In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ideas in the Brain: The Localization of Memory Traces in the Eighteenth CenturyTimo KaitaroPlato suggests in the Theaetetus that we imagine a piece of wax in our soul, a gift from the goddess of Memory. We are able to remember things when our perceptions or thoughts imprint a trace upon this piece of wax, in the same manner as a seal is stamped on wax. Plato (...) uses this metaphor to explain the errors which arise when we mistake something for something else: we connect the perception of an object with the trace belonging to another. The metaphor can also be used in explaining differences in people’s mnestic capacities: rapid learning and forgetting correspond to soft wax, impure wax results in muddled traces, etc.1 If we locate the traces in the brain instead of in the soul, Plato’s metaphor gains consistency and turns into a testable hypothesis. This move was already made by Quintilian.2So, the metaphor of memory as traces in the brain is evidently not a modern invention. This is easy to understand. To frame the hypothesis one needs only to reflect on how we use objects outside our brains for mnemonic purposes. We conserve ideas by tracing or printing letters and words on paper. We are also able to conserve images in drawings, paintings and prints. What could be more natural than to think of memory as the formation of traces in the brain? The development of even better information storage techniques in the form of pictures, symbols, and signs provides the metaphor extra plausibility. Plato’s seal allows us to imagine the imprint of a person’s likeness, but modern techniques of information storage and retrieval make it even easier to imagine memory in general as the formation of material traces.Explaining memory in terms of material traces could, of course, be taken [End Page 301] to mean that the formation of material traces in the brain is merely a necessary condition of memory. But one could also take a more reductionistic stance which identifies memory with the formation of material traces. Furthermore, one could identify specific mental items (sensations, ideas, memories) with specific physiological events or anatomical entities in the brain. This seems especially plausible if we imagine that the traces in the brain are as discrete and separate as ideas or memories are in our minds. Since the traces we form or print on paper consist of discrete letters and words, the thought that the traces in the brain are equally discrete and separate comes easily. Plato, in fact, made separateness a condition for the memory to work properly: it is not easy to read signs printed on one another.3 Of course, no traces are actually visible in the brain. But they are easy to imagine, as it is to imagine explanations of psychological phenomena, such as association, based on these traces.At the end of the seventeenth century, explanations of mental phenomena referring to material traces in the brain were used by writers, from Platonists to materialists, who supported widely different theories about the nature of the human mind.4 In fact, as I will show later in this paper, the question of the possible identity of mental entities, like ideas or sensations, with material entities or traces in the brain is relatively independent of the question of the existence of an immaterial soul. Or rather, if there is a systematic connection between the answers proposed to these two questions in the eighteenth century, it is not the connection one would expect. Nowadays we often tend to think of a prototypical materialist as someone who makes radical reductionistic claims about the identity of mental phenomena with brain states. We also tend to think of the eighteenth-century French materialists as “mechanistic.”5 In view of this reputation, it may come as a surprise to find that some eighteenth-century materialists, notably Denis Diderot, were in fact consistent anti-reductionists and opposed to mechanical or mechanistic explanations of the mental.6 In fact, the epithet “mechanistic” is misleading even when applied to the philosopher who is traditionally presented as the paradigmatic example of a “mechanistic materialist,” Julien Offray... (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)

In this article, the author examines the origins and definition of the concept of realms of memory, and demonstrates the possibilities of its use as a research optic. The reason for the author’s attention is the established tradition of identifying realms of memory with material objects, which does not correspond to Pierre Nora’s original intention and the meaning of the term. In order to meet this challenge, the author first offers a brief description of Nora’s project and his (...) own proposed definition of the lieu de mémoire. Nora identifies three aspects to better define the core concept of his project: materiality, symbolism, functionality; he attributes key importance to symbolism in particular. Next, the author looks at the origins of the project and its predecessors. The author argues that realms of memory act as an extension of Halbwachs’s concept of “social framework” and Yeats’s reinterpreted idea of mnemonic places. Nora’s project, being possible only in a situation of a rejection of linear causality of historical narrative, intersects with the idea of Foucault’s “archaeology of knowledge” and Benjamin’s romantic anti-historicism. However, instead of their conflicting perspective, it offers a diplomatic consensus of lieu de mémoire. The author then presents a perspective on Nora’s project by F. Hartog, who sees in the project of realms of memory a new model of time and historiography. Next, in order to explore the applicability Nora’s optics, the author outlines the primary features associated with the realms of memory. Thus, a realm of memory is a “remnant” of the past associated with certain commemorative practices, subject to multiple interpretations, capable of change but retaining its significance. Leveling the complexity and debatability of memory sites, as well as the conflictuality inherent in them, reduces their use in scientific discourse to a metaphor or rhetorical figure. Following Hartog, the author proposes to view Nora’s places of memory as a heuristic tool which represents a certain optic for research into the past. Understanding realms of memory as an aesthetic concept makes it possible to interpret them as an epistemological framework, the use of which can moderate the ideological interests and political biases of the researcher, to talk about nation and national identity without nationalism, and to consider memory sites as a way to research the local past. (shrink)

In the multidisciplinary field of memory studies, remembering and forgetting have mainly been analyzed following two ideal-typical models: memory-as-containment (exemplified by the notions of framework and site of memory) and memory-as-flow (epitomized by the notions of afterlife and mnemohistory). These two models are often presented as mutually exclusive and counterposed. Yet, in linking past with present, and when connecting different spaces and generations, memory is always the result of circulation (flow) as well as of local (...) semiotic conditions of production and use (containment). By investigating memory-making and oblivion-making in processes of interpretation, the semiotic perspective elaborated by Umberto Eco allows us to envision memory-as-containment and memory-as-flow in a combined analysis, where the twofold conception of memory – either as movement or as form – merges. The aim of this article is, then, to provide an interpretative theory of memory, and to identify and describe the methodological tools capable of implementing such an approach. The memory of the former Italian concentration camp of Fossoli will serve as an exemplary and illustrative case study. (shrink)

In this paper I explore how early modern Italian Aristotelians understood Aristotle’s De memoria by focusing on three key-points of Aristotle’s theory of memory and recollection: the localization of memory in the perceptual part of the soul; the characterisation of phantasia and its association with the notions of koinē aisthēsis and prōton aisthētikon; the definition of recollection as “a kind of syllogism” and its account as an activity that implies the faculty of deliberating and is therefore restricted (...) to humans. My aim is to show the interactions as well as the tensions between natural philosophical and medical theories in reading and interpreting Aristotle’s Parva naturalia in the Italian milieu. (shrink)

This paper is a tentative step towards a historical cognitive science, in the domain of memory and personal identity. I treat theoretical models of memory in history as specimens of the way cultural norms and artifacts can permeate ('proto')scientific views of inner processes. I apply this analysis to the topic of psychological control over one's own body, brain, and mind. Some metaphors and models for memory and mental representation signal the projection inside of external aids. Overtly at (...) least, medieval and Renaissance theorists agreed that such models had to allow for, or even guarantee, some conception of cognitive order and discipline. Individual memory traces had to be independent, not mixed up or interfering with others. The long tradition of improving or bypassing 'natural memory' by deliberately internalizing artefactual models was part of an arduous process of self-fashioning. Moral panic about confusion and mixture features centrally in the imposition of cognitive discipline in local memory traditions. (shrink)

Memory research distinguishes two components of episodes—the event or item and the spatial–temporal setting or context in which it occurred. The wordcontextis used either globally to denote the physical, social, or emotional environment at study and test or it is used locally to refer to another word or picture that was paired with a particular target. In this article, we report four experiments that investigated the influence of two different nonverbal local contexts on explicit word recognition and implicit word (...) identification test performance. In each experiment, university students studied words that were displayed against various extra-item local contexts, and the contexts were either the same or different at study and test. What differed across experiments was the nature of the contexts: for Experiments 1 and 2, it was a band of color that stretched across the computer screen, and for Experiments 3 and 4, the context was a colored line drawing. The combined findings from all experiments provide no evidence of memory context effects on priming. By contrast, recognition test performance showed reliable MCEs but only when the local context was a concrete drawing or when it was a color that was target-related or appropriate. The discussion compared these findings with those from previous studies that concerned the cueing effectiveness of verbal and nonverbal extra-item contexts. (shrink)

This paper comprises an analysis of an aspect of the history of psychiatric/psychological knowledge. The case in point is the transience of the notion of memory recovery in the context of childhood sexual abuse. By transience is meant that the concept of memory recovery apparently vanished and re-emerged despite the fact that its source, childhood sexual abuse, did not disappear. Such abuse is a fairly common phenomenon worldwide, whereas memory recovery seems to be temporally and locally limited. (...) Is it possible to say that psychiatric/psychological knowledge of memory recovery is also context-dependent and culture-bound? If so, what would this mean in relation to the applicability of this knowledge? (shrink)

Emotional arousal enhances perception and memory of high-priority information but impairs processing of other information. Here, we propose that, under arousal, local glutamate levels signal the current strength of a representation and interact with norepinephrine (NE) to enhance high priority representations and out-compete or suppress lower priority representations. In our "glutamate amplifies noradrenergic effects" (GANE) model, high glutamate at the site of prioritized representations increases local NE release from the locus coeruleus (LC) to generate “NE hotspots.” At these NE (...) hotspots, local glutamate and NE release are mutually enhancing and amplify activation of prioritized representations. In contrast, arousal-induced LC activity inhibits less active representations via two mechanisms: 1) Where there are hotspots, lateral inhibition is amplified; 2) Where no hotspots emerge, NE levels are only high enough to activate low-threshold inhibitory adrenoreceptors. Thus, LC activation promotes a few hotspots of excitation in the context of widespread suppression, enhancing high priority representations while suppressing the rest. Hotspots also help synchronize oscillations across neural ensembles transmitting high-priority information. Furthermore, brain structures that detect stimulus priority interact with phasic NE release to preferentially route such information through large-scale functional brain networks. A surge of NE before, during, or after encoding enhances synaptic plasticity at NE hotspots, triggering local protein synthesis processes that enhance selective memory consolidation. Together, these noradrenergic mechanisms promote selective attention and memory under arousal. GANE not only reconciles apparently contradictory findings in the emotion-cognition literature but also extends previous influential theories of LC neuromodulation by proposing specific mechanisms for how LC-NE activity increases neural gain. (shrink)

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterized by atypical perception, including processing that is biased toward local details rather than global configurations. This bias may impact on memory. The present study examined the effect of this perception on both implicit (Experiment 1) and explicit (Experiment 2) memory in conditions that promote either local or global processing. The first experiment consisted of an object identification priming task using two distinct encoding conditions: one favoring local processing (Local condition) and the other (...) favoring global processing (Global condition) of drawings. The second experiment focused on episodic (explicit) memory with two different cartoon recognition tasks that favored either local (i.e., processing specific details) or a global processing (i.e., processing each cartoon as a whole). In addition, all the participants underwent a general clinical cognitive assessment aimed at documenting their cognitive profile and enabling correlational analyses with experimental memory tasks. Seventeen participants with ASD and 17 typically developing (TD) controls aged from 10 to 16 years participated to the first experiment and 13 ASD matched with 13 TD participants were included for the second experiment. Experiment 1 confirmed the preservation of priming effects in ASD but, unlike the Comparison group, the ASD group did not increase his performance as controls after a globally oriented processing. Experiment 2 revealed that local processing led to difficulties in discriminating lures from targets in a recognition task when both lures and targets shared common details. The correlation analysis revealed that these difficulties were associated with processing speed and inhibition. These preliminary results suggest that natural perceptual processes oriented toward local information in ASD may impact upon their implicit memory by preventing globally oriented processing in time-limited conditions and induce confusion between explicit memories that share common details. (shrink)

IntroductionThe prefrontal cortex plays a crucial role in cognition, particularly in executive functions. Cortical reactivity measured with Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation combined with Electroencephalography is altered in pathological conditions, and it may also be a marker of cognitive status in middle-aged adults. In this study, we investigated the associations between cognitive measures and TMS evoked EEG reactivity and explored whether the effects of this relationship were related to neurofilament light chain levels, a marker of neuroaxonal damage.MethodsFifty two healthy middle-aged adults from (...) the Barcelona Brain Health Initiative cohort underwent TMS-EEG, a comprehensive neuropsychological assessment, and a blood test for NfL levels. Global and Local Mean-Field Power, two measures of cortical reactivity, were quantified after left prefrontal cortex stimulation, and cognition was set as the outcome of the regression analysis. The left inferior parietal lobe was used as a control stimulation condition.ResultsLocal reactivity was significantly associated with working memory and reasoning only after L-PFC stimulation. No associations were found between NfL and cognition. These specific associations were independent of the status of neuroaxonal damage indexed by the NfL biomarker and remained after adjusting for age, biological sex, and education.ConclusionOur results demonstrate that TMS evoked EEG reactivity at the L-PFC, but not the L-IPL, is related to the cognitive status of middle-aged individuals and independent of NfL levels, and may become a valuable biomarker of frontal lobe-associated cognitive function. (shrink)

True to his longstanding bias against grand unifying theories, Hacking chooses to pursue these questions by focusing on a specific case of memory-thinking: the history of multiple personality. His excavation of the contemporary terrain leads him, however, to the surprisingly grand conclusion that the various sciences of memory—including neurological studies of localization, experimental studies of recall, and studies in the psychodynamics of memory—all emerged in connection with attempts to “scientize the soul,” as a result of which (...) spiritual battles have been recast as scientific controversies “where we suppose there is such a thing as knowledge to be had”. (shrink)

A key component of research on human sentence processing is to characterize the processing difficulty associated with the comprehension of words in context. Models that explain and predict this difficulty can be broadly divided into two kinds, expectation‐based and memory‐based. In this work, we present a new model of incremental sentence processing difficulty that unifies and extends key features of both kinds of models. Our model, lossy‐context surprisal, holds that the processing difficulty at a word in context is proportional (...) to the surprisal of the word given a lossy memory representation of the context—that is, a memory representation that does not contain complete information about previous words. We show that this model provides an intuitive explanation for an outstanding puzzle involving interactions of memory and expectations: language‐dependent structural forgetting, where the effects of memory on sentence processing appear to be moderated by language statistics. Furthermore, we demonstrate that dependency locality effects, a signature prediction of memory‐based theories, can be derived from lossy‐context surprisal as a special case of a novel, more general principle called information locality. (shrink)

Tactile exploration often involves sequential touches interspersed with stimulus-free durations. Whereas it is obvious that texture-related perceptual variables, irrespective of the encoding strategy, must be stored in memory for comparison, it is rather unclear which of those variables are held in memory. There are two established variables—“intensity” and “frequency”, which are “temporally global” variables because of the long stimulus integration interval required to average the signal or derive spectral components, respectively; on the other hand, a recently established third (...) contender is the “temporally local” variable that codes for kinematic profiles of very short, suprathreshold events in the vibrotactile signal. Here, we present the first psychophysical evidence that temporally local variables can be stored in memory. To that end, we asked participants to detect changes in pulsatile indentation stimuli at their fingertips with and without a gap of 1 s between stimulus presentations. The stimuli either contained global variables alone, or a mix of local and global variables. We found, first, that humans are much better at detecting a change in stimuli when local variables are available rather than global ones alone—as evident by the fact that 21 compared to only 6 participants out of 25 yielded a valid psychophysical curve, respectively. Second, this observation persists even when there is a gap between the stimuli, implying local variables must be stored in memory. Third, an extensive array of relevant intensity definitions failed to explain participants’ performance in any consistent manner, which implies that perceptual decisions were less likely to be driven by intensity coding. Taken together, our results suggest that humans perform pulsatile change detection utilizing local pulse shape, and to a lesser degree global pulse rate, and that both parameters can be stored in memory. (shrink)

Using, as a point of departure, Tim Lott's recent autobiography where he attempts to make sense of his mother's suicide of 1988 through a reconstruction of his family genealogy, this article tries to map the production of gendered, classed, and racialized subjects and subjectivity in west London. It addresses the tension between Lott's discourse of his own white working-class boyhood during the 1970s where questions of ‘race’ are all but absent, and the racialized ‘commonsense’ that pervades the interviews with other (...) local white contemporaries of Lott and his parents. These narratives are analysed in relation to the socio-economic context and the political activism of the period. Theoretically, it analyses the ‘diaspora space’ of London/britain, interrogating essentialist ‘origin stories’ of belonging; reaching out to a glimmer on the horizon of emerging non-identical formations of kinship across boundaries of class, racism, and ethnicity; and exploring the purchase of certain South Asian terms – ‘ajnabi’, ‘ghair’, and ‘apna/apni’ – in constructing a non-binarized understanding of identification across ‘difference’. (shrink)

This study investigates the role of locality (a task/material-related variable), demographic factors (age, education, and sex), cognitive capacities (verbal working memory [WM], verbal short-term memory [STM], speed of processing [SOP], and inhibition), and morphosyntactic category (time reference and grammatical aspect) in verb-related morphosyntactic production (VRMP). A sentence completion task tapping production of time reference and grammatical aspect in local and nonlocal configurations, and cognitive tasks measuring verbal WM capacity, verbal STM capacity, motor SOP, perceptual SOP, and inhibition were (...) administered to 200 neurotypical Greek-speaking participants, aged between 19 and 80 years. We fitted generalized linear mixed-effects models and performed path analyses. Significant main effects of locality, age, education, verbal WM capacity, motor SOP, and morphosyntactic category emerged. Production of time reference and aspect did not interact with any of the significant factors (i.e., age, education, verbal WM capacity, motor SOP, and locality), and locality did not interact with any memory system. Path analyses revealed that the relationships between age and VRMP, and between education and VRMP were partly mediated by verbal WM; and the relationship between verbal WM and VRMP was partly mediated by perceptual SOP. Results suggest that subject-, task/material- and morphosyntactic category-specific factors determine accuracy performance on VRMP; and the effects of age, education, and verbal WM on VRMP are partly indirect. The fact that there was a significant main effect of verbal WM but not of verbal STM on accuracy performance in the VRMP task suggests that it is predominantly the processing component (and not the storage component) of verbal WM that supports VRMP. Lastly, we interpret the results as suggesting that VRMP is also supported by a procedural memory system whose efficiency might be reflected in years of formal education. (shrink)

This article describes a left-corner parser implemented within a cognitively and neurologically motivated distributed model of memory. This parser's approach to syntactic ambiguity points toward a tidy account both of surprisal effects and of locality effects, such as the parsing breakdowns caused by center embedding. The model provides an algorithmic-level account of these breakdowns: The structure of the parser's memory and the nature of incremental parsing produce a smooth degradation of processing accuracy for longer center embeddings, and a (...) steeper degradation when they are nested, in line with recall observations by Miller and Isard and speed-accuracy trade-off observations by McElree et al.. Modeling results show that this effect is distinct from the effects of ambiguity and exceeds the effect of mere sentence length. (shrink)

Collective memories of totalitarianism and the industrialized slaughter of the Holocaust have exerted a profound influence on postwar European politics and philosophy. Two of the most prominent political theorists and public intellectuals to take up the legacy of total war are Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas. However, their prescriptions seem to pull in opposite directions. While Arendt draws on remembrance to recover politics on a smaller scale by advocating for the empowerment of local councils, Habermas draws on the past to (...) justify his search for postnational forms of political community that can overcome the bloody legacy of nationalism. My argument brings these two perspectives together by examining their mutual support for European integration as a way of preserving the lessons of totalitarianism. I argue that both Arendt and Habermas reject the technocratic tendencies of the European Union while maintaining hope that it can develop a truly postnational form of politics. (shrink)

The theme of this article is the Thespian Polyandrion and its mnemonic connections to local history, especially the Thespian role during the Persian Wars (480-79) and the Peloponnesian War (431-404). The Polyandrion was constructed after the Battle of Delion (424), a Boiotian victory over the Athenians. It will be argued that the sculptural scheme was shaped in reference to Leonidas’ memorial at Thermopylai. The reference was inspired by Thespian history; the city’s history was largely overshadowed in the memorial landscape of (...) the battlefield, and in narrative traditions of the Persian Wars Thespian efforts were often overlooked. As the Athenians were framed as the new Persians during the Peloponnesian War, the Battle of Delion and its aftermath provided the ideal opportunity to cultivate a lasting memory of Thespian contributions to the freedom of the Greeks. (shrink)

Within feminist memory studies the economy has largely been overlooked, despite the fact that the economic analysis of culture and society has long featured in research on women and gender. This article addresses that gap, arguing that the global economy matters in understanding the gender of memory and memories of gender. It models the conceptual basis for the consideration of a feminist economic analysis of memory that can reveal the dimensions of mnemonic transformation, accumulation and exchange through (...) gendered mnemonic labour, gendered mnemonic value and gendered mnemonic capital. The article then applies the concepts of mnemonic labour and mnemonic capital in more detail through a case study of memory activism examining the work of the Parragirls and the Parramatta Female Factory Precinct Memory Project in Sydney, Australia. The campaigns have worked to recognize the memory and history of the longest continuous site of female containment in Australia built to support the British invasion. The site in Parramatta, which dates from the 1820s, was a female factory for transported convicts, a female prison, an asylum for women and girls, an orphanage and then Parramatta Girls Home. The Burramattagal People of Darug Clan are the Traditional Owners of the land and the site is of practical and spiritual importance to indigenous women. This local struggle is representative of a global economic system of gendered institutionalized violence and forgetting, The analysis shows how the mnemonic labour of women survivors accumulates as mnemonic value that is then transformed into institutional mnemonic capital. Focusing on how mnemonic labour creates lasting mnemonic capital reveals the gendered dimensions of memory which are critical for ongoing memory work. (shrink)

This translation of a classic and original work of intellectual history is beautifully done. Rossi’s book Clavis Universalis was first published in Italian in 1960, but Clucas translates the second, revised edition of 1983. The book is about Renaissance and 17th-century encyclopedism, hieroglyphics and cryptography, the techniques of artificial memory, the history of rhetoric, changes in views about logic and method in the scientific revolution, and new ideas about how language and images might reflect or capture reality. Frances Yates’s (...) brilliant The Art of Memory, published in 1966, has so far had much more influence in the English-speaking world. Despite warm citations and many points of contact with Yates’s work, Rossi is less interested in uncovering hidden occult traditions, and more focussed on the way major 17th-century thinkers’ work must be understood against the rich background of schemes for universal grammar and local memory. He shows that scholars working on Bacon, Descartes, and Leibniz miss key references to this intellectual heritage. Half of the book [152] introduces relevant mnemonic, rhetorical, linguistic, medical, and occult writings. Rossi includes illuminating discussions not only of Ramon Lull, Petrus Ramus, Cornelius Agrippa, Giordano Bruno, and all, but also of fascinating minor writers like Guglielmo Gratorolo who systematized advice on medical aids to memory in the mid-16th century, and the wonderful Johannes Spangerbergius, who classified various forms of amnesia in 1570. He then argues that polemic against the arts of memory in both Bacon and Descartes coexisted with intense interest on their part in the supplementing of weak powers of natural memory by various artificial aids and objects outside the boundaries of skull and skin. Rossi tells the strange stories of the great 17th-century encyclopedists and universal language schemers—Alsted, Comenius, Wilkins, Dalgarno—making important connections between Wilkins’s scheme and worries about methods for botanical classification in the early Royal Society. The final chapter is a tour de force on ‘the sources of Leibniz’s universal character’, placing him (as Clucas neatly puts it) ‘at the “end” of a Renaissance intellectual tradition rather than reading him “forwards” as an innovative precursor of modern formal logic’. Historians of science, linguistics, and philosophy have built on many aspects of Rossi’s work since 1983, and Clucas contributes an outstanding introduction which summarizes key strands of recent scholarship. (shrink)

This paper sets out a phenomenological account of how the autobiographical past can, on occasion, assume certain future-like qualities. I begin by reflecting on the analogy of a bore wave, as employed in a novel by Julian Barnes. Building on this, I turn to Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre in order to address how our memories are revised in light of our current concerns and vice versa. Then, by adapting Edmund Husserl’s conception of temporal “protention,” I show how acts (...) of remembering are integral to a process of ongoing reconciliation between our current orientation towards the future and the autobiographical past. They sustain, disrupt, and reconsolidate a non-localized, dynamic sense of who we are, in ways that are inseparable from how we experience time. (shrink)

There is a wealth of evidence showing that increasing the distance between an argument and its head leads to more processing effort, namely, locality effects; these are usually associated with constraints in working memory (DLT: Gibson, 2000 ; activation-based model: Lewis and Vasishth, 2005 ). In SOV languages, however, the opposite effect has been found: antilocality (see discussion in Levy et al., 2013 ). Antilocality effects can be explained by the expectation-based approach as proposed by Levy ( 2008 ) (...) or by the activation-based model of sentence processing as proposed by Lewis and Vasishth ( 2005 ). We report an eye-tracking and a self-paced reading study with sentences in Spanish together with measures of individual differences to examine the distinction between expectation- and memory-based accounts, and within memory-based accounts the further distinction between DLT and the activation-based model. The experiments show that (i) antilocality effects as predicted by the expectation account appear only for high-capacity readers; (ii) increasing dependency length by interposing material that modifies the head of the dependency (the verb) produces stronger facilitation than increasing dependency length with material that does not modify the head; this is in agreement with the activation-based model but not with the expectation account; and (iii) a possible outcome of memory load on low-capacity readers is the increase in regressive saccades (locality effects as predicted by memory-based accounts) or, surprisingly, a speedup in the self-paced reading task; the latter consistent with good-enough parsing (Ferreira et al., 2002 ). In sum, the study suggests that individual differences in working memory capacity play a role in dependency resolution, and that some of the aspects of dependency resolution can be best explained with the activation-based model together with a prediction component. (shrink)

This paper samples the large body of neuroscientific evidence suggesting that each mental function takes place within specific neural structures. For instance, vision appears to occur in the visual cortex, motor control in the motor cortex, spatial memory in the hippocampus, and cognitive control in the prefrontal cortex. Evidence comes from neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, neurochemistry, brain stimulation, neuroimaging, lesion studies, and behavioral genetics. If mental functions take place within neural structures, mental functions cannot survive brain death. Therefore, there is no (...) mental life after brain death. -/- 1. The Neural Localization of Mental Functions - 1.1 Perception and Motor Control - 1.2 Memory - 1.3 Emotion - 1.4 Language - 1.5 Thinking - 1.6 Attention and Consciousness - 1.7 Spirituality -- 2. Objections - 2.1 Linguistic Dualism - 2.2 Mere Correlation - 2.3 Neural Plasticity - 2.4 Intentionality - 2.5 Phenomenal Consciousness - 2.6 Subjectivity - 2.7 Self-Knowledge - 2.8 Free Will - 2.9 Are We Just Indulging in Physicalistic Wishful Thinking? -- 3. Conclusion -- Appendix: Physicalism and the Afterlife. (shrink)

Selling “existences” for $25 a shot, hypnotists in 1950s America took their soul-searching clients back before birth to access memories from their previous lives. This brief “nationwide preoccupation” with past-life regression is one of eleven episodes richly documented in Alison Winter’s history of memory in the twentieth century. It followed reports from Morey Bernstein, a Colorado businessman, that when he hypnotized a local housewife, she remembered vivid details of her life as “Bridey Murphy” in nineteenth-century Ireland. A “giddy salon (...) culture” developed in the wake of public thrill at Bridey’s precise and emotional personal memories, transmitted across incarnations. While party invitations instructed guests to “come as you were”, one teenager’s suicide note announced his desire to explore reincarnation “in person”. (shrink)

The article aims to concretize the phenomenological account concerning the problem of an auditory image. The author considers auditory imagery as a scientific object and compares different treatments of the problem to fix the potential and advantages of its phenomenological interpretation. In the first stage of the study, the author distinguishes the key characteristics of the image by means the lexical analysis. This is the perceptual (predominantly visual) nature of an image, integrality, and essentiality (image as an idea). In the (...) second stage, the understandings of the mental and auditory imagery in physiology, experimental psychology, music psychology, musicology, and interdisciplinary studies are described. In the third stage, the peculiar phenomenological ways of the comprehension of an auditory image are revealed. The phenomenological interest is to pick out consciousness which perceiving of an image equally from the process of perceiving and from entailing in an image. The specific phenomenological stance is placing an auditory image on the bound of transcendent (the process of perceiving) and immanent (an image that is already perceived). The auditory image is conceived as the unity of Modi of its givenness. Most fecks of this Modi are original, they cannot be transferred into other science scopes: they are the interconnection of all moments of the temporal unfolding, self-organization in the time, self-referentiality, non-semanticity, periodicity/randomness, eventuality, quasi-embodiment (physicality). Solely phenomenological problems are problems of the constitution of an auditory image, its life-horizon, intersubjectivity, and regional matching. The author infers that phenomenology does not conceive auditory image as sustained auditory representation, associated with acoustic memory. Its perceptual nature does not play a key role here. Moreover, the perceptual-semantic duality of the image is not fixed by the phenomenological description. The phenomenological approach is unique because it researches auditory data exhaustively but does not use semantic and referential analysis of them. The main feature of phenomenological description is the focus on the unity of auditory image: All the elements of auditory data are interpreted in their synthesis as the different levels of the unity of hearing image. Thus, the phenomenological approach as a whole is the most promising for comprehending such a dominant quality of the auditory image as integrality. (shrink)

Some theorists who emphasize the complexity of biological and cognitive systems and who advocate the employment of the tools of dynamical systems theory in explaining them construe complexity and reduction as exclusive alternatives. This paper argues that reduction, an approach to explanation that decomposes complex activities and localizes the components within the complex system, is not only compatible with an emphasis on complexity, but provides the foundation for dynamical analysis. Explanation via decomposition and localization is nonetheless extremely challenging, and (...) an analysis of recent cognitive neuroscience research on memory is used to illustrate what is involved. Memory researchers split between advocating memory systems and advocating memory processes, and I argue that it is the latter approach that provides the critical sort of decomposition and localization for explaining memory. The challenges of linking distinguishable functions with brain processes is illustrated by two examples: competing hypotheses about the contribution of the hippocampus and competing attempts to link areas in frontal cortex with memory processing. (shrink)

An account of the development of temporal understanding is proposed which links such understanding with the development of episodic memory. We distinguish between different ways of representing time in terms of the kinds of temporal frameworks they involve. Distinctions are made between frameworks that are perspectival or nonperspectival and those that represent recurrent sequences or particular times. Even primitive temporal understanding integrates both perspectival and nonperspectival components. However, since early frameworks are event-based and localized, they are not yet sufficient (...) for episodic memory in that they do not enable the child to think of events as having occurred at particular points in time. We describe the emergence of new kinds of frameworks in terms of the development of temporal decentering. Two levels of temporal decentering are distinguished, with the higher level involving an appreciation of how event representations depend on one's temporal perspective. (shrink)

The emphasis placed by H. Atlan, like G. Bateson, on the reception of messages during communication between subsystems leads to a conception of learning, and more generally of human memory, surprisingly close to that proposed by I. Rosenfield on the basis of the work of G. M. Edelman. The authors stressed the close and reciprocal link between the theory of functional localization and the conception of memory, which they have just seen, radically refuted by Rosenfield. The theory (...) of functional localization therefore considers as established the existence of a whole series of rigid relationships between specific locations in the brain and certain major functions performed by the body. Thus briefly summarized, the theory of neural Darwinism provides positive evidence in favor of the Rosenfield's theory of human memory. All these characteristics make the functioning of human memory an outstanding example of the natural complexity of a self‐organized system in the sense of Atlan. (shrink)

This article analyzes the distinctive forms that collective memories take in the age of globalization. It studies the transition from national to cosmopolitan memory cultures. Cosmopolitanism refers to a process of `internal globalization' through which global concerns become part of local experiences of an increasing number of people. Global media representations, among others, create new cosmopolitan memories, providing new epistemological vantage points and emerging moral-political interdependencies. The article traces the historical roots of this transformation and outlines the theoretical foundations (...) for the emergence of cosmopolitan memories through an examination of how the Holocaust has been remembered in Germany, Israel and the USA in the course of the last fifty years. It is precisely the abstract nature of `good and evil' that symbolizes the Holocaust, which contributes to the extra-territorial quality of cosmopolitan memory. As such, memories of the Holocaust contribute to the creation of a common European cultural memory. (shrink)

The hypothesis of extended cognition (HEC) claims that the cognitive processes that materially realise thinking are sometimes partially constituted by entities that are located external to an agent’s body in its local envi- ronment. We show how proponents of HEC need not claim that an agent must have a central nervous system, or physically instantiate processes organised in such a way as to play a causal role equivalent to that of the brain if that agent is to be capable of (...) cognition. Focusing on the case of spatial memory, we make our argument by taking a close look at the striking example of Physarum Polycephalum plasmodium (i.e., slime mould) which uses self- produced non-living extracellular slime trails to navigate its environment. We will argue that the use of exter- nalized spatial memory by basal organisms like Physarum is an example of extended cognition. Moreover, it is a possible evolutionary precursor to the use of internal spatial memory and recall in animals thus demonstrating how extended cognition may have emerged early in evolutionary history. (shrink)

The study aimed to address memorial practices in the context of the formation of cultural memory in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan. Memorial objects and their socio-cultural context were addressed in the study, including the processes of rethinking memory in the countries of the region after independence. To achieve the aim of the study, key memorials were selected, information about their symbolism and architecture was collected and systematised, and a comparison with global memorialisation practices was made. The (...) study demonstrated that memorial sites in Central Asia contribute to the preservation of national identity and cultural memory by integrating local symbols, ornaments, religious motifs, and historical narratives. The symbolism of memorials in Central Asia combines history with cultural traditions, creating a unique space for collective commemoration. The rituals that accompany memorial practices reflect the desire for social unity through an emphasis on shared values and past events. The peculiarity of the region is that Soviet monuments, unlike in many other post-Soviet countries, are rarely dismantled. Instead, they adapt to new realities by rethinking symbolism, changing the context or integrating national motifs. This approach contributes to the formation of a unique narrative of national memory that organically connects the historical past with modern ideas of national identity and cultural heritage. The findings underline the importance of memorial objects as instruments of cultural memory and provide a broader perspective on their role in shaping socio-cultural identities in postcolonial societies. (shrink)

This article articulates a sociological conception of settler colonial remembering as a tool of legitimation. Theories of memory in the context of settler colonialism generally center counter-memories by the subaltern or colonized, or official hegemonizing representations at the level of state institutions. Underexamined is the dialectical nature of memory and discursive representations that help reproduce settler colonial processes of accumulation and displacement at the micro-level. The article draws on archival data from avowedly socialist-leftist Zionist colonies to explicate patterned (...) representations of Palestinian villages that Zionist forces gradually displaced prior to and during the 1948 War/Nakba. I demonstrate how the colonial settlers attributed political meaning through five representational modes: contrasting the indigenous as backward and primitive and settlers as progressive and developed; denying an indigenous connection to the land; emphasizing amiable relations through the promotion of cultural progress and settler superiority; asymmetrically assessing settler and indigenous belongings to national collectives; and legitimizing land purchases that dispossessed indigenous cultivators, despite the settlers’ socialist ideology, while reducing conflict to the issue of economic compensation. I theorize a form of settler colonial memory based not merely on erasure, but on recognition and disavowal. Finally, I argue that local memory is a significant site of production in which the conceptual tools to both trace the historical processes of supremacy and subvert asymmetrical sociality lie. (shrink)

In contemporary scientific discourse, interest in memory problems has increased significantly. This trend, in our opinion, is due to a number of factors, among which one of the leading places is «democratization» of history. This process began to a large extent under the influence of a violent wave of emancipation of peoples and ethnic groups, which began at the end of the twentieth century. It actualized the need to rethink the past and revive a large part of the cultural (...) heritage of a number of ethnic and ethno-regional communities.Growth of attention to memory studios was facilitated by globalization. Itsliberal-oriented universalist intentions led to the erosion of the foundations of national identity without deprecating sociality as such. The fluidity and rapid change in social standards that have become a logical consequence of this process have shown the urgent need to find those ideological landmarks that can provide certainty at least on a daily basis. Here, a person feels the need for group consolidation, which is perceived directly through participation in social practices. Such practices reproduce the identity of the group and at the same time broadcast a historically formed and established system of group values. The revival of local forms of identity, which takes place under the influence of globalization in the conditions of the rapidity of social standards, can be regarded as a completely positive phenomenon. Meanwhile, in cases of politicization of collective memories, such local groups can significantly undermine the stable development of national states. The purpose of the study is to reveal the value of collective memories in the process of forming and preserving group identity.The task of the paper was to identify the universal foundations of human sociality and to reveal the importance of collective memories in the process of formation and preservation of group identity. Methods. The methodological basis of the study was the multidisciplinary approach, which was combined with the principles of objectivity and impartiality. The basic place in the process of scientific understanding of the role of memory in the process of formation and preservation of group identity was played by general scientific principles and methods, namely: the principles of historical and logical unity, objectivity, integrity and comprehensiveness. Also were used such general scientific methods as analysis and synthesis, induction, analogy, retrospective,comparison, etc. Along with the mentioned methods were widely used methods of cultural, social and categorical analysis, as well as the principles of philosophical hermeneutics. Results In the course of the study, M. Halbwachs’es implicit conclusion about the key role of collective memories in the process of formation of collective identity was refuted, some aspects of collective memory theory developed by him were specified. In particular, the provision on the decisive role of collective memory in the process of formation of group identity was revised and the importance of social friendship in the process of formation of the social community was shown, the persistence and moral significance of which is determined by common memories.Memories provide the appearance of images that become the status of collective identity symbols, which contain behavioral patterns and moral teachings for members of the community. Common memories can be transmitted through direct communication that covers a limited social space, or to be executed in a ritual and/or text. Due to rites or texts reinterpretations, a significant part of the memorization that is important for the collective identity can remain unchanged for a long time. (shrink)

This essay proposes that the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe serves a primary function other than its eponymous one. Using a site-specific, local historical context rather than memorial or Holocaust discourse, it presents the Memorial as a spot of psychic unity for once-divided Berlin and as a physically appropriate heir to the land upon which it was built. This approach is motivated by the apparent incongruity of local response to an explicitly somber structure: Why did the public react (...) not only positively but even joyfully to the Memorial after its dedication? And why were behaviors such as playing.. (shrink)

Places and anniversaries can function as ‘sites of memory’, but three major Newtonian locations – Cambridge, Grantham and London – were also sites of conflict that resonated with wider debates about the nature of genius and the conduct of science. Ritualized celebrations at appropriate times and places helped not only to establish Newton's status as a local hero, national exemplar and scientific genius, but also to promote various versions of national and scientific heritage. By examining changes in how Newton (...) has been commemorated, this paper explores ways in which different protagonists have contributed to and benefited from legendary visions of Newton. (shrink)

School-aged children often participate in school field trips, summer camps or visits at informal learning institutions like zoos and museums. However, relatively little is known about children’s memory and learning from these experiences, what types of event details and facts are retained, how retention varies across age, and whether different patterns are observed for different types of experiences. We aimed to answer these questions through a partnership with a local zoo. Four- to 10-year-old children participated in a weeklong summer (...) camp, during which they engaged in dynamic events, including visits to zoo animals. On the last day of camp, we elicited autobiographical event narratives for two types of experiences: a child-selected animal event and an experimenter-selected animal event. We coded event narratives for length and breadth using previously used autobiographical memory narrative coding schemes. In addition, we created a coding scheme to examine retention of semantic information. We report the types of autobiographical event details and facts children recalled in their narratives, as well as age group differences that were found to vary depending on the type of information and type of event. Through this naturalistic, yet controlled, study we gain insights into how children remember and learn through hands-on activities and exploration in this engaging and dynamic environment. We discuss how our results provide novel information that can be used by informal learning institutions to promote children’s memory and retention of science facts. (shrink)

Ranging from behavioral to molecular levels of analysis, this informative study presents the results of recent research into the biochemistry and neural mechanisms of imprinting. Horn discusses some of the difficulties that researchers have encountered in analyzing the neural basis of memory and describes ways in which these difficulties have been overcome through the analysis of memories underlying habituation and imprinting. He also considers the biochemical consequences of imprinting and its cerebral localization, and examines the relationships between human (...) and animal memory. (shrink)

Rationale: Deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the hippocampus is proposed for enhancement of memory impaired by injury or disease. Many pre-clinical DBS paradigms can be addressed in epilepsy patients undergoing intracranial monitoring for seizure localization, since they already have electrodes implanted in brain areas of interest. Even though epilepsy is usually not a memory disorder targeted by DBS, the studies can nevertheless model other memory-impacting disorders, such as Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). Methods: Human patients undergoing Phase (...) II invasive monitoring for intractable epilepsy were implanted with depth electrodes capable of recording neurophysiological signals. Subjects performed a delayed-match-to-sample (DMS) memory task while hippocampal ensembles from CA1 and CA3 cell layers were recorded to estimate a multi-input, multi-output (MIMO) model of CA3-to-CA1 neural encoding and a memory decoding model (MDM) to decode memory information from CA3 and CA1 neuronal signals. After model estimation, subjects again performed the DMS task while either MIMO-based or MDM-based patterned stimulation was delivered to CA1 electrode sites during the encoding phase of the DMS trials. Each subject was sorted (post hoc) by prior experience of repeated and/or mild-to-moderate brain injury (RMBI), TBI, or no history (control) and scored for percentage successful delayed recognition (DR) recall on stimulated vs. non-stimulated DMS trials. The subject’s medical history was unknown to the experimenters until after individual subject memory retention results were scored. Results: When examined compared to control subjects, both TBI and RMBI subjects showed increased memory retention in response to both MIMO and MDM-based hippocampal stimulation. Furthermore, effects of stimulation were also greater in subjects who were evaluated as having pre-existing mild-to-moderate memory impairment. Conclusion: These results show that hippocampal stimulation for memory facilitation was more beneficial for subjects who had previously suffered a brain injury (other than epilepsy), compared to control (epilepsy) subjects who had not suffered a brain injury. This study demonstrates that the epilepsy/intracranial recording model can be extended to test the ability of DBS to restore memory function in subjects who previously suffered a brain injury other than epilepsy, and support further investigation into the beneficial effect of DBS in TBI patients. (shrink)