Abstract
Remembering and forgetting are the two poles of the memory system. Consequently, any approach to memory should be able to explain both remembering and forgetting in order to gain a comprehensive and insightful understanding of the memory system. Can an enactive approach to memory processes do so? In this article I propose a possible way to provide a positive answer to this question. In line with some current enactive approaches to memory, I suggest that forgetting –similarly to remembering– might be constituted within an embodied and active process. Within this process, some simulation and re-enactment paths would acquire more relevance than others. This acquired relevance would make the activation of other paths of recall less likely, thus preventing the memory system from engaging in some episodic simulations. These changes in the likelihood of activation of some paths of recall –the forgotten ones– can be accounted for in an enactive fashion by studying both “internal” and “external” re-enactment and simulation paths. With regard to the latter, I propose to examine the process of forgetting by considering the engagement and affective relation of an embodied agent with her field of affordances. I suggest that, in the case of emotion-laden memories, the agent’s decoupling from some affordances of the environment might contribute to the process of forgetting, in that it would reduce the agent’s opportunities for situated episodic simulations.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
In this sense, the activity of recollection is decoupled from the stimuli and objects involved in the activity being recalled through procedural memory, but it is not decoupled from the proxies of the components of the activity at stake. For the use of objects in situated non-basic cognitive processes, see Gallagher’s affordance-based approach to imagination (Gallagher 2017).
For a discussion of this aspect of episodic memory, see Debus 2007 on spatial relations in memory processes.
I will briefly take into account this type of case in the next paragraph, by considering the concept of unavailability in relation to the enactive concept of memory trace.
This contentless conception of memory traces is a consequence of the way radical enactivists think of the notion of content. Radical enactivists conceive of content in semantic terms, where semantic content is a component of a representation R. An item or process is a representation when it is about or stands for something else. For R to stand for something else, among other criteria, it should fulfill the interpretability condition. This is to say that there should be something in the cognitive process in which R is involved that is able to interpret R. In the case of the neural underpinnings of memory processes, unless one is willing to endorse a very weak notion of interpretation, in which a process in the brain interprets another process in the brain as standing for something else (e.g. an event of the past), it is not clear how the condition of interpretability can be met (Gallagher 2008). Therefore, it is not clear how a memory trace can function as a representational content-bearing structure.
In line with my discussion of the notion of unavailability (§3), this inability might be conceived mostly in terms of inaccessibility, reserving the concept of unavailability for specific cases (e.g. neurodegenerative diseases). In these latter cases, the brain would not be able to instantiate a dispositional property because of impairments in its physical patterns of connectivity (e.g. synaptic impairments; Teipel et al. 2016). In this explanation the concept unavailability would therefore refer to the physical basis on which a memory trace is supposed to supervene.
This approach is somehow consistent with an approach to memory based on Predictive-Coding or Predictive-Processing. Still, I do not explore this idea further because the aim of this article is not to offer an explanation of forgetting that is fully based on these approaches to the brain. Explanations of memory that resort to the theory of Predictive-Processing and of Predictive-Coding are developed, for example, by Clark (2016) and Lin (2015).
In my discussion on forgetting, I consider this phenomenon from the point of view of processes and not from the point of view of states. Hence, one might claim that this approach to forgetting is not complete, because it does not account for the mental state of forgetting (Frise 2018). In response to this possible objection, I suggest that, although an inquiry aimed at accounting for forgetting in terms of states (e.g. phenomenological states) is particularly interesting, it does not fit in the main goal of this work. As a matter of fact, the aim of my discussion is to implement current enactive approaches to memory, which mainly focus on memory processes.
In this article I do not offer a detailed comparison of these two approaches to forgetting because such a discussion is out of the scope of my argument and it would require a much careful analysis of the problem of forgetting in the simulation theory. To my knowledge, such an exam of the problem of forgetting in the simulationist perspective has not been developed yet. Nonetheless, a considerable amount of work on other forms of unsuccessful remembering (e.g. misremembering and confabulation) has been done (Michaelian 2016b, 2018). Future research on forgetting from an enactive and simulationist point of view could draw on this work in order to explore the relationship between forgetting and these memory phenomena.
This is a reformulation of a popular principle that applies to episodic memory and to the likelihood of successful retrieval: the encoding specificity principle. On the basis of this principle, retrieval is facilitated by congruent conditions between the (internal and external) context of retrieval and that of encoding (Tulving and Thomson 1973). Such a “congruence condition” would also serve to defend the cue-dependent approach to forgetting, as well as the enactive approach, from a possible objection. This objection amounts to saying that we should not forget any episode of the past whose associated external cues are continuously present in the agent’s experience.
This way to conceive of encoding is complementary to Hutto and Peeters’ (2018) idea of encoding (§4.1).
For example, see Schomaker and Wittmann’s experimental work on the dissociation of motivation and attention in memory performances (Schomaker and Wittmann 2017).
In line with Kiverstein et al. (2019), I use the expression “field of affordances” to refer to the set of affordances to which an individual is responsive. These affordances vary over time in their soliciting power on the basis of the individual’s needs, interests and concerns.
By “right emotional state” I refer to present emotional states that are associated with the emotional state that the agent underwent during the experience at stake in episodic recollection (Bower 1981).
This perspective on affordances is compatible with the phenomenological approach to soliciting affordances proposed by Dings (2018). In that approach, “whether an affordance solicits action or not depends on its relevance to the agent’s concerns” (Dings 2018: 681). Such an approach to affordances applied to mnemonic processes would explain the flexibility of our situated activities of recall, and it would account for the cases in which we often encounter an evocative object and still it does not function as a memory cue. Indeed, affordances would function as memory cues provided that the agent’s emotional states (e.g. emotions, motives and concerns) entertain some sort of relation with her emotional states at the moment of encoding.
References
Anderson, M. C., & Hanslmayr, S. (2014). Neural mechanisms of motivated forgetting. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 18(6), 279–292. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2014.03.002.
Anderson, M. C., Bjork, R. A., & Bjork, E. L. (1994). Remembering can cause forgetting: Retrieval dynamics in long-term memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 20(5), 1063–1087. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.20.5.1063.
Baddeley, A., Eysenck, M. W., & Anderson, M. C. (2015). Memory. London/New York: Psychology Press.
Barsalou, L. W. (2009). Simulation, situated conceptualization, and prediction. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 364(1521), 1281–1289. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2008.0319.
Beilock, S. L., Wierenga, S. A., & Carr, T. H. (2003). Memory and expertise: What do experienced athletes remember? In J. L. Starkes & K. A. Ericsson (Eds.), Expert performance in sports: Recent advances in research on sport expertise (pp. 295–320). Champaign: Human Kinetics.
Benoit, R. G., Davies, D. J., & Anderson, M. C. (2016). Reducing future fears by suppressing the brain mechanisms underlying episodic simulation. PNAS, 113(52), E8492–E8501. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1606604114.
Bergamin, J. A. (2017). Being-in-the-flow: expert coping as beyond both thought and automaticity. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 16(3), 403–424. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-016-9463-1.
Bjork, E. L., & Bjork, R. A. (1988). On the adaptive aspects of retrieval failure in autobiographical memory. In M. M. Gruneberg, P. E. Morris, & R. N. Sykes (Eds.), Practical aspects of memory: Current research and issues (pp. 283–288). London: Wiley.
Bjork, R. A., & Vanhuele, M. (1992). Retrieval inhibition and related adaptive peculiarities of human memory. In J. F. Sherry & B. Sternthal (Eds.), Advances in consumer research (pp. 155–160). Provo: Association for Consumer Research.
Borghi, A. M., Glenberg, A. M., & Kaschak, M. P. (2004). Putting words in perspective. Memory and Cognition, 32(6), 863–873. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03196865.
Bower, G. H. (1981). Mood and memory. American Psychologist, 36(2), 129–148. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.36.2.129.
Clark, A. (2016). Surfing uncertainty. Prediction, action, and the embodied mind. New York: Oxford University Press.
Davis, M. (2007). Forgetting: Once again it’s all about representations. In H. L. Roediger, Y. Dudai, & S. M. Fitzpatrick (Eds.), Science of memory: Concepts (pp. 317–320). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
De Brigard, F. (2014a). Is memory for remembering? Recollection as a form of episodic hypothetical thinking. Synthese, 191(2), 155–185. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-013-0247-7.
De Brigard, F. (2014b). The nature of memory traces. Philosophy Compass, 9(6), 402–414. https://doi.org/10.1111/phc3.12133.
Debus, D. (2007). Perspectives on the past: A study of the spatial perspectival characteristics of recollective memories. Mind and Language, 22(2), 173–206. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0017.2007.00305.x.
Degenaar, J., & Myin, E. (2014). Representation-hunger reconsidered. Synthese, 191, 3639–3648. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0484-4.
Dijkstra, K., & Post, L. (2015). Mechanisms of embodiment. Frontiers in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01525.
Dings, R. (2018). Understanding phenomenological differences in how affordances solicit action. An exploration. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 17, 681–699. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-017-9534-y.
Engen, H. G., & Anderson, M. C. (2018). Memory control: A fundamental mechanism of emotion regulation. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 22(11), 982–995. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2018.07.015.
Frise, M. (2018). Forgetting. In K. Michaelian, D. Debus, & D. Perrin (Eds.), New directions in the philosophy of memory (pp. 223–240). New York: Routledge.
Gallagher, S. (2008). Are minimal representations still representations? International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 16(3), 351–369. https://doi.org/10.1080/09672550802113243.
Gallagher, S. (2017). Enactivist interventions: Rethinking the mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gallagher, S. (2019). Precis: Enactivist interventions. Philosophical Studies, 176(3), 803–806. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-01230-8.
Gross, J. J. (2002). Emotion regulation: Affective, cognitive, and social consequences. Psychophysiology, 39(3), 281–291. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0048577201393198.
Harris, C. B., Sutton, J., & Barnier, A. J. (2010). Autobiographical forgetting, social forgetting, and situated forgetting: Forgetting in context. In S. Della Sala (Ed.), Forgetting, (pp. 253–284). Hove/New York: Psychology Press.
Heersmink, R. (2017). The narrative self, distributed memory, and evocative objects. Philosophical Studies, 175(8), 1829–1849. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-0935-0.
Higham, P. A., & Guzel, M. A. (2012). Cueing. In N. M. Seel (Ed.), Encyclopedia of the sciences of learning (pp. 871–874). Boston (MA): Springer.
Hutto, D. D., & Myin, E. (2013). Radicalizing enactivism. Basic minds without content. Cambridge (MA): The MIT Press.
Hutto, D. D., & Myin, E. (2015). REC: Just radical enough. Studies in logic, grammar and rhetoric, 41(54), 61–71. https://doi.org/10.1515/slgr-2015-0020.
Hutto, D. D., & Myin, E. (2017). Evolving enactivism. Basic minds meet content. Cambridge (MA): The MIT Press.
Hutto, D. D., & Peeters, A. (2018). The roots of remembering: Radical enactive recollecting. In K. Michaelian, D. Debus, & D. Perrin (Eds.), New directions in the philosophy of memory (pp. 97–118). New York: Routledge.
Kiverstein, J., van Dijk, L., & Rietveld, E. (2019). The field and landscape of affordances: Koffka’s two environments revisited. Synthese, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02123-x.
Krueger, J. (2014). Affordances and the musically extended mind. Frontiers in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.01003.
Krueger, J., & Colombetti, G. (2018). Affective affordance and psychopathology. Discipline Filosofiche, 2(18), 221–247.
Lin, Y. T. (2015). Memory for prediction error minimization: From depersonalization to the delusion of non-existence. A commentary on Philip Gerrans. In T. Metzinger & J. M. Windt (Eds). Open MIND: 15(C). Frankfurt am Main: MIND group. https://doi.org/10.15502/9783958570719.
Loader, P. (2013). Is memory an extended notebook? Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 4(1), 167–184.
Michaelian, K. (2011a). The epistemology of forgetting. Erkenntins, 74(3), 399–424.
Michaelian, K. (2011b). Generative memory. Philosophical Psychology, 24(3), 323–342. https://doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2011.559623.
Michaelian, K. (2016a). Mental time travel. Episodic memory and our knowledge of the personal past. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press.
Michaelian, K. (2016b). Confabulating. misremembering, relearning: The simulation theory of memory and unsuccessful remembering. Frontiers in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01857.
Michaelian, K. (2018). Confabulating as unreliable imagining: In defense of the simulationist account of unsuccessful remembering. Topoi, 39, 133–148. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-018-9591-z.
Michaelian, K., & Sant’Anna, A. (2019). Memory without content? Radical enactivism and (post) causal theories of memory. Synthese. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02119-7.
Michaelian, K., & Sutton, J. (2013). Distributed cognition and memory research: History and current directions. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 4(1), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-013-0131-x.
Murty, V. P., & Dickerson, K. C. (2017). Motivational influences on memory. In S. Kim, J. Reeve, & M. Bong (Eds.), Recent developments in neuroscience research on human motivation (pp. 203–227). Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing.
Myin, E., & Loughlin, V. (2018). Sensorimotor and enactive approaches to consciousness. In R. J. Gennaro (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of consciousness (pp. 202–215). New York: Routledge.
Neisser, U. (1997). The ecological study of memory. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 352(1362), 1697–1701. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.1997.0151.
Nørby, S. (2015). Why we forget? On the adaptive value of memory loss. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(5), 551–578. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691615596787.
Nørby, S. (2019). Mnemonic emotion regulation: A three-process model. Cognition and Emotion, 33(5), 959–975. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2018.1523137.
Petrelli, D., Whittaker, S., & Brockmeier, J. (2008). Autotopography: What can physical mementos tell us about digital memories? CHI’08: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 53–62. https://doi.org/10.1145/1357054.1357065.
Pulvermüller, F., Hauk, O., Nikulin, V. V., & Ilmoniemi, R. J. (2005). Functional links between motor and language systems. European Journal of Neuroscience, 21(3), 793–797. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-9568.2005.03900.x.
Rowlands, M. (2017). Memory and the self: Phenomenology, science and autobiography. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Schacter, D. L., & Addis, D. R. (2007). The cognitive neuroscience of constructive memory: Remembering the past and imagining the future. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 362(1481), 773–786. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2007.2087.
Schomaker, J., & Wittmann, B. C. (2017). Memory performance for everyday motivational and neutral objects is dissociable from attention. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2017.00121.
Singer, J. A., & Conway, M. A. (2008). Should we forget forgetting? Memory Studies, 1(3), 279–285. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698008093793.
Storm, B. C. (2019). Measures of forgetting. In H. Otani & B. L. Schwartz (Eds.), Handbook of research methods in human memory (pp. 36–49). New York/London: Routledge.
Sutton, J. (1998). Philosophy and memory traces. Descartes to connectionism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sutton, J., Harris, C. B., Keil, P. G., & Barnier, A. J. (2010). The psychology of memory, extended cognition, and socially distributed remembering. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 9(4), 521–560. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-010-9182-y.
Teipel, S., Grothe, M. J., Zhou, J., Sepulcre, J., Dyrba, M., Sorg, C., & Babiloni, C. (2016). Measuring cortical connectivity in Alzheimer’s disease as a brain neural network pathology: Toward clinical applications. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, 22(2), 138–163. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1355617715000995.
Tulving, E. (1974). Cue-dependent forgetting. American Scientist, 62(1), 78–82.
Tulving, E., & Pearlstone, Z. (1966). Availability versus accessibility of information in memory for words. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 5(4), 381–391. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-5371(66)80048-8.
Tulving, E., & Thomson, D. M. (1973). Encoding specificity and retrieval processes in episodic memory. Psychological Review, 80(5), 352–373. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0020071.
Unsworth, N., Spillers, G. J., & Brewer, G. (2012). Dynamics of context-dependent recall: An examination of internal and external context change. Journal of Memory and Language, 66(1), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2011.05.001.
Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991). The embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience. Cambridge (MA): The MIT Press.
Wimber, M., Alink, A., Charest, I., Kriegeskorte, N., & Anderson, M. C. (2015). Retrieval induces adaptive forgetting of competing memories via cortical pattern suppression. Nature Neuroscience, 18(4), 582–589. https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.3973.
Wylie, G. R., Foxe, J. J., & Taylor, T. L. (2008). Forgetting as an active process: an FMRI investigation of item-method-directed forgetting. Cerebral Cortex, 18(3), 670–682. https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhm101.
Acknowledgements
This work has benefitted from the feedback of Francesco Bellucci, Marta Benenti, Dom Holdaway, Claudia Mazzuca, Mario Panico, Matteo Poloni, and Caterina Villani. I would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their careful and insightful comments.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher’s note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Caravà, M. An exploration into enactive forms of forgetting. Phenom Cogn Sci 20, 703–722 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-020-09670-6
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-020-09670-6