Abstract
Recent work on the early development of episodic memory in my laboratory has been fuelled by the following assumption: if episodic memory is re-experiential memory then Kant’s analysis of the spatiotemporal nature of experience should constrain and positively influence theories of episodic memory development. The idea is that re-experiential memory will “inherit” these spatiotemporal features. On the basis of this assumption, Russell and Hanna (Mind and Language 27(1):29–54, 2012) proposed that (a) the spatial element of re-experience is egocentric and (b) that the temporal element of re-experiencing involves order/simultaneity. The first of these assumptions is immediately problematic for two reasons. In the first place, if we assume that early episodic recall mediated by processing in the hippocampus, then (a) is clearly in tension with the fact that spatial coding in the hippocampus is allocentric/environment-centred. Second, two of our own recent experiments (described here) show that when only egocentric cues are available in a What/When/Where episodic memory task it is not possible to distinguish young children’s performance from semantic memory. I argue that this tension should be resolved by recognising that the egocentric coding of the original experience as being of an objective scene relies upon allocentric representations and these are preserved in re-experiential memory, allowing a recollection of the objective nature of the scene on which one takes a subjective view.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
This is a strange position, as it tacitly assumes that in the human case verbal reports provide us with a reliable dip-stick-like report on a subject’s phenomenology.
In the What-When-Where task, there was ½ chance of picking the correct icon animal initially, then a ¼ chance of moving it to the correct corner, then another ½ chance of picking the second animal correctly, followed by a ¼ chance of moving it to the correct corner. In the What-What-What task there was a ½ chance of picking one of the two correct hats, followed by a ½ chance of putting this on the correct animal, followed by a ½ chance of putting this in the correct box; after this a ¼ chance of picking the other correct hat. As there was now only one animal remaining this was followed by a ½ chance of putting the hat-wearing animal in the correct box.
Because it was not possible to calculate the probability of performing one of the correct actions ‘by chance’ (in contrast to choosing one of the animals previously) we computed chance only for those children who had performed both of the actions. The overwhelming majority of the children did so, in fact.
I do not wish to give the impression that episodic memory can be simply reduced to a visuospatial perspective. This oversells the visual and undersells the emotional, evaluative, and kinaesthetic. That said, the points that need making in what follows can be made by taking “perspectival-egocentric” as the synecdoche for this full set.
Some readers may balk at the addition of this representational layer; but the issue is out of the mainstream of the paper.
References
Asch, S.E. 1969. A reformulation of the problem of associations. American Psychologist 24: 92–102.
Babb, S.J., and J.D. Crystal. 2006. Episodic-like memory in the rat. Current Biology 16(13): 1317–1321.
Bauer, P.J., L.A. Hertsgaard, and S.S. Werwerka. 1995. Effects of experiencing and reminding in long-term recall in infancy: Remembering not to forget. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 59: 260–298.
Bauer, P.J., J.A. Wenner, P.L. Dropik, and S. Wewerka. 2000. Parameters of remembering and forgetting in the transition from infancy to early childhood. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 65 (Serial number 263).
Bremner, J.G., and P.E. Bryant. 1977. Place versus response as the basis of spatial errors made by young infants. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 23: 162–171. naugton.
Bruce, D., A. Wilcox-O’Hearn, J.A. Robinson, K. Phillips-Grant, L. Francis, and M.C. Smith. 2005. Fragment memories mark the end of childhood amnesia. Memory and Cognition 33: 567–576.
Burgess, N., E.A. Maguire, and J. O’Keefe. 2002. The human hippocampus and spatial and episodic memory. Neuron 35: 625–641.
Burns, P., C. Russell, and J. Russell. 2013. Children’s episodic representations of self-in-the-past. Manuscript in preparation.
Burns, P., C. Russell, and J. Russell. 2014. Pre-school children’s proto-episodic memory assessed by deferred imitation. Under review. [TS available from JR.].
Campbell, J. 1994. Past, space, and self. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Clayton, N.S., and A. Dickinson. 1998. Episodic-like memory during cache recovery by scrub jays. Nature 395: 272–274.
Crawley, S.E., and C.C. French. 2005. Field and observer viewpoint in remember/know memories of personal childhood events. Memory 13: 673–681.
Davis, N., J. Gross, and H. Hayne. 2008. Defining the boundary of childhood amnesia. Memory 16: 465–474.
Eacott, M.E., and R.A. Crawley. 1998. The offset of childhood amnesia: Memory for events that occurred before age 3. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 127: 22–33.
Eacott, M.J., and G. Norman. 2004. Integrated memory for object, place, and context in rats: A possible model of episodic-like memory? Journal of Neuroscience 24: 1948–1953.
Evans, G. 1980. Things without the mind ––A commentary on chapter two of Strawson’s Individuals. In Philosophical subjects: Essays presented to P. F. Strawson, ed. Z. Van Straaten. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Freud, S. 1899/1950. Screen memories. Collected papers. London: Hogarth Press.
Guyer, P, and A.W. Wood. Translators and editors, 1998. Critique of pure reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hoerl, C. 2001. The phenomenology of episodic recall. In Time and memory: Issues in philosophy and psychology, ed. T. McCormack and C. Hoerl. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Iordanova, M.D., M.A. Good, and R.C. Honey. 2008. Configural learning without reinforcement: Integrated memories for correlates of what, where, and when. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 61(12): 1787–1792.
Iordanova, M.D., D.J. Burnett, M.A. Good, and R.C. Honey. 2011. Pattern memory involves both elemental and configural processes: Evidence from the effects of hippocampal lesions. Behavioral Neuroscience 125(4): 567–577.
Jones, E.J.H., and J.S. Herbert. 2006. Exploring Memory in Infancy: Deferred imitation and the development of declarative memory. Infant and Child Development 15: 195–205.
Kant, I. 1770/1992. Concerning the ultimate ground of the differentiation of directions in space. In Theoretical philosophy 1755–1770, ed. I. Kant, pp. 363–416. Ak 2 385–419. Translated by D. Walford and R. Meerbote. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
King, J.A., I. Trinkler, T. Hartley, F. Vargha-Khadem, and N. Burgess. 2004. The hippocampal role in spatial memory and the familiarity-recollection distinction: A single case study. Neuropsychology 18: 405–417.
Martin, M.G.F. 2001. Out of the past: Recall as retained acquaintance. In Time and memory: Issues in philosophy and psychology, ed. T. McCormack and C. Hoerl. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McCormack, T., and M. Hanley. 2012. Children’s reasoning about the temporal order of past and future events. Cognitive Development 26: 299–314.
McDonough, L., J.M. Mandler, R.D. McKee, and L.R. Squire. 1995. The deferred imitation task as a nonverbal measure of declarative memory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 92: 7580–7584.
McNaughton, B.L., and R.G.M. Morris. 1987. Hippocampal synaptic enhancement and information storage within a distributed memory system. Trends in Neuroscience 10: 408–414.
Meltzoff, A.N. 1985. Immediate and deferred imitation in fourteen- and twenty-four-month-old infants. Child Development 56: 62–72.
Michaelian, K. 2011. Generative memory. Philosophical Psychology 24: 323–342.
Morris, R.G.M., and U. Frey. 1997. Hippocampal synaptic plasticity: Role in spatial learning or the automatic recording of attended experience? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. B. Biological Sciences 352: 1489–1503.
Nardini, M., N. Burgess, K. Breckenridge, and J. Atkinson. 2006. Differential Developmental trajectories for egocentric, environmental, and intrinsic frames of reference in spatial memory. Cognition 101: 153–172.
Nardini, M., J. Atkinson, and P. Burgess. 2008. Children re-orient using the left/right sense of coloured landmarks at 18–24 months. Cognition 106: 519–527.
Newcombe, N., and J. Huttenlocher. 1992. Children’s early ability to solve perspective-taking problems. Developmental Psychology 28: 635–643.
Newcombe, N.S., and J. Huttenlocher. 2000. Making space: The development of spatial representation and reasoning. Boston: MIT Press.
Newcombe, N., J. Huttenlocher, A.B. Drummey, and J.G. Wiley. 1998. The development of spatial location coding: Place learning and dead reckoning in the second and third years. Cognitive Development 13: 185–200.
Newcombe, N.S., M.E. Lloyd, and K.R. Ratliff. 2007. Development of episodic and autobiographical memory: A cognitive neuroscience perspective. In Advances in child development and behaviour, vol. 35, ed. R.V. Kail. London: Academic.
Newcombe, N.S., F. Balcomb, K. Ferrara, M. Hansen, and J. Koski. in press. Two rooms, two representations? Episodic-like memory in toddlers and preschoolers. Developmental Science.
Nigro, G., and U. Neisser. 1983. Point of view in personal memories. Cognitive Psychology 15: 467–482.
O’Keefe, J. 1990. A computational theory of the hippocampal cognitive map. In ‘Understanding the brain through the hippocampus.’. Progress in Brain Research 83: 287–300.
O’Keefe, J. 1993. Kant and the sea-horse. An essay in the neurophilosophy of space. In Spatial representation: Problems in the philosophy and psychology, ed. N. Eilan, R. McCarthy, and B. Brewer. Oxford: Blackwell.
O’Keefe, J., and L. Nadel. 1978. The hippocampus as a cognitive map. Oxford: Clarendon.
Pearce, J.M. 1994. Similarity and discrimination: A selective review and a connectionist model. Psychological Review 94: 61–73.
Perner, J. 2001. Episodic memory: Essential distinctions and developmental implications. In The self in time, ed. C. Moore and K. Lemmon. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Perner, J., and D. Howes. 1992. He thinks he knows: And more developmental evidence against simulation (role-taking) theory. Mind and Language 7: 72–86.
Perner, J., and T. Ruffman. 1995. Episodic memory and autonoetic consciousness: Developmental evidence and a theory of childhood amnesia. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 59: 516–548.
Perner, J., D. Kloo, and E. Gornik. 2007. Episodic memory development: Theory of mind is part of re-experiencing events. Infant and Child Development 15: 25–51.
Piaget, J. 1962. Play, dreams and imitation in childhood. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Piaget, J., and B. Inhelder. 1967. The child’s conception of space. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Povinelli, D.J., A.M. Landry, L.A. Theall, B.R. Clark, and C.M. Castille. 1999. Development of young children’s understanding that the recent past is causally bound to the present. Developmental Psychology 35: 1426–1439.
Ratliff, K.R., and N.S. Newcombe. 2008. Reorienting when cues conflict: Using geometry and features following landmark displacement. Psychological Science 19: 1301–1307.
Rice, H.J., and D.C. Rubin. 2011. Remembering from any angle: The flexibility of perspective retrieval. Consciousness and Cognition 20: 568–577.
Rolls, E.T., and A. Treves. 1998. Neural networks and brain function. Chapter 3. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Russell, J., and R. Hanna. 2012. A minimalist approach to the development of episodic memory. Mind and Language 27(1): 29–54.
Strawson, P.F. 1959. Individuals: An essay in descriptive metaphysics. London: Methuen.
Trinkler, I., J.A. King, H.J. Spiers, and N. Burgess. 2006. Part or parcel? Contextual binding of events in episodic memory. In Binding in human memory, a neurocognitive approach, ed. H.D. Zimmer, A. Mecklinger, and U. Lindenberger. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tulving, E. 1972. Episodic and semantic memory. In Organisation of memory, ed. E. Tulving and W. Donaldson, 381–403. New York: Academic.
Utsunomiya, H., K. Takana, M. Okazaki, and A. Mitsudome. 1999. Development of The temporal lobe in infants and children: Analysis by MR-based volumetry. American Journal of NeuroRadiology 20: 717–723.
Wright, A.A. 2013. Episodic memory: A rat model of source memory. Current Biology 23(5): 387–391.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Russell, J. Episodic Memory as Re-Experiential Memory: Kantian, Developmental, and Neuroscientific Currents. Rev.Phil.Psych. 5, 391–411 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-014-0194-3
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-014-0194-3