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)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 33.1 (2000) vii-ix [Access article in PDF] In Memory of Henry I first met Henry W. Johstone Jr. during the spring of 1968. I was a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin and Henry was in Madison as part of a distinguished visitor series hosted by my mentor, Lloyd Bitzer. Lloyd had invited a group of graduate students to his home to meet the (...) guest of honor. I was particularly excited because Henry had accepted my paper on Aristotle's theory of exemplification to appear in the new international journal Philosophy and Rhetoric, which he edited. This was my first publication and I wanted to thank him, which seemed to this novice the appropriate thing to do. I remember that evening for Henry's seeming reserve, which I later learned was a deep shyness that masked his capacity for uncanny directness and a wicked sense of humor, and for his generosity in deflecting my naiveté about the basis for editorial judgments. I also remember it for his deft way of engaging a room of young rhetoricians with questions that conveyed his doubt about their subject (he later changed his mind) without clouding his sincere openness to what we had to say. The following fall, we met again during my interview for a position in the Speech Department at Penn State University. I was offered the position and became Henry's colleague as Book Review Editor of P&R. For the next thirty years, I was blessed to serve as Henry's partner-in-crime in the joys of life that may remain today only among the professoriate. We shared in the editorial work of the journal, in co-teaching our graduate seminar in Philosophy and Rhetoric, in our intellectual passion for the bonds and wars between philosophy and rhetoric, and in the pleasure of choosing the right bottle of wine. But more than that, we shared these common pursuits in contexts of luncheons, dinners, and social occasions that mixed intellectual work with the pleasure of treasured company.My son phoned today to tell me that Henry had died. His passing leaves a void in my life that goes beyond the loss of a friend and colleague. Henry was the person who, through patient selection of manuscripts for me to referee and guidance, taught me how to read journal submissions and offer critiques that might help the author to improve and the journal to prosper. Henry was the person who taught me the value of generosity with junior colleagues by his respectful and serious engagement of my own work. He had a marvelous capacity to entertain any idea seriously, to consider the possibility that even a far-fetched conjecture might have value rather than rejecting it out of hand. He lived the ideas he wrote about as a philosopher, arguing always ad hominem and con amore. Henry was the person who took me in tow as a young Turk and suffered my impatience with the conservative ways of our established institution [End Page vii] by taking me to lunch, engaging me in discussions of ideas, and sharing the delights of intellectual work, and in the process helping me retain my ideals and my focus.Lunch for Henry was more than a noontime meal. It was the way he sustained bonds with those he valued as friends and colleagues. He would call two weeks in advance to arrange a date at the Allen Room of the State College Hotel. He would arrive at my office ten minutes early and we would take a leisurely stroll along the Old Main Mall to the hotel. Our arrival was announced by the host with "Good afternoon Dr. Johnstone," that showed in its formality deep respect and in its tone equally deep affection. Henry always took a cocktail with lunch, inviting his companion to join him, and unless you were specific about the bill beforehand, Henry usually insisted on paying. Settling the bill was never an issue for Henry. He often included a graduate assistant from the journal or an assistant professor in our party and seemed to... (shrink)

In this article, I argue that access internalism should replace preservationism, which has been called “a received view” in the epistemology of memory, as the standard position about memorial justification. My strategy for doing so is two-pronged. First, I argue that the considerations which motivate preservationism also support access internalism. Preservationism is mainly motivated by its ability to answer the explanatory challenges posed by the problem of stored belief and the problem of forgotten evidence. However, as I will demonstrate, (...) access internalism also has the resources to provide plausible solutions to those problems. Second, I argue that preservationism faces a couple of problems which access internalism avoids. Doing so, I present a new scenario which, on the one hand, functions as a counterexample to preservationism, and, on the other hand, provides intuitive support for access internalism. Moreover, I also demonstrate how preservationism, in light of recent research in cognitive psychology, is vulnerable to skepticism about memorial justification, whereas access internalism remains unthreatened. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Introduction:Remarks in Memory of David W. ChappellDonald K. SwearerOn December 8, 1996, David Chappell delivered the Bodhi Day lecture, titled "Bodhisattva in the Twenty-first Century," at the Hompa Hongwanji Temple in central Oahu. The lecture wasn't autobiographical—David was much too unassuming to have thought of himself in these terms—but those of us who loved David and who had the privilege of working with him over many years have (...) no such qualms. David's dedication, sincerity of spirit, generosity, and compassion were truly bodhisattva-like.In his lecture David contrasts the superficial, electronic Internet connectedness of our lives today with the common ground discovered at Awakening based on what David called "heart connection," an insight into the shared nature of all sentient beings that leads to empathy, compassion, and kindness. In contrast to enlightened heart connectedness, Internet interaction lacks the capacity of an intimacy with the varied phenomena of life at each moment. "The Internet," he observes, "allows us to ease our solitude by getting access to things that are compatible with our own interests. However, Buddhism considers that the achievement of enlightenment involves being able to be compatible and have empathy with things that may seem foreign or offensive or a threat to us by seeing them as connected and similar to ourselves. This involves not just new information, or a new perspective on things, but a new understanding of ourselves and our relationship to others at a level that touches what is beyond manipulation or even rational expression."I've quoted rather extensively from David's 1996 Bodhi Day talk because it reveals several dimensions of his bodhisattva-like nature: his sense of connectedness with those around him and a heart-to-heart intimacy with a wide network of friends, acquaintances, and even those at a greater personal distance. David's simpatico nature was manifested in many ways—from his body language to his dedication to peacemaking.On a visit to the United States during the Vietnam War, Thich Nhat Hanh was speaking to a large audience gathered in the auditorium of a large Midwestern church. Following the talk a middle-aged man jumped to his feet, shook his clenched [End Page 3] fist in anger, and shouted in a loud voice, "Well, Mr. Hanh, if you're so concerned about your fellow Vietnamese dying in the rice paddies, why are you here?! Why aren't you there with them?!" Thây stood silently for what seemed like minutes and then replied in calm, quiet tones, "I'm here because some of the roots of the war are here in the United States. When one waters a plant, it's insufficient to water the leaves. One has to water the roots." He then turned and walked slowly through the side door of the auditorium. Jim Forest, Thây's Catholic Peace Fellowship friend who was in the audience, sensed something was wrong and quickly followed him outside. There he found his friend bent over, hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath. Slowly Thây stood erect and, breathing normally, explained that in order not to respond in anger but with understanding and compassion he had entered into deep breathing; however, the state he had achieved had been too deep and left him short of breath. Jim Forest later observed in a memoir that for the first time in his life he realized the profound connection between breathing and one's actions.David's inner nature was expressed in an act as simple as breathing: his trademark bodhisattva-like smile. At the 1980 Oahu conference that launched the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies, convened by David and his colleague Bob Bobilin, there were more than just one or two frustrating logistical snafus. Whatever the crisis, however, David never lost his cool. He would smile and in his typically unhurried manner offer a helping hand or a word of calm advice, seemingly in the belief that good karma, compassionate Buddha nature, or God's grace would help rectify the situation.David stories abound—humorous, poignant, moving. Those who worked with him as colleagues in religious studies, the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies... (shrink)

This paper presents a computational model that integrates a dynamically structured holographic memory system into the ACT-R cognitive architecture to explain how linguistic representations are encoded and accessed in memory. ACT-R currently serves as the most precise expression of the moment-by-moment working memory retrievals that support sentence comprehension. The ACT-R model of sentence comprehension is able to capture a range of linguistic phenomena, but there are cases where the model makes the wrong predictions, such as the over-prediction (...) of retrieval interference effects during sentence comprehension. Here, we investigate one such case involving the processing of sentences with negative polarity items and consider how a dynamically structured holographic memory system might provide a cognitively plausible and principled explanation of some previously unexplained effects. Specifically, we show that by replacing ACT-R's declarative memory with a dynamically structured memory, we can explain a wider range of behavioral data involving reading times and judgments of grammaticality. We show that our integrated model provides a better fit to human error rates and response latencies than the original ACT-R model. These results provide proof-of-concept for the unification of two independent computational cognitive frameworks. (shrink)

This paper presents a computational model that integrates a dynamically structured holographic memory system into the ACT-R cognitive architecture to explain how linguistic representations are encoded and accessed in memory. ACT-R currently serves as the most precise expression of the moment-by-moment working memory retrievals that support sentence comprehension. The ACT-R model of sentence comprehension is able to capture a range of linguistic phenomena, but there are cases where the model makes the wrong predictions, such as the over-prediction (...) of retrieval interference effects during sentence comprehension. Here, we investigate one such case involving the processing of sentences with negative polarity items and consider how a dynamically structured holographic memory system might provide a cognitively plausible and principled explanation of some previously unexplained effects. Specifically, we show that by replacing ACT-R's declarative memory with a dynamically structured memory, we can explain a wider range of behavioral data involving reading times and judgments of grammaticality. We show that our integrated model provides a better fit to human error rates and response latencies than the original ACT-R model. These results provide proof-of-concept for the unification of two independent computational cognitive frameworks. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 35.1 (2005) 3-6MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Whispers of the Flesh Essays in Memory of Pierre KlossowskiIan JamesRussell Ford Pierre Klossowski—novelist, essayist, painter, and translator—was one of the most startling, original, and influential figures in twentieth-century French intellectual culture. The older brother of the well-known painter Balthus and a close associate of Georges Bataille, Klossowski's diverse oeuvre includes novels, philosophical essays, and translations, as well as paintings and (...) films. Confined thus far to an undeserved but somehow fitting shadow existence in the margins and notes of theorists who have become mainstays of Anglo-American criticism, Klossowski's own work has increasingly become a focus of critical interest for its decisive contribution to the development of thought and aesthetics in France from the 1950s onward. Born in 1905, the eldest son of Polish émigrés, Klossowski spent his first ten years in Paris in an artistic milieu, heavily influenced by the neoimpressionism of figures such as Bonnard and Derain. His father, Erich Klossowski de Rola, was a painter and art historian, the author of an important monograph on Daumier. His mother, Baladine, was also a painter and trained under Bonnard. While still a teenager Klossowski was introduced to the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, with whom he became close and who in turn introduced him to the novelist André Gide. At eighteen he became Gide's secretary and assisted him with the drafts of his famous novel Les faux-monnayeurs.Not until 1930, however, did Klossowski's own career properly begin, when he translated with Jean-Pierre Jouve a collection of poems by Friedrich Hölderlin. Throughout his life Klossowski was a prolific and influential translator from both German and Latin into French, translating amongst others Nietzsche, Kafka, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein from the German, and Suetonius, Virgil, Augustine, and Tertullian from the Latin. While working for the prominent Parisian psychoanalyst René Laforgue, Klossowski published his first philosophical essay on the Marquis de Sade in 1933 in the Revue française de la psychanalyse. Scandalized by Klossowski's Nietzschean-inflected psychoanalytic interpretation of Sade's writing, Laforgue dismissed Klossowski immediately. Throughout the 1930s Klossowski made a number of key friendships and acquaintances, most importantly with Georges Bataille, but also many others, including Walter Benjamin, André Masson, Jean Wahl, and Maurice Heine. During this period he published several articles and collaborated with Bataille on the review Acéphale and in the avant-garde experiment of the Collège de Sociologie (where, it is said, he would attend meetings dressed in a soutane). During the war years Klossowski trained in a number of Catholic seminaries, a vocation which ultimately failed and led to the writing of his first novel, La vocation suspendue. In the postwar period he married [End Page 3] a war widow, Denise Morin Sinclair, who had been interned in Ravensbrück for her activities in the Resistance and who became the model for Roberte, a key figure in much of Klossowski's fiction and painting. After the war Klossowski began to publish the influential works for which he will chiefly be remembered: literary-philosophical essays on Sade and Nietzsche (among others), as well as six important novels written between 1950 and 1965, La vocation suspendue (1950), the three works, originally published separately, which went on to form the Lois de l'hospitalité trilogy—Roberte ce soir (1954), La révocation de l'Édit de Nantes (1959) and Le souffleur ou le théâtre de société (1960)‚—and, finally, Le Baphomet (1965).Klossowski's seminal 1947 work, Sade mon prochain, was one of the first full-length literary and philosophical studies of Sade's work to be published in France and marked a decisive break from earlier accounts. Whereas earlier treatments of Sade had focused either on biographical detail or on the medical and psychosexual import of his life and writing, Klossowski's reading was concerned with the intertwined figures of law and transgression in Sade's work. After Sade mon prochain French intellectuals and writers... (shrink)

Researchers have been interested in what retrieval process is responsible for overgeneral autobiographical memories (OGM) in depression. Previous cross-sectional studies demonstrated that, for negatively valenced cues, directly retrieved OGM, rather than generatively retrieved OGM, are associated with depression. However, longitudinal evidence of this relationship is still lacking and needs to be tested. We conducted a re-analysis of the online computerised memory specificity training (c-MeST) data to examine whether directly retrieved OGM for negative cues prospectively predicts high levels of depression (...) 1 month later. Participants who met the criteria of current major depressive disorders (N = 116; n = 58 in the c-MeST group and n = 58 in the control group) recalled autobiographical memories for positive and negative cues and judged each retrieval process (i.e. direct or generative). The results supported our prediction, and directly retrieved OGM for negative cues predicted high levels of depressive symptoms 1 month later even after controlling for the group effect, baseline depressive symptoms, executive functioning and rumination. Exploratory analysis showed that direct retrieval of specific memories prospectively predicted low levels of depression. These results support the theory that elevated accessibility of negatively valenced general memory representations is a vulnerability factor for depressive symptoms. (shrink)

The present work investigates the memory accessibility of linguistically focused elements and the representation of the alternatives for these elements in Working Memory and in delayed recognition memory in the case of the Hungarian pre-verbal focus construction. In two probe recognition experiments we presented preVf and corresponding focusless neutral sentences embedded in five-sentence stories. Stories were followed by the presentation of sentence probes in one of three conditions: the probe was identical to the original sentence in (...) the story, the focused word was replaced by a semantically related word and the target word was replaced by a semantically unrelated but contextually suitable word. In Experiment 1, probes were presented immediately after the stories measuring WM performance, while in Experiment 2, blocks of six stories were presented and sentences were probed with a 2-minute delay measuring delayed recognition memory performance. Results revealed an advantage of the focused element in immediate but not in delayed retrieval. We found no effect of sentence type on the recognition of the two different probe types in WM performance. However, results pertaining to the memory accessibility of focus alternatives in delayed retrieval showed an interference effect resulting in a lower memory performance. We conclude that this effect is indirect evidence for the enhanced activation of focus alternatives. The present work is novel in two respects. First, no study has been conducted on the memory representation of focused elements and their alternatives in the case of the structurally marked Hungarian pre-verbal focus construction. Second, to our knowledge, this is the first study that investigates the focus representation accounts for WM and delayed recognition memory using the same stimuli and same measured variables. Since both experiments used exactly the same stimulus set, and they only differed in terms of the timing of recognition probes, the principle of ceteris paribus fully applied with respect to how we addressed our research question regarding the two different memory systems. (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)

The aim of this article was to provide experimental evidence that classical dissociation between levels of consciousness associated with memory retrieval can be explained in terms of task dependency and distinctiveness of traces. In our study phase, we manipulated the level of isolation of the memory trace by means of an isolation paradigm . We then tested these two types of isolation in a series of tasks of increasing complexity: a lexical decision task, a recognition task, and a (...) free recall task. The main result of this study was that distinctiveness effects were observed as a function of the type of isolation and the nature of the task. We concluded that trace distinctiveness improves subsequent access to the trace, while the level of trace distinctiveness also appears to determine the possibility of conscious or explicit retrieval. (shrink)

This volume began as a remembrance of Alonzo Church while he was still with us and is now finally complete. It contains papers by many well-known scholars, most of whom have been directly influenced by Church's own work. Often the emphasis is on foundational issues in logic, mathematics, computation, and philosophy - as was the case with Church's contributions, now universally recognized as having been of profound fundamental significance in those areas. The volume will be of interest to logicians, computer (...) scientists, philosophers, and linguists. The contributions concern classical first-order logic, higher-order logic, non-classical theories of implication, set theories with universal sets, the logical and semantical paradoxes, the lambda-calculus, especially as it is used in computation, philosophical issues about meaning and ontology in the abstract sciences and in natural language, and much else. The material will be accessible to specialists in these areas and to advanced graduate students in the respective fields. (shrink)

We investigate the order in which speakers produce the proper names of couples they know personally in English and Japanese, two languages with markedly different constituent word orders. Results demonstrate that speakers of both languages tend to produce the name of the person they feel closer to before the name of the other member of the couple (N = 180). In this way, speakers’ unique personal histories give rise to a remarkably systematic linguistic generalization in both English and Japanese. Insofar (...) as closeness serves as an index of cognitive accessibility, the current work demonstrates that systematicity emerges from a domain-general property of memory. (shrink)

As new unanticipated items are added to a memory, it must be able to reorganize itself, integrating the new items into its structure. The reorganization process must maintain the memory's structure and also build up the knowledge retrieval strategies need to search that structure. This study will present an algorithm for knowledge‐based memory reorganization. Included in that algorithm are processes for directed generalization and generalization refinement. A fact retrieval system called CYRUS which uses the algorithm is also (...) presented. Conclusions are drawn about maintaining accessibility in a conceptual memory, organizing generalized knowledge with respect to specific knowledge, and expected retrieval failures due to change over time in the memory's organization. (shrink)

Autobiographical memory is intimately linked to the self. However, the relation between the self and involuntary recall has been understudied. Theoretically, the more relevant an event is to the self the more accessible the memory should be. In line with this prediction, the present study tested the hypothesis that self-relevance of a stressor modulates involuntary recall. Healthy student participants viewed distressing film clips and were presented with information that defined the main characters as more or less similar to (...) them, or without any information about the characters. In line with predictions, participants in the high self-relevance condition reported more involuntary memories of the film clips after one week compared to participants in the low self-relevance and control conditions. The findings support the theoretical relation between the self and memory accessibility and extend findings from previous research to the domain of involuntary recall. (shrink)

Starting from Marr's ideas about levels of explanation, a theory of the data structures and access processes in human memory is demonstrated on 10 tasks. Functional characteristics of human memory are captured implementation-independently. Our theory generates a multidimensional task classification subsuming existing classifications such as the distinction between tasks that are implicit versus explicit, data driven versus conceptually driven, and simple associative (two-way bindings) versus higher order (threeway bindings), providing a broad basis for new experiments. The formal language (...) clarifies the binding problem in episodic memory, the role of input pathways in both episodic and semantic (lexical) memory, the importance of the input set in episodic memory, and the ubiquitous calculation of an intersection in theories of episodic and lexical access. (shrink)

During dialog, references are presented, accepted, and potentially reused. Two experiments were conducted to examine reuse in a naturalistic setting. In Experiment 1, where the participants interacted face to face, self-presented references and references accepted through verbatim repetition were reused more. Such biases persisted after the end of the interaction. In Experiment 2, where the participants interacted over the phone, reference reuse mainly depended on whether the participant could see the landmarks being referred to, although this bias seemed to be (...) only transient. Consistent with the memory-based approach to dialog, these results shed light on how differences in accessibility in memory affect the unfolding of the interaction. (shrink)

Linguistic dependencies between non‐adjacent words have been shown to cause comprehension difficulty, compared with local dependencies. According to one class of sentence comprehension accounts, non‐local dependencies are difficult because they require the retrieval of the first dependent from memory when the second dependent is encountered. According to these memory‐based accounts, making the first dependent accessible at the time when the second dependent is encountered should help alleviate the difficulty associated with the processing of non‐local dependencies. In a dual‐task (...) paradigm, participants read sentences that did or did not contain a non‐local dependency (i.e., object‐ and subject‐extracted cleft constructions) while simultaneously remembering a word. The memory task was aimed at making the word held in memory accessible throughout the sentence. In an object‐extracted cleft (e.g., It was Ellen whom John consulted…), the object (Ellen) must be retrieved from memory when consulted is encountered. In the critical manipulation, the memory word was identical to the verb's object (ELLEN). In these conditions, the extraction effect was reduced in the comprehension accuracy data and eliminated in the reading time data. These results add to the body of evidence supporting memory‐based accounts of syntactic complexity. (shrink)

This theoretical article investigates the effects of media frames on individuals' judgments. In contrast to previous theorizing, we suggest that framing scholars should embrace both, on-line and memory-based judgment formation processes. Based on that premise, we propose a model that distinguishes between two phases of framing effects. Along the first phase, the media's framing contributes to the formation of an on-line or a memory-based judgment. The second phase describes six hypothetical routes for the stability or the change of (...) these judgments: maintenance, readjustment, crystallization, inoculation, persuasion, and attenuation. At the heart of our model, we try to extract predictors for each of those routes. Finally, the implications of the proposed model for future framing research are discussed. (shrink)

It’s a popular idea that memory resembles testimony insofar as each can ‘preserve’ epistemic warrant. But how does such ‘preservation’ do its epistemic work? I have elsewhere developed an assurance theory of testimonial warrant. Here, I develop an assurance theory of preservative memory. How could the ‘preservation’ of warrant through memory work through an assurance? What would even count as an intrapersonal assurance? I explain each form of preservation by contrasting the relation that preserves warrant with a (...) pathological alternative. My assurance theory of testimony theorizes the illocutionary norms governing the speech act of telling by explaining what goes wrong when there’s what Austin calls an ‘abuse.’ But what norms govern an intrapersonal memory relation? There are two sides in a memory relation: the earlier self judges that p, then memory keeps the later self in epistemic touch with that judgment by ‘preserving’ its warrant. But this is not an illocutionary relation. (When you ‘tell yourself that p,’ you are trying to ‘convince yourself’ that p and as such typically do not yet even judge that p.) I argue that the earlier self nonetheless offers an assurance by extending an invitation to trust. Your earlier self judges that p in part by projecting a future in which you will continue to trust yourself on the question whether p when you lose access to the evidence that informed the judgment. That projection of trust in yourself posits a worthiness of trust that ought to lead others to accept your testimony that p. Assurance in memory and assurance in testimony thus ought to work together. This aspect of the parallel emerges vividly when we see how it breaks down in the pathology of gaslighting – more than merely illocutionary abuse! – which targets specifically how testimony and memory work together in inviting trust relations. (shrink)

Those in the openness movement believe that access to information is inherently democratic, and assume the effects of openness will all be good from the movement’s perspective. But means are not ends, nothing is inevitable, and just what will be done with openly available information once achieved is rarely specified. One implicit goal of the openness movement is to create and sustain politically useful memory in situations in which official memory may not suffice, but to achieve this, openness (...) is not enough. With the transition from a panopticon to a panspectron environment, the production of open information not only provides support for communities but also contributes to surveillance. Proprietary ownership of information is being challenged, but there is erosion of ownership in the sense of being confident in what is known. Some tactics currently in use need to be re–evaluated to determine their actual effects under current circumstances. Successfully achieving tactical memory in the 21st century also requires experimentation with new types of tactics, including those of technological discretion and of scale as a medium. At the most abstract level, the key political battle of the 21st century may not be between particular political parties or ideologies but, rather, the war between mathematics and narrative creativity. (shrink)

Vocabulary size has been suggested as a useful measure of “verbal abilities” that correlates with speech recognition scores. Knowing more words is linked to better speech recognition. How vocabulary knowledge translates to general speech recognition mechanisms, how these mechanisms relate to offline speech recognition scores, and how they may be modulated by acoustical distortion or age, is less clear. Age-related differences in linguistic measures may predict age-related differences in speech recognition in noise performance. We hypothesized that speech recognition performance can (...) be predicted by the efficiency of lexical access, which refers to the speed with which a given word can be searched and accessed relative to the size of the mental lexicon. We tested speech recognition in a clinical German sentence-in-noise test at two signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), in 22 younger (18–35 years) and 22 older (60–78 years) listeners with normal hearing. We also assessed receptive vocabulary, lexical access time, verbal working memory, and hearing thresholds as measures of individual differences. Age group, SNR level, vocabulary size, and lexical access time were significant predictors of individual speech recognition scores, but working memory and hearing threshold were not. Interestingly, longer accessing times were correlated with better speech recognition scores. Hierarchical regression models for each subset of age group and SNR showed very similar patterns: the combination of vocabulary size and lexical access time contributed most to speech recognition performance; only for the younger group at the better SNR (yielding about 85% correct speech recognition) did vocabulary size alone predict performance. Our data suggest that successful speech recognition in noise is mainly modulated by the efficiency of lexical access. This suggests that older adults’ poorer performance in the speech recognition task may have arisen from reduced efficiency in lexical access; with an average vocabulary size similar to that of younger adults, they were still slower in lexical access. (shrink)

Do we see more than we can report? Psychologists and philosophers have been hotly debating this question, in part because both possibilities are supported by suggestive evidence. On one hand, phenomena such as inattentional blindness and change blindness suggest that visual awareness is especially sparse. On the other hand, experiments relating to iconic memory suggest that our in-the-moment awareness of the world is much richer than can be reported. Recent research has attempted to resolve this debate by showing that (...) observers can accurately report the color diversity of a quickly flashed group of letters, even for letters that are unattended. If this ability requires awareness of the individual letters’ colors, then this may count as a clear case of conscious awareness overflowing cognitive access. Here we explored this requirement directly: can we perceive ensemble properties of scenes even without being aware of the relevant individual features? Across several experiments that combined aspects of iconic memory with measures of change blindness, we show that observers can accurately report the color diversity of unattended stimuli, even while their self-reported awareness of the individual elements is coarse or nonexistent — and even while they are completely blind to situations in which each individual element changes color mid-trial throughout the entire experiment. We conclude that awareness of statistical properties may occur in the absence of awareness of individual features, and that such results are fully consistent with sparse visual awareness. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Memory and Justice:Narrative Sources of Community in Camus's The First ManJohn Randolph LeBlancThere as a certain frustration involved in trying to find Albert Camus's conception of justice in express positive statements. But inasmuch as Camus saw his work in the trope of journey, his complex set of ideas about justice are to be discerned in the narrative structure of his texts. This is particularly so in his last (...) work, the incomplete autobiographical The First Man.1 In the novel, Camus has his protagonist and fictional self Jacques Cormery seek the sources of his orientation to questions of love and justice by attempting to reconstruct the brief life of a father he never knew. It is in the life reconstructed, chiefly through the recollected memories of those who knew the man that Jacques comes to understand his own responses to questions of love and justice. A necessary by-product of the process is that through his questioning, Jacques recreates a community of which he is a product but, until the journey is undertaken, he has never been a part. His journey is, thus, one of self-discovery and inextricably ties justice to community formation. Camus's last novel, I will argue, suggests the importance of memory and narrative to the fundamental questions of political theory, particularly, questions regarding community-formation and the role and nature of justice.IContemporary reflections on the nature of politics take narrative encounters with reality seriously. The significance of narrative to political theory is, I think, tied to the Augustinian recognition that, temporally speaking, we live forward but learn backwards. It is through reconstructing [End Page 140] our experiences as individuals that we learn about who we are and how we got here. Recent political theory has come to recognize that this epistemological structure works at both the individual and the communal level. Michael Walzer, for example, has suggested that a community's culture is the story its members tell so as to make sense of the different pieces of their social life and justice is the doctrine that distinguishes the pieces.2 But distinguishing the pieces can mean and has meant blocking or restricting our access to that reconstruction. While a time-honored political practice, the impulse to control the contents of the narrative by deeming it unworthy or too dangerous to speak became a self-conscious political practice and a particularly dangerous phenomenon in the last century. Controlling the contents of narrative means control in past, present, and future tense. Memory can become a site of resistance because narrative depends on memory for its points of reference. What gets narrated gets remembered. Most often, what does not get narrated either gets lost or must find another way.Narrative and memory have always been political resources, Joshua Foa Dienstag suggests in his important work on memory and narrative in political theory, but the self-conscious control of them is dangerous.3 At the end of a century wherein we perpetrated much we might be tempted to forget, it is increasingly evident that we must remember before we can speak of justice, that is, our stories must be told and heard before we can reconstitute (or re-member) a functional conception of political community. It is in these terms that I want to talk about narrative and its relationship to political community and justice. But what is silenced is as important as what is articulated. Dienstag, who reads political theory as narrative, suggests that, practically speaking, what we have learned is that memory unarticulated is even more dangerous than memory manipulated. Memory unarticulated either festers and becomes a flashpoint for turmoil or is articulated by an interest for its own ends and becomes a tool of control if not oppression. In either case, memory is bastardized to the ends of power politics and distinguishing between authentic and inauthentic experiences becomes the province of politicians. Leaving these distinctions to politicians, I want to suggest, is risky business. When memory represents the absence of a set of experiences rather than their presence, we are confronted by the end of a community rather than its beginning.All cultures, Walzer suggests, have an interest in... (shrink)

This paper approaches web archiving as preservation of digital memory and as a dynamic informational environment with complex problems of harvest, use, access and preservation. It uses a qualitative and exploratory-descriptive approach, identifying web archiving initiatives and promoting a reflection on the ways of defining web information collection, geographical gaps in web archiving and problems regarding uses and rights of this information. Whereas initiatives such as Internet Archive harvest a lot of information from across the web, an imbalance of (...) digital memory exists where many countries do not possess their own web archiving initiatives, and therefore, coverage of information is unequally produced. (shrink)

Cybervetting has become common practice in personnel decision-making processes of organizations. While it represents a quick and inexpensive way of obtaining additional information on employees and applicants, it gives rise to a variety of legal and ethical concerns. To limit companies’ access to personal information, a _right to be forgotten_ has been introduced by the European jurisprudence. By discussing the notion of forgetting from the perspective of French hermeneutic philosopher Paul Ricoeur, the present article demonstrates that both, companies and employees, (...) would be harmed if access to online information on applicants and current employees would be denied. Consistent with a Humanistic Management approach that promotes human dignity and flourishing in the workplace, this article proposes guidance for the responsible handling of unpleasant online memories in personnel decision-making processes, thereby following Ricoeur’s notion of forgetting as “kept in reserve”. Enabling applicants and employees to take a qualified stand on their past is more beneficial to both sides than a right to be forgotten that is questionable in several respects. (shrink)

The main roles of libraries are developing and providing access to collections of cultural heritage. While the specific policies necessary to accomplish these roles may vary across different types of libraries, these institutions have at their core a dual role in preserving and supporting access to documents illustrating an era of knowledge and culture. Libraries are thus significant institutions in the process of learning, but also in that of remembering and forgetting at a social level. This article provides an overview (...) of the structure and organization of the public library system in the last two decades of the Communist regime in Romania. As part of a larger information history project, the research discusses the characteristics of this system created to support mass education and the ways in which public libraries also became institutions of memory in Communist Romania. The description of the library system structure is enriched by an overview of the professional training available for librarians and descriptions of the main library services related to access to collections and memories. The analysis of archival materials and oral history interviews with librarians document how these services were implemented and delve into the challenges encountered. Partial access to knowledge and information was a core part of the offered library services. As a consequence, services that were part of the Communist library system could be a source of long-term memory impairment at the social level. (shrink)

The target article by Bernard Baars presents a quick way of grasping the gist of his book In the Theater of Consciousness: The Workspace of the Mind, published recently . The metaphor of consciousness as a theatre has a long history. A prototype of the theatre model may be traced back to Plato's Allegory of the Cave, in which we are like prisoners living in a cave just observing the shadows of reality. The modern theatre model insists on consciousness being (...) under the control of attention by introducing a searchlight metaphor . The target article explores some evidence from the viewpoint of Global Workspace theory by using a method of ‘contrastive analysis’. According to this theory, GW works as the publicity organ of the brain and has a facility for accessing, disseminating, and exchanging information, and for exercizing global coordination and control . Baars describes his GW as a theatre. ‘As the house lights begin to dim and the audience falls silent, a single spotlight pierces the descending darkness, until only one bright spot, shining on stage, remains visible. You know that the audience, actors, stagehands, and spotlight operators are there, working together under invisible direction and guided by an unknown script, to present the flow of visible events on stage. As the house lights dim, only the focal contents of consciousness remain. Everything else is in darkness’ . According to GW theory, a theatre stage with a bright spot is just a working memory. So I would like to comment on some general characteristics of the working memory and related spotlight problem. (shrink)

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

There are times when a curiously odd relic of language presents us with a thread, which when pulled, reveals deep and general facts about human language. This paper unspools such a case. Prior to 1930, English speakers uniformly preferred male-before-female word order in conjoined nouns such asuncles and aunts; nephews and nieces; men and women. Since then, at least a half dozen items have systematically reversed their preferred order (e.g.,aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews) while others have not (men and (...) women). We review evidence that the unusual reversals began withmother and dad(dy)and spread to semantically and morphologically related binomials over a period of decades. The present work proposes that three aspects ofcognitive accessibilitycombine to quantify the probability of A&B order: (1) the relative accessibility of the A&B terms individually, (2) competition from B&A order, and critically, (3) cluster strength (i.e., similarity to related A'&B' cases). The emergent cluster of female-first binomials highlights the influence of semantic neighborhoods in memory retrieval. We suggest that cognitive accessibility can be used to predict the word order of both familiar and novel binomials generally, as well as the diachronic change focused on here. (shrink)

I draw upon Edmund Husserl’s classic text, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, in order to reframe some of his insight regarding the structures of inner time-consciousness and lay the groundwork for a few claims of my own. First, I show how musical expression is constituted in relation to the flowing movement of absolute subjectivity. Moreover, by carefully distinguishing between retention and recollection, I clarify, on the one hand, music’s ability to support access to memory proper (...) and, on the other hand, its ability to keep the past “in play,” so to speak. In this way, we come to understand how music offers a unique memorial capacity—it makes possible the life of the past, as the vital movement of absolute subjectivity. Throughout the essay, I refer to Josquin’s motet Ave Maria…virgo serena in order to clarify the specific temporal structures that are at issue. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001) 371-373 [Access article in PDF] Book Review French Fiction in the Mitterrand Years: Memory, Narrative, Desire French Fiction in the Mitterrand Years: Memory, Narrative, Desire, by Colin Davis & Elizabeth Fallaize; 160pp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, $24.95. Like the Mitterrand era itself, Davis and Fallaize's French Fiction in the Mitterrand Years is somewhat uneven. The election of François Mitterrand in 1981 (...) as the President of the Fifth Republic was a milestone in modern French history. After the conservative politics of the 1960s and 70s, the election of a socialist president and legislature seemed to offer the possibility of a new political and intellectual atmosphere. Indeed, the first two years of Mitterrand's presidency brought sweeping reforms. However, several scandals, continued economic problems and later "cohabitation" with a right-wing legislative majority muted the original verve. Mired in partisan politics, the government often appeared ineffectual.As with the political arena, French fiction of the 1980s was produced under the shadow of another long-standing French institution--the nouveau roman. Again we find a new direction, a turning-away from the past during the 1980s. Yet there was no outright refusal. There were no manifestos or polemical articles written by budding novelists, no claim to Literature. As Annie Ernaux describes her work Une Femme (1987): "Mon projet est de nature littéraire [...]. Mais je souhaite rester, d'une certaine façon, au-dessous de la littérature" (My project is of a literary nature [...]. But I wish to remain, in a certain way, beneath literature (p. 144).This lack of pretension is important, for it helps us better understand the writing of the period. As Davis and Fallaize point out, in the fiction of the Mitterrand years we find a return to history, to the subject, and to storytelling, three areas disdained by the new novelists of the 1950s and 60s (pp. 12-15). But at the same time, there is not an elegiac return to the conventions of the past. There are no didactic tales of Lucien de Rubempré's lost illusions. A good example of this is Patrick Roegiers's Beau Regard (1990), the account of a dinner during which hardly anyone speaks, told by a narrator who knows no one else at the table. Davis and Fallaize note: "In these novels the event is merely an incident, the story no more than an anecdote, and the anecdote merely a fait divers" (p. 147). Although not inconsequential, argue Davis and Fallaize, there is an unquestionable modesty to these texts.In the introduction to their work Davis and Fallaize write: "The aim of the current book is to analyze some of the most important and interesting directions in French fiction through detailed discussions of a selection of texts, all published during François Mitterrand's period as President of the Fifth Republic (1981-95)" (p. 1). This is exactly what they accomplish, selecting six novels--Duras's L'Amant (The Lover, 1984), Pennac's Au bonheur des ogres (The Scapegoat, 1985), Semprun's La Montagne blanche (1986), Echenoz's Lac (Lake, 1989), Guilbert's A l'ami qui ne m'a pas sauvé la vie (To the Friend Who Did Not Save [End Page 371] my Life, 1990), and Ernaux's Passion simple (Simple Passion, 1991)--and spending one chapter on each. They also discuss some of the important features of the era's fiction including memory, especially of World War II, contemporary culture and postmodernism, and autofiction.However, the book's limited goal also leads to some of its problems. As a whole, the work lacks cohesion. Chapters often read like individual essays. Moreover, although some chapters are well-grounded critically and contextually, others are not. Finally, the conclusion is too brief to synthesize aptly the various topics discussed in the previous chapters. The reader does not have a solid grasp of the fictional landscape of the Mitterrand years, but rather, as the introduction indicated, knowledge of "some of the [...] interesting directions in French fiction."One of the most illuminating chapters considers Daniel... (shrink)

In four studies, we investigated the role of remembering, reflecting on, and mutating personal past moral transgressions to learn from those moral mistakes and to form intentions for moral improvement. Participants reported having ruminated on their past wrongdoings, particularly their more severe transgressions, and they reported having frequently thought about morally better ways in which they could have acted instead (i.e., morally upward counterfactuals; Studies 1–3). The more that participants reported having mentally simulated morally better ways in which they could (...) have acted, the stronger their intentions were to improve in the future (Studies 2 and 3). Implementing an experimental manipulation, we then found that making accessible a morally upward counterfactual after committing a moral transgression strengthened reported intentions for moral improvement—relative to resimulating the remembered event and considering morally worse ways in which they could have acted instead (Study 4). We discuss the implications of these results for competing theoretical views on the relationship between memory and morality and for functional theories of counterfactual thinking. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 33.2 (2000) 187-191 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Memory, Identity, Community: The Idea of Narrative in the Human Sciences Memory, Identity, Community: The Idea of Narrative in the Human Sciences. Ed. Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman. Albany: SUNY Press, 1997. Pp. 393. $59.50, cloth; $19.95, paperback. According to its editors, the point of this anthology of previously published essays is to (...) "illustrate the ways in which 'narrative' has been used as an organizing concept in the human sciences over the last few decades" (ix). They argue that a "paradigm shift" is occurring in the human sciences, "one that leads away from nomological models and toward a more humanistic language and approach, in which narratives are central." Accordingly, the collection features essays about narrative written by authors who represent fields as disparate as philosophy, history, sociology, anthropology, psychology, religion, law, gender studies, political science, speech communication, and environmental studies. The collection reprints a few essays that are well known within the humanities. For example, the Hinchmans include an excerpt from Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue (1981), as well as Gertrude Himmelfarb's often-reprinted attack on social history, entitled "History With the Politics Left Out."As their title indicates, the editors divide their collection into three sections entitled "Memory," "Identity," and "Community." Their rationale for this division is that memory serves humans as a narrative stream that makes sense of the otherwise inchoate data given by experience. The narrative structured by memory produces what the Hinchmans call identity. Identity in its turn is influenced by narratives that circulate in the communities in which an individual exists. This collection aims to demonstrate that narrative plays a fundamental role within all three of these conceptual categories. The Hinchmans put it this way: As historians, social scientists, or (for that matter) prophets and bards weave narratives of the second order--stories that connect the individual mind to the social world--they create artifacts that soon take on a life of their own. These stories, told and retold, furnish the stock from which individual life narratives can be constructed. In other words, the story of an individual life usually plays off of one or more historically and socially transmitted narratives, which serve as prototypes of the elaboration of personal identity. Narrative theory is thus always implicitly a theory of how communities are formed and maintained, and how individuals are drafted into available social roles. (xxii-xxiii) [End Page 187]Each of the three major sections contains one or two theoretical essays, as well as two or three more that consider ways in which the concepts of memory, identity, and community play out in specific disciplinary contexts. For example, the section on community is introduced with MacIntyre's meditation on the relation of narrated selves to communities. It contains a theoretical essay by Edward M. Bruner on the malleability of community narratives, entitled "Ethnography as Narrative," and Walter Fisher's "Narration, Reason, and Community." Philip Abbott examines the use of narrative in political theory in an essay entitled "Storytelling and Political Theory," while Jim Cheney demonstrates the fruitfulness of communal narrative to environmental rhetoric in "Postmodern Environmental Ethics: Ethics as Bioregional Narrative." (Cheney's is the most intriguing piece in the collection).The editors introduce each section of the collection with brief essays that raise interesting questions. For example, introducing the section called "Memory," they ask: "Is the past something that can be reconstructed, on the basis of memories, or can it only be constructed?" and "Is there such a thing as prereflective, prenarrative, unemplotted experience, or does all experience possess at least an implicit narrative structure?" (1-2). Two of the essays collected under this head, David Carr's "Narrative and Real World: An Argument for Continuity" and Stephen Crites's "The Narrative Quality of Experience," are theoretical attempts to answer these questions. Other essays in this section investigate the role played by memory and narrative in the construction of specific discourses. W. Lance Bennett examines the role played by storytelling in criminal trials, and Misia... (shrink)

Episodic memory is sometimes described as mental time travel. This suggests three ideas: that episodic memory offers us access to the past that is quasi-experiential, that it is a source of knowledge of the past, and that it is, at root, passive. I offer an account of episodic memory that rejects all three ideas. The account claims that remembering is a matter of representing the past to oneself, in a way suitably responsive to how one experienced the (...) remembered episode to be. I argue that episodic memory is active, in the way this view suggests. I clarify the idea that it is, as the view also implies, not a source of knowledge but an expression of knowledge the subject already has. And I suggest the view need not limit memories to states that are in any way experience-like. This position offers a way to articulate the relations between episodic memory and related phenomena: factual memory, generic memory, remembering-how and anticipation. And it allows us to explain how we know which aspects of our episodic memory states to take seriously and which (such as the shift to an observer perspective on the remembered events) to treat as merely incidental. (shrink)

The role of public memory in a digital information age beckons us to explore how information is stored, managed, and circulated throughout various networks. Engaging with questions of public memory allows us to meditate on how we and future generations have developed processes and methods of information management that shape how knowledge emerges today. In order to understand how public memory interacts with networks of information, we must look at the systems and technologies that store, manage, and (...) make publicly accessible this information. Nathan R. Johnson's Architects of Memory: Information and Rhetoric in a Networked Archival Age serves as an important contribution to this task by historicizing the formation... (shrink)

Recent evidence from our lab indicates that LTP shares an important property with memory consolidation: it is consolidated by natural reinforcement. Nevertheless, the hypothesis, that LTP-like mechanisms or other forms of enhanced synaptic efficacy are basic elements in learning is not unequivocally supported. Skepticism aside, LTP is an accessible experimental model that is optimally equipped for the investigation of the cellular and molecular machinery involved in synaptic weight changes.

This article discusses the impact of Descartes’s substance-dualism on his account of discursive reason. Taking the presentation of deduction in the Rules as a paradigmatic case of thought’s extension and movement in time, I analyze the relation between intuitive and discursive understanding and that between intellect and imagination. I focus specifically on the mediation of corporeal impressions and of intellectual ideas by ingenium. As intellectual, ingenium is a faculty of understanding; as joining with phantasia, ingenium has access to corporeal affections, (...) images, and memory. Deduction involves both of these aspects of ingenium, and Descartes’s dualism complicates efforts to clarify the operations and nature of ingenium. Thus the dynamics of dualistic psychology account for some of the limitations of deduction in particular and discursive rationality in general. (shrink)

In the literature on episodic memory, one claim that has been made by a number of psychologists, and that is also at least implicit in some of the accounts given by philosophers, is that being able to recollect particular past events in the distinctive way afforded by episodic memory requires the possession of aspects of a theory of mind, such as a grasp of the relationship between one’s present recollective experience and one’s own past perceptual experience of the (...) remembered event. In this paper, I re-examine what connection, if any, there is between episodic memory and theory of mind. I first criticize the dominant way in which this connection has been construed theoretically, which – perhaps influenced by other aspects of theory of mind research – has sought to link the possession of episodic memory primarily with a grasp of the idea of representation, or the idea of informational access. I then argue for a novel, alternative, way of connecting episodic memory and theory of mind, which focuses on the category of an experience, and on the role a grasp of that category might be seen to play in episodic recollection. In doing so, I also draw attention to a dimension of our understanding of the mental which remains as yet underexplored in the literature on theory of mind. (shrink)

Number facts are commonly assumed to be verbally stored in an associative multiplication fact retrieval network. Prominent evidence for this assumption comes from so-called operand-related errors (e.g. 4 × 6 = 28). However, little is known about the development of this network in children and its relation to verbal and non-verbal memories. In a longitudinal design, we explored elementary school children from grades 3 and 4 in a multiplication verification task with the operand-related and -unrelated distractors. We examined the contribution (...) of multiplicative fact retrieval by verbal and visuo-spatial short-term and working memory. Children in grade 4 showed smaller reaction times in all conditions. However, there was no significant difference in errors between grades. Contribution of verbal and visuo-spatial working memory also changed with grade. Multiplication correlated with verbal working memory and performance in grade 3 but with visuo-spatial working memory and performance in grade 4. We suggest that the relation to verbal working memory in grade 3 indicates primary linguistic learning of and access to multiplication in grade 3 which is probably based on verbal repetition of the multiplication table heavily practiced in grades 2 and 3. However, the relation to visuo-spatial semantic working memory in grade 4 suggests that there is a shift from verbal to visual and semantic learning in grade 4. This shifting may be induced because later in elementary school, multiplication problems are rather carried out via more written, i.e., visual tasks, which also involve executive functions. More generally, the current data indicates that mathematical development is not generally characterized by a steady progress in performance; rather verbal and non-verbal memory contributions of performance shift over time, probably due to different learning contents. (shrink)

The well-known experiments of Nisbett and Wilson lead to the conclusion that we have no introspective access to our decision-making processes. Johansson et al. have recently developed an original protocol consisting in manipulating covertly the relationship between the subjects’ intended choice and the outcome they were presented with: in 79.6% of cases, they do not detect the manipulation and provide an explanation of the choice they did not make, confirming the findings of Nisbett and Wilson. We have reproduced this protocol, (...) while introducing for some choices an expert guidance to the description of this choice. The subjects who were assisted detected the manipulation in 80% of cases. Our experiment confirms Nisbett and Wilson’s findings that we are usually unaware of our decision processes, but goes further by showing that we can access them through specific mental acts. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Decolonizing MemoryLaurence J. Kirmayer*, MD (bio)In this far-reaching essay, Emily Walsh explores the significance of memory for coming to grips with the enduring legacy of colonialism in psychiatry. She argues that "for reasons of self-preservation, racialized individuals should reject collective memories underwritten by colonialism." Psychiatry can enable this process or collude with the structures of domination to silence and disable those who bear the brunt of the colonialist (...) history of violence and its current global incarnations. In this brief commentary, I want to underscore the importance of Walsh's argument, link it to contemporary work in cognitive and social science on the dynamics of memory, and point to some resources for implementing these insights in health services and clinical practice.Memory as Psychological Process, Social Practice and Cultural InstitutionMemory is not simply an individual psychological process of accessing images, stories, and knowledge of the past, but a reconstructive process of building a narrative (Kirmayer, 1996). This narrative is profoundly shaped by available templates, metaphors and models that are provided by the tacit, normative and official histories of society (Hirst, Yamashiro & Coman, 2018). But memory is also shaped by cultural affordances that guide attention and by narrative practices, which depend on other people (Ramstead, Veissière, & Kirmayer, 2017). In effect, remembering is not a matter of reaching down into one's memory archive or sedimented experience, but an embodied and enactive process of thinking with and through others (Laanes & Meretoja, 2021; Veissière, Constant, Ramstead, Friston, & Kirmayer, 2020). Memory then depends on community and on a shared understanding of history and of possible futures through which one can anchor and elaborate one's individual story.A direct consequence is that disconnecting a person from others, disembedding them from their social milieu, will lead to disruptions in memory and in the continuity of self. When the environment is toxic, this severance may sometimes be (partly) beneficial—but it always comes at a cost. Figuring out those costs, making them explicit, and ensuring that those whose history is being suppressed or overwritten by others have a chance to reclaim and write their own, is an ethical and pragmatic imperative.The denial of vital memories (recent or remote, personal or collective) causes fractures in the self that may disorganize the individual, install false consciousness, and cement the exclusionary and disvalued position of colonized, racialized, and [End Page 243] marginalized subjects. This process is not only—or even primarily—about memory. It is part of the structure of everyday life, inscribed in institutions and practices where colonial histories, racism, and economic exploitation are deeply entangled. Representations of the past are part of the way we construe the present and anticipate the future—but not every interpretive frame is a memory; there are structures in and of the moment that condition how we think about ourselves in health and illness and these too convey interests and biases disguised as "just the way things are."Fanon's Politics of Postcolonial Memory and IdentityWalsh offers a reading of aspects of Fanon's philosophy to reveal the workings of colonialism in and through memory. She is concerned with specific subsets of collective memories that are affectively charged and related to the identity of a group (Wertsch & Roediger, 2008). These memories are collective not simply they are shared by or distributed among the members of a group but because they define or constitute the collective itself.History is written largely by the powerful who create dominant or 'master' narratives that serve their own projects of legitimation and self-mystification (Trouillot, 2015; Lindqvist, 2021). But the creation of dominant narratives is not solely the province of those in power. There are many kinds of self-serving collective memory (Baumeister & Hastings, 2013)—from those related to the creation of nation states, which may ignore not only colonized peoples, but all ethnicities, religions or linguistic groups subordinated to the ideals of the dominant group (Anderson, 2006; Gunew, 2013; van Alphen & Carretero, 2015), to other forms of collective identity, even to those created by liberatory movements. These are maintained by institutionalization, ceremonial repetition and reenactment... (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)