stream which represents the world and self in language coordinates; the ‘Motivator’ is the frontal cortical extension of a subcortical extended-amygdala stream (...) which represents the world and self in motivational/emotional coordinates; the ‘Attender’ is the frontal cortical extension of a subcortical extended-hippocampal stream which represents the world and self in spatiotemporal coordinates and directs attention to internal and external events; and the ‘Coordinator’ is the frontal extension of the dorsal perceptual stream which represents the world and self in body- and eye-coordinates and controls willed action and working memory. This tutorial review examines the interacting roles of these five systems in perception, working memory, attention, long - term memory, motor control, and thinking. (shrink)

Five experiments investigated the role of spatial connectedness between a pair of objects presented in the change detection task for the actual capacity of visual working memory (VWM) in healthy young adults (total N = 405). Three experiments yielded a surprising nonlinear relationship between the proportion of pair-wise connected objects and capacity, with the highest capacity observed for homogenous displays, when either all objects were connected or disjointed. A drop in capacity, ranging from an average of a quarter (...) of an object out of three objects maintained in VWM, was noted when only some objects were connected while others were disjointed. As indicated by another two experiments, this effect was specific to double-feature encoding, but disappeared when single visual features had to be memorized. No existing theoretical model of VWM can directly explain this novel effect. Overall, the nonlinear effect of spatial connectedness implies that representations in VWM possess hierarchical structure defined by wholes, parts, features, and their relations, and the heterogeneity of such a structure hinders VWM performance, while homogeneity facilitates it. (shrink)

Categorization and memory for specific items are fundamental processes that allow us to apply knowledge to novel stimuli. This study directly compares categorization and memory using delay match to category (DMC) and delay match to sample (DMS) tasks. In DMC participants view and categorize a stimulus, maintain the category across a delay, and at the probe phase view another stimulus and indicate whether it is in the same category or not. In DMS, a standard item working (...) class='Hi'>memory task, participants encode and maintain a specific individual item, and at probe decide if the stimulus is an exact match or not. Constrained Principal Components Analysis was used to identify and compare activity within neural networks associated with these tasks, and we relate these networks to those that have been identified with resting state-fMRI. We found that two frontoparietal networks of particular interest. The first network included regions associated with the dorsal attention network and frontoparietal salience network; this network showed patterns of activity consistent with a role in rapid orienting to and processing of complex stimuli. The second uniquely involved regions of the frontoparietal central executive network; this network responded more slowly following each stimulus and showed a pattern of activity consistent with a general role in role in decision-making across tasks. Additional components were identified that were associated with visual, somatomotor and default mode networks. (shrink)

This commentary critically examines the view of the relationship between perception and memory in Ned Block's *The Border Between Seeing and Thinking*. It argues that visual working memory often stores the outputs of perception without altering their formats, allowing online visual perception to access these memory representations in computations that unfold over longer timescales and across eye movements. Since Block concedes that visual working memory representations are not iconic, we should not think of perceptual (...) representations as exclusively iconic either. (shrink)

Theories of consciousness divide over whether perceptual consciousness is rich or sparse in specific representational content and whether it requires cognitive access. These two issues are often treated in tandem because of a shared assumption that the representational capacity of cognitive access is fairly limited. Recent research on working memory challenges this shared assumption. This paper argues that abandoning the assumption undermines post-cue-based “overflow” arguments, according to which perceptual conscious is rich and does not require cognitive access. Abandoning (...) it also dissociates the rich/sparse debate from the access question. The paper then explores attempts to reformulate overflow theses in ways that don’t require the assumption of limited capacity. Finally, it discusses the problem of relating seemingly non-probabilistic perceptual consciousness to the probabilistic representations posited by the models that challenge conceptions of cognitive access as capacity-limited. (shrink)

This paper examines a parallel between Aristotle’s account of phantasia and contemporary psychological models of working memory, a capacity that enables the temporary maintenance and manipulation of information used in many behaviors. These two capacities, though developed within two distinct scientific paradigms, share a common strategy of psychological explanation, Aristotelian Faculty Psychology. This strategy individuates psychological components by their target-domains and functional roles. Working memory and phantasia result from an attempt to individuate the psychological components responsible (...) for flexible thought and are thus implicated in most of our robust cognitive processes, from reading comprehension to problem solving. We then present two novel objections which suggest that these capacities cannot explain our ability to engage in flexible thought. To escape the resultant impasse, we survey alternatives and argue that most promising strategies depend on identifying the behaviors attributed to intelligent thought and action. (shrink)

The role of conscious attention in language processing has been scarcely considered, despite the wide-spread assumption that verbal utterances manage to attract and manipulate the addressee’s attention. Here I claim that this assumption is to be understood not as a figure of speech but instead in terms of attentional processes proper. This hypothesis can explain a fact that has been noticed by supporters of Relevance Theory in pragmatics: the special role played by speaker-related information in utterance interpretation. I argue that (...) representation of the speaker in working memory reliably enhances the activation of speaker-related information and, consequently, the role it plays in determining the content of interpretations. (shrink)

Short‐term memory in vision is typically thought to divide into at least two memory stores: a short, fragile, high‐capacity store known as iconic memory, and a longer, durable, capacity‐limited store known as visual working memory (VWM). This paper argues that iconic memory stores icons, i.e., image‐like perceptual representations. The iconicity of iconic memory has significant consequences for understanding consciousness, nonconceptual content, and the perception–cognition border. Steven Gross and Jonathan Flombaum have recently challenged the (...) division between iconic memory and VWM by arguing against the idea of capacity limits in favor of a flexible resource‐based model of short‐term memory. I argue that, while VWM capacity is probably governed by flexible resources rather than a sharp limit, the two memory stores should still be distinguished by their representational formats. Iconic memory stores icons, while VWM stores discursive (i.e., language‐like) representations. I conclude by arguing that this format‐based distinction between memory stores entails that prominent views about consciousness and the perception–cognition border will likely have to be revised. (shrink)

Defining consciousness along the lines of Nagel, an organism has consciousness iff there is something it is like to be that organism, I relate three types of consciousness (phenomenal, access and reflexive) to the three types of short-term memory (sensory memories, short-term working memory and the central executive). The suggestion is that these short-term memory stores may be a key feature of consciousness.

The potential of memory modification techniques (MMTs) has raised concerns and sparked a debate in neuroethics, particularly in the context of identity and authenticity. This paper addresses the question whether and how MMTs influence authenticity. I proceed by drawing two distinctions within the received views on authenticity. From this, I conclude that an analysis of MMTs based on a dual-basis, process view of authenticity is warranted, which implies that the influence of MMTs on authenticity crucially depends on the specifics (...) of how memory modification would eventually work. Therefore, I continue with a systematic analysis of possible properties of MMTs in which I distinguish between the dimensions of memories and the kinds of experiences that can be modified as well as the properties of the process of memory modification. The impact of MMTs on authenticity is analyzed regarding the possible properties of MMTs and based on a narrative approach to authenticity which fulfills the requirements of a dual-basis, process view of authenticity. Lastly, I explore the potential of MMTs to shift the balance between self-discovery and self-creation within authenticity and thereby alter the concept itself as well as the value of authenticity. (shrink)

From his initial writings on imagination and memory, to his recent studies of the glance and the edge, the work of American philosopher Edward S. Casey continues to shape 20th-century philosophy. In this first study dedicated to his rich body of work, distinguished scholars from philosophy, urban studies and architecture as well as artists engage with Casey's research and ideas to explore the key themes and variations of his contribution to the humanities. -/- Structured into three major parts, the (...) volume reflects the central concerns of Casey's writings: an evolving phenomenology of imagination, memory, and place; representation and landscape painting and art; and edges, glances, and voice. Each part begins with an extended interview that defines and explains the topics, concepts, and stakes of each of area of research. Readers are thus offered an introduction to Casey’s fascinating body of work, and will gain a new insight into particular aspects and applications of Casey's research. -/- With a complete bibliography and an introduction that at once stresses each of Casey’s areas of research while putting into perspective their overarching themes, this authoritative volume identifies the overall coherence and interconnections of Edward S. Casey's work and his impact in contemporary thought. (shrink)

Memory is studied at a bewildering number of levels, with a vast array of methods, and in a daunting range of disciplines and subdisciplines. Is there any sense in which these various memory theorists – from neurobiologists to narrative psychologists, from the computational to the cross-cultural – are studying the same phenomena? In this exploratory position paper, I sketch the bare outline of a positive framework for understanding current work on constructive remembering, both within the various cognitive sciences, (...) and across gulfs between the cognitive and the social sciences. I pinpoint some lines of psychological theory and research which offer promising and compatible ways of thinking about individual memory and shared or social memory simultaneously. These are obviously ambitious projects, and this paper seeks more to elicit help with forging these connections than to present firm results. The aim is to draw out some consequences of empirical work on social memory and in developmental psychology. (shrink)

While memory is conceptualized predominantly as an individual capacity in the cognitive and biological sciences, the social sciences have most commonly construed memory as a collective phenomenon. Collective memory has been put to diverse uses, ranging from accounts of nationalism in history and political science to views of ritualization and commemoration in anthropology and sociology. These appeals to collective memory share the idea that memory ‘‘goes beyond the individual’’ but often run together quite different claims (...) in spelling out that idea. This paper reviews a sampling of recent work on collective memory in the light of emerging externalist views within the cognitive sciences, and through some reflection on broader traditions of thought in the biological and social sciences that have appealed to the idea that groups have minds. The paper concludes with some thoughts about the relationship between these kinds of cognitive metaphors in the social sciences and our notion of agency. (shrink)

The overflow debate concerns this following question: does conscious iconic memory have a higher capacity than attention does? In recent years, Ned Block has been invoking empirical works to support the positive answer to this question. The view is called the “rich view” or the “Overflow view”. One central thread of this discussion concerns the nature of iconic memory: for example how rich they are and whether they are conscious. The first section discusses a potential misunderstanding of “visible (...) persistence” in this literature. The second section discusses varieties of attention relevant to this debate. The final section discusses the most prominent alternative interpretation of the Sperling paradigm—the postdiction interpretation—and explains how it can be made compatible with a weaker version of the rich or overflow view. (shrink)

This is a paper on the philosophical clinical psychology of PTSD. How best to improve our treatment plans for the disorder is the primary imperative in the clinical literature. Our failure to properly treat those suffering from PTSD up until now could be either the result of merely a problem in practice or, more seriously, a problem in principle. In this essay, I explore three possible accounts consistent with the supposition that what we have here is a problem in principle. (...) I call the first the “Somatic” hypothesis; the second, the “Memorial”; and the third, a “Rilkean” hypothesis of PTSD, which is inspired by the recent work of M. Rowlands. The first two have been more-or-less articulated previously; the third is introduced here for the first time. The primary argument of this essay is abductive: I argue in favor of a Rilkean Memory hypothesis of PTSD by comparing it to the other two accounts and showing that it possesses greater theoretical virtue than they do. I then conclude the essay by noting certain limitations with the account here sketched, nonetheless suggesting that this hypothesis can open up new avenues of clinical research and treatment options for the disorder. (shrink)

The (dis)continuism debate in the philosophy and cognitive science of memory concerns whether remembering is continuous with episodic future thought and episodic counterfactual thought in being a form of constructive imagining. I argue that settling that dispute will hinge on whether the memory traces (or “engrams”) that support remembering impose arational, perception-like constraints that are too strong for remembering to constitute a kind of constructive imagining. In exploring that question, I articulate two conceptions of memory traces—the replay (...) theory and the prop theory—that return conflicting answers to whether remembering is constructive imagining. The prop theory’s vision of traces is suggestive of continuism, while the replay theory’s is a natural fit for discontinuism. Which view of traces is in fact correct remains undetermined by current empirical work. Nevertheless, it may already be possible to reach a compromise in the (dis)continuism debate, through the development of a conciliatory continuist causal theory. This view—only outlined here—accepts the continuism-friendly prop theory of traces, while still requiring that genuine remembering fulfills an appropriate causation condition, as required by the kinds of causal theories of remembering typically favored by discontinuists. (shrink)

What characterizes most technical or theoretical accounts of memory is their reliance upon an internal storage model. Psychologists and neurophysiologists have suggested neural traces (either dynamic or static) as the mechanism for this storage, and designers of artificial intelligence have relied upon the same general model, instantiated magnetically or electronically instead of neurally, to do the same job. Both psychology and artificial intelligence design have heretofore relied, without much question, upon the idea that memory is to be understood (...) as a matter of internal storage. In what follows, I shall first sketch the most important reasons for skepticism about this model, and I shall then propose an outline of an alternative way of talking about memory. This will provide an appropriate framework for suggesting a few implications for future work in artificial intelligence. (shrink)

A common way to understand memory structures in the cognitive sciences is as a cognitive map​. Cognitive maps are representational systems organized by dimensions shared with physical space. The appeal to these maps begins literally: as an account of how spatial information is represented and used to inform spatial navigation. Invocations of cognitive maps, however, are often more ambitious; cognitive maps are meant to scale up and provide the basis for our more sophisticated memory capacities. The extension is (...) not meant to be metaphorical, but the way in which these richer mental structures are supposed to remain map-like is rarely made explicit. Here we investigate this missing link, asking: how do cognitive maps represent non-spatial information?​ We begin with a survey of foundational work on spatial cognitive maps and then provide a comparative review of alternative, non-spatial representational structures. We then turn to several cutting-edge projects that are engaged in the task of scaling up cognitive maps so as to accommodate non-spatial information: first, on the spatial-isometric approach​ , encoding content that is non-spatial but in some sense isomorphic to spatial content; second, on the ​ abstraction approach​ , encoding content that is an abstraction over first-order spatial information; and third, on the ​ embedding approach​ , embedding non-spatial information within a spatial context, a prominent example being the Method-of-Loci. Putting these cases alongside one another reveals the variety of options available for building cognitive maps, and the distinctive limitations of each. We conclude by reflecting on where these results take us in terms of understanding the place of cognitive maps in memory. (shrink)

For corporate memory and enterprise ontology systems to be maximally useful, they must be freed from certain barriers placed around them by traditional knowledge management paradigms. This means, above all, that they must mirror more faithfully those portions of reality which are salient to the workings of the enterprise, including the changes that occur with the passage of time. The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate how theories based on philosophical realism can contribute to this objective. We discuss (...) how realism-based ontologies (capturing what is generic) combined with referent tracking (capturing what is specific) can play a key role in building the robust and useful corporate memories of the future. (shrink)

Abstract (German) Dieses Buch faßt meine Forschungen zur Semiotik Giordano Brunos und zu deren Grundlagen in der Kosmologie und in der Gedächtnistheorie zusammen, wobei sowohl die Heterogenität als auch der Universalität des Denkers den Charakter dieses Buches geprägt haben. Es wird kein glattes Bild seiner Person oder seines Werkes angeboten, kein bejahender Jubel über eine epochale Leistung; wichtiger war mir die bis ins Detail gehende, manchmal mühselige Interpretation seiner Systementwürfe, wobei ich versucht habe, auch deren formales und technisches Niveau deutlich (...) zu machen. Nicht seine Weltanschauung soll dargestellt werden, sondern sein Versuch, eine Vielfalt von Detaillösungen in eine wohlproportionierte, wenn auch ins Unendliche reichende Wissensarchitektur zu integrieren. Als Startsignal mag folgende Frage dienen: Inwiefern ist Giordano Bruno Semiotiker? Der Philosoph Bruno wird von Jacobi als Beispiel spinozistischer Tendenzen wieder ins Gespräch gebracht; später wird er für die spekulative Naturphilosophie, die aus Kants Schatten heraustritt, z.B. für Schelling und Hegel, interessant, und schließlich wird er als Märtyrer der Freiheit von den Antiklerikalen im Risorgimento hochgehoben. Der Heroenkult um die „Kopernikanische Wende" weiß mit Bruno nichts anzufangen, er ist kein Naturwissenschaftler, wie man ihn sich im 20 . Jh . wünscht. Von Yates ( 1964 ) wird er als Hermetiker und Ahnherr der Rosenkreuzer entdeckt, und plötzlich soll er auch noch ein Semiotiker sein ? Die Etikette „Semiotiker" ist allerdings weniger riskant als jene früher an Bruno herangetragenen. Bruno ist Philosoph, in einem allgemeinen Sinn , insofern er alle wesentlichen Aspekte: metaphysische, natur philosophische, ethische, semiotische, poetologische zum Entwurf eines möglichst kohärenten Bildes vereint, und er ist ein Renaissance-Philosoph, d .h. das antike Erbe, besonders jenes in den orientalischen Tiefen der Kulturgeschichte (Ägypten und Chaldäer) ist sein Ausgangspunkt. Selbst den Entwurf des Copernicus versteht Bruno in erster Linie als eine Wiederentdeckung antiker Einsichten. Es gibt jedoch in Brunos Schaffen einen roten Faden: die Architektur unseres Wissens, das Gedächtnis der Kultur- und Wissensgemeinschaft und natürlich desjenigen, der wie Bruno dieses Wissen zu einer Synthese vereinigen will . Seine Philosophie versucht, wie jede große Philosophie, alles, was wir wissen und was wir daraus an weiterem impliziten Wissen erschließen können, in einer Einheit zu denken, und diese Einheit ist notwendigerweise nur als Zeichensystem (begrifflich, argumentativ, bildhaft, als imaginierte Welt) zu realisieren. -/- Abstract (English) This book summarizes my research on Giordano Bruno's semiotics and its foundations in cosmology and memory theory, whereby both the heterogeneity and the universality of the thinker have shaped the character of this book. No smooth picture of his person or his work is offered, no affirmative jubilation over an epochal achievement; What was more important to me was the sometimes laborious interpretation of his system designs, which went down to the last detail, and I also tried to make their formal and technical level clear. It is not his worldview that should be presented but his attempt to integrate various detailed solutions into a well-proportioned, albeit infinitely reaching, architecture of knowledge. The following question may serve as a starting signal: To what extent is Giordano Bruno a semiotician? Jacobi brings up the philosopher Bruno again as an example of Spinozist tendencies; later, he becomes important for the speculative natural philosophy emerging from Kant's shadow, e.g., for Schelling and Hegel. He is finally extolled as a martyr of freedom by the anticlericals in the Risorgimento. The hero cult around the "Copernican turn" does not know what to do with Bruno; he is not a natural scientist as one would wish in the 20th century. Yates (1964) discovered him as a hermetic, even an ancestor of the Rosicrucians. The etiquette "semiotic" is certainly less risky than the associations that Bruno used to have. Bruno is a philosopher, in a general sense, in that he combines all the essential aspects: metaphysical, natural philosophical, ethical, semiotic, poetological to project a picture that is as coherent as possible, and he is a Renaissance philosopher, i .e . the ancient heritage, especially that in the oriental depths of cultural history (Egypt and Chaldeans) is his starting point. Bruno sees even the draft of Copernicus primarily as a rediscovery of ancient insights. However, there is a common thread in Bruno's work: the architecture of our knowledge, the memory of the cultural and knowledge community and, of course, of those who, like Bruno, want to unite this knowledge into a synthesis. His philosophy, like every great philosophy, tries to think of everything that we know and what we can deduce from it as further implicit knowledge as a unit, and this unit is necessarily only available as a system of signs (conceptual, argumentative, pictorial, as an imagined world). to realize. 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Thomas Reid believed that the human mind is well equipped, from infancy, to acquire knowledge of the external world, with all its objects, persons and events. There are three main faculties that are involved in the acquisition of knowledge: (original) perception, memory, and imagination. It is thought that we cannot understand how exactly perception works, unless we have a good grasp on Reid’s notion of perceptual conception (i.e., of the conception employed in perception). The present paper argues that the (...) same is true of memory, and it offers an answer to the question: what type of conception does it employ? (shrink)

Among the many commonalities between memory and imagination is the fact that they can both be understood as skills. In this chapter, I aim to draw out some connections between the skill of memory and the skill of imagination in an effort to learn something about the nature of these activities and the connection between them. I start by considering the ways that one might work to cultivate these skills in the hope that we could learn something about (...) imagination training by reflection on memory training and vice versa. Interestingly, however, an initial look at the empirical research on the respective training regimens does not show much potential for this kind of crossover. Though there are some commonalities that can be found across the training regimens, these commonalities are nothing special over and above the kinds of commonalities one might find in training regimens for skills of any sort. Fortunately, however, the matter does not end there. When we think more deeply about the details of some of the training regimens for memory, we discover some important connections between the skill of memory and the skill of imagination. In particular, I argue that the two skills turn out to be interestingly intertwined. (shrink)

Traces of many past events are often layered or superposed, in brain, body, and world alike. This often poses challenges for individuals and groups, both in accessing specific past events and in regulating or managing coexisting emotions or attitudes. We sometimes struggle, for example, to find appropriate modes of engagement with places with complex and difficult pasts. More generally, there can appear to be a tension between what we know about the highly constructive nature of remembering, whether it is drawing (...) on neural or worldly resources or both, and the ways that we need and use memory to make claims on the past, and to maintain some appropriate causal connections to past events. I assess the current state of work on situated affect and distributed memory, and the recent criticisms of the ‘dogma of harmony’ in these fields. I then deploy these frameworks to examine some affective dimensions of place memory, sketching a strongly distributed conception of places as sometimes partly constituting the processes and activities of feeling and remembering. These approaches also offer useful perspectives on the problems of how to engage – politically and aesthetically – with difficult pasts and historically burdened heritage. In assessing artistic interventions in troubled places, we can seek responsibly to do justice to the past while fully embracing the dynamic and contested constructedness of our present emotions, memories, and activities. (shrink)

Departing from what Levey and Sznaider (2002) in their seminal work ‘Memory Unbound’ refer to as ‘cosmopolitan memory’ that emerges as one of the fundamental forms ‘collective memories take in the age of globalization’, this article will consider the underlying ethical implications of global memory formation that have yet to be adequately theorized. Since global disseminations of local memory cultures and the implicit canonization of its traumas are intimately related to the concept of archive, I will (...) first focus on what Derrida (1996) in Archive Fever calls ‘archival violence’ and will show its inherent relation to the formation of cosmopolitan memory. Another related concept that I will use and that will problematize the transformation of living, embodied memory into archival, cultural memory upon which the formation of cosmopolitan memory depends is the witness. Using Agamben’s writing (2002) in this context that in Remnants of Auschwitz focuses on the foundational (im)possibilities of bearing witness, I will show that this transformation that determines the very possibility of cosmopolitan memory is far from unproblematic and readily accessible as Levy and Sznaider seem to assume. What will emerge as the most distinctive concern of global memory formation is the ethical material of difference as that which both makes its imperatives historically and politically exigent and that which signifies the difficulties of its unified articulation. Solidarity with the suffering of the other that mobilizes the very formation of cosmopolitan memory is also what should solicit vigilance against the universalistic ritualizations of its prerogatives. (shrink)

Classic change blindness is the phenomenon where seemingly obvious changes which coincide with visual disruptions (such as blinks or brief blanks) go unnoticed by an attentive observer. Some early work into the causes of classic change blindness suggested that any pre-change stimulus representation is overwritten by a representation of the altered post-change stimulus, preventing change detection. However, recent work revealed that even when observers do maintain memory representations of both the pre- and post-change stimulus states, they can still miss (...) the change, suggesting that change blindness can also arise from a failure to compare the stored representations. Here we study slow change blindness, a different but related phenomenon that occurs even in the absence of visual disruptions when the change occurs sufficiently slowly, to determine whether it could be explained by conclusions from classic change blindness. Across three different slow change blindness experiments we found that observers, who consistently failed to notice the change, had access to at least two memory representations of the changing display. One representation was precise but short-lived: a relatively detailed representation of the more recent states of slow-change display, but fragile. The other representation lasted longer but was fairly general: stable but too coarse to differentiate the various stages of the changing display. These findings suggest that although multiple representations are formed, the failure to compare hypothesis might not explain slow change blindness; even if a comparison were made, the representations formed would be either too sparse (longer term stores) or too fragile (short-lived stores) for such a comparison to be informative about a change. (shrink)

This work is a phenomenological exploration of overgeneral memory in depressed patients. It reviews the current philosophical literature on the first-person experience of depression, which has so far omitted the phenomenon of overgeneral memory. However, this phenomenon is well documented within psychology; and this essay will show that its symptomatic appearance in depression and subsequent disturbance of self- experience justifies attention to the phenomenon within the phenomenology of depression. Both the theory of embodiment and the extended mind thesis (...) work extensively with the nature of memory in other conditions such as Alzheimer's and dementia. Thus, these philosophical approaches will be utilised in an analysis of overgeneral memory; this will enrich the philosophy of depression, memory and self and highlight the value of the concepts of embodiment and the extended mind. Moreover, this philosophical interrogation suggests a route toward therapeutic interventions to help patients suffering from overgeneral memory applying techniques from extended mind and cognition studies. (shrink)

Mistakes can be made in both personal and official accounts of past events: lies can be told. Stories about the past have many functions besides truth-telling: but we still care deeply that our sense of what happened should be accurate. The possibility of error in memory and in history implies a commonsense realism about the past. Truth in memory is a problem because, coupled with our desires to find out what really happened, we recognize that our individual and (...) collective access to past events may be indirect. This chapter sketches some approaches, from across the disciplines, to such problems about authority over the past. I open up recent lines of research on autobiographical memory which should be more accessible in the humanities and social sciences. Psychological work on constructive remembering should not be seen as sceptically challenging the very possibility of everyday authority over our own past, but as identifying specific forms of fallibility. I argue that the study of historical and social processes is an integral part of the cognitive sciences of memory, not a humanistic curiosity. (shrink)

For nearly two decades, ethicists have expressed concerns that the further development and use of memory modification technologies (MMTs)—techniques allowing to intentionally and selectively alter memories—may threaten the very foundations of who we are, our personal identity, and thus pose a threat to our well-being, or even undermine our “humaneness.” This paper examines the potential ramifications of memory-modifying interventions such as changing the valence of targeted memories and selective deactivation of a particular memory as these interventions appear (...) to be at the same time potentially both most promising clinically as well as menacing to identity. However, unlike previous works discussing the potential consequences of MMTs, this article analyzes them in the context of the narrative relational approach to personal identity and potential issues related to autonomy. I argue that such a perspective brings to light the ethical aspects and moral issues arising from the use of MMTs that have been hidden from previously adopted approaches. In particular, this perspective demonstrates how important the social context in which an individual lives is for the ethical evaluation of a given memory-modifying intervention. I conclude by suggesting that undertaking memory modifications without taking into account the social dimension of a person’s life creates the risk that she will not be able to meet one of the basic human needs—the autonomous construction and maintenance of personal identity. Based on this conclusion, I offer some reflections on the permissibility and advisability of MMTs and what these considerations suggest for the future. (shrink)

You tell your friend about a strange event you witnessed. Your friend presses you: how do you know it really happened? It’s natural to answer that you saw it happen. But that can’t be the full story of how you know. Past seeing, by itself, does not entirely explain present knowing or reasonable believing. When our past learning matters for what we can be confident of in the present, something connects the two. That something seems to be memory. (...) class='Hi'>Memory plays some role in our everyday believing, and upon closer inspection that role appears essential. Yet memory is secretive, always operating, almost always without our noticing, and often eluding any effort to appreciate its workings. Even in philosophy, we take for granted memory’s unflagging efforts. There is some mystery about how it supports good inductive reasoning, for example, though we recognize that good inductive reasoning relies on past observation. And memory is what allows this indispensable relying, almost by magic. -/- How does memory help us believe and reason well, if it ever truly does? What might bottle it up and stop it? This entry surveys influential answers. (shrink)

In this article, I outline various ways in which artifacts are interwoven with autobiographical memory systems and conceptualize what this implies for the self. I first sketch the narrative approach to the self, arguing that who we are as persons is essentially our life story, which, in turn, determines our present beliefs and desires, but also directs our future goals and actions. I then argue that our autobiographical memory is partly anchored in our embodied interactions with an ecology (...) of artifacts in our environment. Lifelogs, photos, videos, journals, diaries, souvenirs, jewelry, books, works of art, and many other meaningful objects trigger and sometimes constitute emotionally laden autobiographical memories. Autobiographical memory is thus distributed across embodied agents and various environmental structures. To defend this claim, I draw on and integrate distributed cognition theory and empirical research in human-technology interaction. Based on this, I conclude that the self is neither defined by psychological states realized by the brain nor by biological states realized by the organism, but should be seen as a distributed and relational construct. (shrink)

[This is a response to a target article in BBS]. Although the art-historical context of a work of art is important to our appreciation of it, it is our knowledge of that history that plays causal roles in producing the experience itself. This knowledge is in the form of memories, both semantic memories about the historical circumstances, but also episodic memories concerning our personal connections with an artwork. We also create representations of minds in order to understand the emotions that (...) artworks express. (shrink)

This special issue, which includes papers first presented at two workshops on ‘Memory, Mind, and Media’ in Sydney on November 29–30 and December 2–3, 2004, showcases some of the best interdisciplinary work in philosophy and psychology by memory researchers in Australasia (and by one expatriate Australian, Robert Wilson of the University of Alberta). The papers address memory in many contexts: in dance and under hypnosis, in social groups and with siblings, in early childhood and in the laboratory. (...) Memory is taken as a test case for evaluating the optimistic vision of a new kind of cognitive science defended by Andy Clark. Clark (2001:154) argues: Much of what matters about human intelligence is hidden not in the brain, nor in the technology, but in the complex and iterated interactions and collaborations between the two ... The study of these interaction spaces is not easy, and depends both on new multidisciplinary alliances and new forms of modelling and analysis. The pay-off, however, could be spectacular: nothing less than a new kind of cognitive scientific collaboration involving neuroscience, physiology, and social, cultural, and technological studies in about equal measure. So the central motivation is to investigate critically how well the case of memory would fit the extended mind’ thesis put forward by Clark and Chalmers (Clark and Chalmers 1998; Clark 1997, 2006)—according to which mental states and processes can spread across the.. (shrink)

Sven Bernecker’s contribution to the ongoing revival in the philosophy of memory offers a consistent vision and analysis of propositional remembering, and covers a range of topics in analytic metaphysics and epistemology. Bernecker defends a methodological externalism, by which memory ‘must be analyzed from a third-person point of view’ (34): so even though conceptual analysis remains the primary method, the ‘linguistic intuitions’ that guide it ‘are not a priori but empirical working hypotheses’ (31). Given the central role (...) of such intuitions in Bernecker’s treatment of many briefly described thought experiments throughout the book, it is strange that he does not defend their use more explicitly in this early section on method, instead leaving it to a later footnote (147, n. 11) to say that ‘trying to defend the use of intuitions in the philosophy of memory would . . . take us too far afield’. Bernecker’s subtitle signals a restricted target audience: this is a book for those analytic philosophers who will enjoy long exegeses on Twin Earth, slow switching or quasi-memory. Psychological results on memory are cited, but only piecemeal, and interactive dialogue with scientific theory is not Bernecker’s aim. (shrink)

Many recent AI systems take inspiration from biological episodic memory. Here, we ask how these ‘episodic-inspired’ AI systems might inform our understanding of biological episodic memory. We discuss work showing that these systems implement some key features of episodic memory whilst differing in important respects, and appear to enjoy behavioural advantages in the domains of strategic decision-making, fast learning, navigation, exploration and acting over temporal distance. We propose that these systems could be used to evaluate competing theories (...) of episodic memory’s operations and function. However, further work is needed to validate them as models of episodic memory and isolate the contributions of their memory systems to their behaviour. More immediately, we propose that these systems have a role to play in directing episodic memory research by highlighting novel or neglected hypotheses as pursuit-worthy. In this vein, we propose that the evidence reviewed here highlights two pursuit-worthy hypotheses about episodic memory’s function: that it plays a role in planning that is independent of future-oriented simulation, and that it is adaptive in virtue of its contributions to fast learning in novel, sparse-reward environments. (shrink)

Following the seminal work of Ingvar (1985. “Memory for the future”: An essay on the temporal organization of conscious awareness. Human Neurobiology, 4, 127–136), Suddendorf (1994. The discovery of the fourth dimension: Mental time travel and human evolution. Master’s thesis. University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand), and Tulving (1985. Memory and consciousness. Canadian Psychology/Psychologie Canadienne, 26, 1–12), exploration of the ability to anticipate and prepare for future contingencies that cannot be known with certainty has grown into a thriving (...) research enterprise. A fundamental tenet of this line of inquiry is that future-oriented mental time travel, in most of its presentations, is underwritten by a property or an extension of episodic recollection. However, a careful conceptual analysis of exactly how episodic memory functions in this capacity has yet to be undertaken. In this paper I conduct such an analysis. Based on conceptual, phenomenological, and empirical considerations,I conclude that the autonoetic component of episodic memory, not episodic memory per se, is the causally determinative factor enabling an individual to project him or herself into a personal future. (shrink)

We suggest that there is confusion between why consciousness developed and what additional functions, through continued evolution, it has co-opted. Consider episodic memory. If we believe that episodic memory evolved solely to accurately represent past events, it seems like a terrible system—prone to forgetting and false memories. However, if we believe that episodic memory developed to flexibly and creatively combine and rearrange memories of prior events in order to plan for the future, then it is quite a (...) good system. We argue that consciousness originally developed as part of the episodic memory system—quite likely the part needed to accomplish that flexible recombining of information. We posit further that consciousness was subsequently co-opted to produce other functions that are not directly relevant to memory per se, such as problem-solving, abstract thinking, and language. We suggest that this theory is compatible with many phenomena, such as the slow speed and the after-the-fact order of consciousness, that cannot be explained well by other theories. We believe that our theory may have profound implications for understanding intentional action and consciousness in general. Moreover, we suggest that episodic memory and its associated memory systems of sensory, working, and semantic memory as a whole ought to be considered together as the conscious memory system in that they, together, give rise to the phenomenon of consciousness. Lastly, we suggest that the cerebral cortex is the part of the brain that makes consciousness possible, and that every cortical region contributes to this conscious memory system. (shrink)

Honouring the memory of the late Bernard Stiegler, this edited collection presents a broad spectrum of contributions that provide a complex and coherently articulated image of Stiegler's thought which reached beyond the boundaries of academic, artistic and experimental techno-scientific enclaves where it had been originally received. -/- Stiegler's philosophical work encompassed theorization, social diagnosis, planning, practical and territorial experimentation, politics, and aesthetics. In its wake, the essays in this volume celebrate and explore the wealth of this multi-dimensional legacy. They (...) examine the conditions of human life in general, its foundational intermittence, and carry forward Stiegler's post-phenomenological unfolding of the distinctive spatio-temporalities that weave together the epoch we call 'present'. Engaging closely with Stiegler's original impetus for the creation of technologies of care, as well as of communities of knowledge and artistic practice,. (shrink)

One of Clayton’s major contributions to our understanding of animal minds has been her work on episodic-like memory. A central reason for the success of this work was its focus on ecological validity: rather than looking for episodic memory for arbitrary stimuli in artificial contexts, focussing on contexts in which episodic memory would serve a biological function such as food caching. This review aims to deepen this insight by surveying the numerous functions that have been proposed for (...) episodic memory, articulating a philosophically grounded framework for understanding what exactly functions are, and drawing on these to make suggestions for future directions in the comparative cognitive psychology of episodic memory. Our review suggests four key insights. First, episodic memory may have more than one function and may have different functions in different species. Second, cross-disciplinary work is key to developing a functional account of episodic memory. Third, there is scope for further theoretical elaboration of proposals relating episodic memory to food caching and, in particular, future-oriented cognition. Finally, learning-related functions suggested by AI (artificial intelligence)-based models are a fruitful avenue for future behavioural research. (shrink)

A reply to commentators -- Jake Beck, Nico Orlandi and Aaron Franklin, and Ian Phillips -- on our paper "Does perceptual consciousness overflow cognitive access?".

This paper explores the implications of extended and distributed cognition theory for our notions of personal identity. On an extended and distributed approach to cognition, external information is under certain conditions constitutive of memory. On a narrative approach to personal identity, autobiographical memory is constitutive of our diachronic self. In this paper, I bring these two approaches together and argue that external information can be constitutive of one’s autobiographical memory and thus also of one’s diachronic self. To (...) develop this claim, I draw on recent empirical work in human-computer interaction, looking at lifelogging technologies in both healthcare and everyday contexts. I argue that personal identity can neither be reduced to psychological structures instantiated by the brain nor by biological structures instantiated by the organism, but should be seen as an environmentally-distributed and relational construct. In other words, the complex web of cognitive relations we develop and maintain with other people and technological artifacts partly determines our self. This view has conceptual, methodological, and normative implications: we should broaden our concepts of the self as to include social and artifactual structures, focus on external memory systems in the (empirical) study of personal identity, and not interfere with people’s distributed minds and selves. (shrink)

In this paper, I describe how artifacts and autobiographical memory are integrated into new systemic wholes, allowing us to remember our personal past in a more reliable and detailed manner. After discussing some empirical work on lifelogging technology, I elaborate on the dimension of autobiographical dependency, which is the degree to which we depend on an object to be able to remember a personal experience. When this dependency is strong, we integrate information in the embodied brain and in an (...) object to reconstruct an autobiographical memory. In such cases, autobiographical memory is extended or distributed. (shrink)

This article relates the ideas of Stanisław Brzozowski (1878-1911) with those of Bernard Stiegler (1952-2020), both of whom problematize the "work" of art understood as a labor practice. Through the conceptual analysis of epigenetics and epiphylogenetics for aesthetic theory, I claim that both thinkers develop practical concepts relevant to contemporary art philosophy. First, I present an overview of Brzozowski's aesthetics, for whom literature and the arts are linked with ethics, and aesthetic form is tied with moral judgment. Then, I continue (...) with an outline of Stiegler's, for whom the role of artists is to sculpt a new culture and historical epoch called the Neganthropocene. Finally, the notion of "work" as a type of memory practice is analyzed. The comparison shows that Stiegler develops epigenetics phenomenologically via memory ("tertiary retentions") and phylogenetics to epiphylogenetics. Both philosophers argue against determinism. This study suggests that their key ideas advance and complement each other. (shrink)

The notion of epistemic responsibility applied to memory has been in general examined in the framework of the responsibilities that a collective holds for past injustices, but it has never been the object of an analysis of its own. In this article, I propose to isolate and explore it in detail. For this purpose, I start by conceptualizing the epistemic responsibility applied to individual memories. I conclude that an epistemic responsible individual rememberer is a vigilant agent who knows when (...) to engage in different kinds of mental and non-mental actions in order to monitor and update her memories, and who develops and nurture different kinds of virtuous attitudes that guide those actions. These (epistemic) virtuous attitudes are oriented not only towards herself but also towards others. Whereas this conception of epistemic responsibility does not pose a problem to understand shared memories of family members and friends, it may seem suspicious when applied to large-scale collective memories. These memories, which I name historical memories, are memories of events that have a traumatic impact for the community, are permeated by unequal relations of power, keep a complex relationship with historical science, and present other characteristics that distinguish them from individual memories. But despite these differences, the analysis undertaken in this work shows that the general principles that govern the epistemic responsibility of individual and (large-scale) collective rememberers are similar, and are based on similar grounds: pragmatic considerations about the consequences of misremembering or forgetting and a feeling of care. The similarities at the individual and collective scale of the epistemic vigilant attitude that is and should be taken toward our significant past may partially justify the use of the same epithet—“memory”—to refer to these different kinds of representations. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between a prominent version of the relational view of memory and recent work on forms of unsuccessful remembering or memory errors. I argue that unsuccessful remembering poses an important challenge for the relational view. Unsuccessful remembering can be divided into two kinds: misremembering and confabulating. I discuss each of these cases in light of a recent relational account, according to which remembering is characterized by an experiential relation to past events, and I argue (...) that experiential relations do not adequately distinguish between remembering and unsuccessful remembering. This is because there are, on the one hand, cases of remembering that do not instantiate the relevant experiential relations, and, on the other hand, cases of confabulation and misremembering that do instantiate the relevant experiential relations. I conclude by suggesting that any successful relationalist attempt to explain remembering needs to come to grips with unsuccessful remembering. (shrink)

Embodied human minds operate in and spread across a vast and uneven world of things—artifacts, technologies, and institutions which they have collectively constructed and maintained through cultural and individual history. This chapter seeks to add a historical dimension to the enthusiastically future-oriented study of “natural-born cyborgs” in the philosophy of cognitive science,3 and a cognitive dimension to recent work on material memories and symbol systems in early modern England, bringing humoral psychophysiology together with material culture studies. The aim is to (...) sketch an integrative framework which spans early modern ideas and practices relating to brains, bodies, memory, and objects. Embodiment and environment, I’ll argue, were not (always) merely external influences on feeling, thinking, and remembering, but (in certain circumstances) partly constitutive of these activities. (shrink)

In this Master's dissertation, I try to show that the causal theory of memory, which is the only theory developed so far that at first view seems more plausible and that could be integrated with psychological explanations and investigations of memory, shows some conceptual and ontological problems that go beyond the internal inconsistencies that each version can present. On one hand, the memory phenomenon analyzed is very limited: in general it is reduced to the conscious act of (...) remembering expressed in a propositional format: the idea of an agent who can control his memory reports, in contrast to a passive subject who merely retrieve his encoded memories, is not even considered. Furthermore, the representational function of memory is the only function taken into account; and all the diachronic changes that could entail a dynamic conception of memory are ignored, as is the consideration of context in a broad sense of the term. On the other hand, causal theories make some implicit assumptions that are obviously questionable (e.g., the difference between facts and events) and leave some of their key concepts unexplained, like the nature of the causality, the isomorphism between the memory trace and the memory event, etc. Nonetheless, the principal point that we criticized is the idea of a correspondence between a past event or representation of it, the correspondent memory trace and the memory representation of it. Psychological models of memory, with the exception of the spatial analogy, question some of these assumptions and suggest that memory information is organized in a way other than that implied by the causal theory. But it is distributed connectionism that actually challenges the causal theory of memory, not only through some of its basic postulates, like the superpositional conception of memory traces, their mutual influence and constant state of change, but also because it is compatible with a more situated approach to memory phenomena as well as with the idea that memory in reality accomplishes a variety of functions that go beyond the representational one. The explicit and implicit ideas provided by distributed connectionism, together with the previous criticisms that we made to of causal theory, clearly suggest the possibility of developing another kind of philosophical theory of memory, different from existing theories. This task, nonetheless, implies: (a) A much deeper study of connectionism principles and memory models, as well as of the rival candidate, symbolism, plus the evaluation of these models in the light of psychological and neurophysiological empirical research, which unfortunately I have not dealt with in this work. (b) An analysis of the metaphysical nature of events and facts, in order to see if we should decide in favor of a realist or a non-realist account. It is also clear that this decision can’t be taken without an examination of perception studies (and not exclusively philosophical ones) which would be crucial for determining what is encoded in memory, and studies devoted to language, which, I suspect, plays an important role in the segmentation of reality. (c) A clarification of the notion of causality, because we wouldn’t like to deny any kind entail the complete disappearance of boundaries between memory and imagination. And even if I suspect that my future work will question the existence of absolute boundaries between these two capacities, the notion of causality can’t be completely erase from the theory of memory without erasing the memory phenomenon itself. But this causality, as we’ve already showed, can’t consist in the naïve conception adopted by the causal accounts of memory, nor can it be explained in counterfactual terms. If we think of the reconsolidation concept, of the interdependence between all the memory system, and of the deciding influence of context, it’s almost sure that more than one notion of causality will need to be invoked in order to explain memory. (d) Because I do not want to reduce the study of memory exclusively to cases of remembering, it’s essential to analyze how memory intervenes not only in imagination, but also in perception, reasoning and future projection, for example. In this respect, we could quote the interesting articles of Atance & O’Neill (2001) and Bucker & Carroll (2006), the first concerning the relationship between episodic memory and episodic future thinking, the second concerning the relationship between episodic memory and all kinds of self-projection, such as navigation and theory of mind, relations that would also have to be explored from a philosophical perspective, in particular to overcome the tendency to suppose that representation is the only function of memory. I will also mention the necessity of combining the notion of metamemory with that of memory to some extent; as I have already remarked, it is implausible to suppose that a subject who consciously remembers something is unable to exert any kind of control over his memory reports. (e) Finally, in order to integrate a situated conception of memory into a philosophical account, it will also be indispensable to take into consideration what is known as “everyday memory research” as well as studies in social and collective memory. (shrink)

This paper examines how time functions as an active subject in the works of Mark Doty and Edmund de Waal, mainly through their reflections on still life and material objects. Doty’s meditations on a still life painting and De Waal’s exploration of his family’s netsuke collection reveal an inversion of our typical understanding of time, where instead of us moving through time, time itself shapes, preserves, or erodes people, places, and things. By closely observing these objects—Doty’s “things of the world” (...) and De Waal’s family heirlooms—each author recognizes how time acts upon them, turning seemingly permanent elements into transient reflections. This study argues that, in both accounts, time is a subjugating force and a silent reminder of impermanence. In this way, the paper invites readers to adopt a “close-looking” perspective, recognizing time’s invisible yet profound impact on memory, materiality, and the passage of life itself. (shrink)