Abstract: This paper is partly a tribute to Richard Jeffrey, partly a reflection on some of his writings, The Logic of Decision in particular. I begin with a brief biography and some fond reminiscences of Dick. I turn to some of the key tenets of his version of Bayesianism. All of these tenets are deployed in my discussion of his response to the St. Petersburg paradox, a notorious problem for decision theory that involves a game of infinite expectation. Prompted by that paradox, I conclude with some suggestions of avenues for future research

Abstract: Based on brain state-dependent behavioral changes, consolidation of sensorimotor memories has been posited to evolve in two different functional stages. Only the second of these stages requires sleep and leads to performance benefits. Recent results, however, suggest that sleep is not always crucial for the expression of delayed behavioral gains but might be critical for enhancing automaticity in the absence of attention, another expression of memory consolidation

Abstract: In his recent (2005) book "Sweet Dreams: philosophical obstacles to a science of consciousness," Dennett renews his attack on a philosophical notion of qualia, the success of which attack is required if his brand of Functionalism is to survive. He also articulates once again what he takes to be essential to his notion of consciousness. I shall argue that his new, central argument against the philosophical concept of qualia fails. In passing I point out a difficulty that David Rosenthal's "higher-order thought" theory of consciousness also faces in accounting for qualia. I then contrast Dennett's newest account of consciousness with interestingly different conceptions by contemporary neuro-scientists, and I suggest that philosophers should take the recent suggestions by neuro-scientists more seriously as a subject for philosophical investigation

Abstract: This paper is just a comment to the impressive work by A. C. Ehresmann and J.-P. Vanbremeersch on the theory of Memory Evolutive Systems (MES). MES are truly higher order systems. Hyperstructures represent a new concept which I introduced in order to capture the essence of what a higher order structure is—encompassing hierarchies and emergence. Hyperstructures are motivated by cobordism theory in topology and higher category theory. The morphism concept is replaced by the concept of a bond. In the paper I briefly introduce hyperstructures motivated geometrically and suggest further developments of the MESs along these lines, which could widen up new areas of applications

Abstract: Johnson-Laird's mental models theory claims that reasoning is a semantic process of construction and manipulation of models in working memory of limited capacity. Accordingly, both a deduction and a given interpretation of a premise would be all the harder the higher the number of models they require. The purpose of the present experiment was twofold. First, it aimed to demonstrate that the interpretation of if...then conditional sentences in children (third, sixth, and ninth graders) evolves as a function of the number of models the children can produce. We proposed a theory of conditional reasoning development that hypothesises a developmental trend of three successive levels of interpretations underlain by one, two, and then three models, i.e. conjunctive, biconditional, and conditional respectively. Second, we aimed to show that these different levels correlate with working memory capacities: the higher the working memory span, the higher the number of models underlying the conditional interpretation. These two hypotheses were verified, supporting the mental models theory. The results are compared with the rival theory of mental logic

Abstract: Extreme conditions like savantism, autism or synaesthesia, which have a neurological 2AH, UK basis, challenge the idea that other minds are similar to our own. In this paper we report a single case study of a man in whom all three of these conditions co-occur. We suggest, on the basis of this single case, that when savantism and synaesthesia co- occur, it is worthwhile testing for an undiagnosed Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC). This is because savantism has an established association with ASC, and the combination of ASC with synaesthesia may increase the likelihood of savantism. The implications of these conditions for philosophy of mind are introduced

Abstract: From its genesis in the 1960s, the focus of inquiry in neuroscience has been on the cellular and molecular processes underlying neural activity. In this pursuit neuroscience has been enormously successful. Like any successful scientific inquiry, initial successes have raised new questions that inspire ongoing research. While there is still much that is not known about the molecular processes in brains, a great deal of very important knowledge has been secured, especially in the last 50 years. It has also attracted the attention of a number of philosophers, some of whom have viewed it as evidence for a ruthlessly reductionistic program that will eventually explain how mental processes are performed in the brain in purely molecular terms. As neuroscience developed, however, there emerged a smaller group of researchers who focused on systems, behavioral, and cognitive neuroscience. These investigators have also made impressive advances in the last 50 years and they have been the focus of an even larger group of philosophers, who have appealed to systems level understanding of the brain as providing the appropriate point of connection to the information processing accounts advanced in psychology

Abstract:      This article is the English-language pre-print version of the chapter published in "Hitlers Sklaven" (in German). The volume "Hitlers Sklaven" (2008) is a result of a massive international oral history project aimed to study forced and slave labour for the Nazi regime during World War II. Within this volume, our article focuses specifically on the experiences of Russian women - former slave labourers. Biographical interviews with these now elderly women were carried out in 2005 in Pskov. The Russian region of Pskov borders on Latvia, Estonia and Byelorussia, and was occupied by the Germans from July, 1941 to July, 1944. This resulted, in particular, in approximately 150,000 people deported from Pskov region only (out of the estimated 3 mln people deported from the USSR as a whole).The article distinguishes between several categories of interviewees: women - civilians, deported to forced works from occupied territories; women subjected to the draft, who were then taken prisoners and forced to work; and finally, women who worked in occupation. The work could be in industry, construction, or agriculture. Girls often baby-sat for babies and younger children in a camp or at a farm. Themes of pre-war childhood memories, childhood labour, love during the war are also featured in the article.The article highlights the gender-specific nature of war memories. It is revealed in the way of constructing a biographical story around the souvenirs of feelings, rather than of particular events, and also constructing different gendered identities through such a story.The article also outlines the strategies of the respondents' adaptation to post-war life in the Soviet Union, where the interviewees were often repressed or stigmatised. Such biographical strategies include normalisation, compensation and hyper-compensation, and anonymisation. Besides, the article tells about narrative strategies of coping with a trauma, such as fragmentation (having gaps in the life story) and emotional detachment. These findings and the oral history material featured in the article are especially important in the context of Russia where public discourse was dominated, until recently, by the silence about people deported to Germany, and this didn't allow them to fully overcome their traumatic experiences

Abstract: Spacetime memory is defined with a holonomic approach to information processing, where multi-state stability is introduced by a non-linear phase-locked loop. Geometric phases serve as the carrier of physical information and geometric memory (of orientation) given by a path integral measure of curvature that is periodically refreshed. Regarding the resulting spin-orbit coupling and gauge field, the geometric nature of spacetime memory suggests to assign intrinsic computational properties to the electromagnetic field

Abstract: Much of our work with enriched experience and training in animals supports the Quartz & Sejnowski (Q&S) thesis that environmental information can interact with pre-existing neural structures to produce new synapses and neural structure. However, substantial data as well as an evolutionary perspective indicate that multiple information-capture systems exist: some are constructivist, some are selectionist, and some may be tightly constrained

Abstract:   An information completion of an extensive game is obtained by extending the information partition of every player from the set of her decision nodes to the set of all nodes. The extended partition satisfies Memory of Past Knowledge (MPK) if at any node a player remembers what she knew at earlier nodes. It is shown that MPK can be satisfied in a game if and only if the game is von Neumann (vN) and satisfies memory at decision nodes (the restriction of MPK to a player's own decision nodes). A game is vN if any two decision nodes that belong to the same information set of a player have the same number of predecessors. By providing an axiom for MPK we also obtain a syntactic characterization of the said class of vN games

Abstract: ∗I am grateful to two anonymous referees for helpful and constructive comments. A first version of this paper was presented at the fifth conference on Logic and the Foundations of Game and Decision Theory (LOFT5), Torino, June 2002

Abstract: The problem of cortical integration is described and various proposed solutions, including grandmother cells, cell assemblies, feed-forward structures, RAAM and synchronization, are reviewed. One method, involving complex attractors, that has received little attention in the literature, is explained and developed. I call this binding through annexation. A simulation study is then presented which suggests ways in which complex attractors could underlie our capacity to reason. The paper ends with a discussion of the efficiency and biological plausibility of the proposals as integration mechanisms for different regions and functions of the brain

Abstract:      In the hopes of directing students to the great philosophic texts through the entertainment fare they consume, this article analyzes the philosophic significance of Memento, a 2000 film directed by Christopher Nolan. We understand the film as a thought experiment in which memory capacity is partially removed from the main character, Leonard Shelby. The experiment is run with Leonard's thoughts and behavior according with Hume's epistemology and cognitive psychology. As a result, Memento ends up illustrating Hume's positions on personal identity, the character of justice, and the intellectual limitations of the human mind

Abstract: This is a review of the book ‘Memory Evolutive Systems; Hierarchy, Emergence, Cognition’, by A. Ehresmann and J.P. Vanbremeersch. I welcome the use of category theory and the notion of colimit as a way of describing how complex hierarchical systems can be organised, and the notion of categories varying with time to give a notion of an evolving system. In this review I also point out the relation of the notion of colimit to ideas of communication; the necessity of communications to be symbolic representations; and the use of an analogy with mathematics to spell out some of the necessities of such a mode of communication to be powerful, robust and efficient

Abstract: Bishop Butler objected to Locke's theory of personal identity on the grounds that memory presupposes personal identity. Most of those sympathetic with Locke's account have accepted Butler's criticism, and have sought to devise a theory of personal identity in the spirit of Locke's that avoids Butler's circularity objection. John McDowell has argued that even the more recent accounts of personal identity are vulnerable to the kind of objection Butler raised against Locke's own account. I criticize McDowell's stance, drawing on a distinction introduced by Annalisa Coliva between two types of immunity to error through misidentification

Abstract: Blair proposes that fluid intelligence, working memory, and executive function form a unitary construct: fluid cognition. Recently, our group has utilized a combined correlational–experimental cognitive neuroscience approach, which we argue is beneficial for investigating relationships among these individual differences in terms of neural mechanisms underlying them. Our data do not completely support Blair's strong position. (Published Online April 5 2006)

Abstract: The effort to identify the neural substrate of episodic recall, though ambitious, lacks experimental support. By considering the data on c-fos activation by novel and familiar stimuli in recognition studies, we illustrate how inadequate experimental designs permit alternative interpretations. We stress that interpretation of c-fos expression changes should be supported by adequate recognition tests

Abstract: The reconstructive turn in memory theory challenges us to provide an account of successful remembering that is attentive to the ways in which we use memory, both individually and socially. I investigate conceptualizations of accuracy and integrity useful to memory theorists and argue that faithful recollection is often a complex epistemological/ethical achievement

Abstract: Emotions and consciousness are intimately linked and often conceived from a purely intrapersonal perspective. This paper explores the implications of considering emotions as not only intrapersonal but also as interpersonal and transpersonal heterarchical (i.e., every component has potentially equal importance) systems. It is telling that in contemplative traditions and contemporary research on hypnotic experience, deep 'inner' experience is pregnant with interpersonal and transpersonal meanings. Similarly, the propensity to have porous conscious experiences is paralleled by the tendency to be affected by the emotion of others. Anecdotal and experimental evidence on anomalous events clearly suggests that strong emotions can have non-local effects. That consciousness and emotions are embedded within interpersonal and transpersonal fields has important epistemological and ethical implications

Abstract: Some self-proclaimed skeptics of recovered memory claim that traumatic childhood events simply cannot be forgotten at the time only to be remembered later in life. This claim has been made repeatedly by the Advisory Board members of a prominent advocacy group for parents accused of sexual abuse, the so-called False Memory Syndrome Foundation. The research project described in this article identifies and documents the growing number of cases that have been ignored or distorted by such skeptics. To date, this project has documented 35 cases in which recovered memories of traumatic childhood events were corroborated by clear and convincing evidence. This article concludes with some observations about the politics of the false memory movement, particularly the tendency to conceal or omit evidence of corroboration. Several instances of this vanishing facts syndrome are documented and analyzed

Abstract:      The craft of librarianship should inform the law governing the acquisition, preservation, and transmission of knowledge. Drawing upon T.S. Eliot's works of literary criticism, part I of this article describes the contradictory role of cultural memory in a society saturated with new information. Even as the accumulation of information in a technologically explosive society heightens the value of the most prominent cultural landmarks, each distinct cultural expression commands an ever-diminishing amount of attention. Parts II and III turn from literary theory to legal doctrine. After reviewing the Supreme Court's cases on library management, part II endorses two basic principles within the law of librarianship as a branch of First Amendment jurisprudence. First, decisions to acquire material should lie beyond judicial challenge. Second, legislative mandates to exclude material should draw strict scrutiny and should be presumed unconstitutional. Part III concludes that uncertainty within the Supreme Court's jurisprudence on librarianship should be resolved in favor of more liberal access to information

Abstract: It is estimated that about one and a half billion hours of moving images were produced in 1999, twice as many as a decade before. If that rate of growth continues, one hundred billion hours of moving images will be made in the year 2025. In 1895 there were just above forty minutes of moving images to be seen, and most of them are now preserved. Today, for every film made, thousands of them disappear forever without leaving a trace. Meanwhile, public and private institutions are struggling to save the film heritage with largely insufficient resources and ever increasing pressure from the commercial world. Are they wasting their time? Is the much feared and much touted Death of Cinema already occurring before our eyes? Is digital technology the solution to the problem, or just another illusion promoted by the industry? In a provocative essay designed as a collection of aphorisms and letters, Paolo Cherchi Usai brings an impassioned scrutiny to bear on these issues with a critique of film preservation, an indictiment of the crimes perpetuated in its name, and a proposal to give a new analytical framework to a major cultural phenomenon of our time. The Death of Cinema is published in Italian as L'ultimo spettatore . Sulla distruzione del cinema 1999, Editore Il Castoro

Abstract: A number of philosophers, from Thomas Reid1 through C. A. J. Coady2, have argued that one is justified in relying on the testimony of others, and furthermore, that this should be taken as a basic epistemic presumption. If such a general presumption were not ultimately dependent on evidence for the reliability of other people, the ground for this presumption would be a priori. Such a presumption would then have a status like that which Roderick Chisholm claims for the epistemic principle that we are justified in believing what our senses tell us

Abstract: The immemorial and recollection -- The reserve of forgetting -- The unforgettable -- The sudden and the unhoped for -- Retrospection.

Abstract: 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

Abstract: In a laudable effort to move beyond simplistic "All-or-Nothing" views on the role of sleep in memory consolidation, Walker proposes that memory traces acquired during a learning episode further undergo at least two distinct sorts of modifications after practice has ended (that is, "off-line"): Consolidation-based stabilization (CBS) and consolidation-based enhancement (CBE). The first set of processes would be dependent on wakefulness, while the second would be dependent on sleep. While we certainly agree with the author that previous characterizations of the role of sleep during memory formation has tended to focus on simplistic distinctions, it also appears to us that Walker's own proposal, in which a sharp distinction is made between wake-dependent CBS and sleep-dependent CBE, falls into the same trap

Abstract: We are sympathetic to most of what Glenberg says in his target article, but we consider it common wisdom rather than something radically new. Others have argued persuasively against the idea of abstraction in cognition, for example. On the other hand, Hebbian connectionism cannot get along without the idea of association, at least at the neural level

Abstract: The imagination opens onto a reconciliation of the past with the future, especially when it is activated as a retrieval of the memories of collective suffering. This is especially the case with the Latin American experience, with its history of military governments and their 'dirty wars' against their civilians. Using Ricoeur's notion of the metaphorical imagination, and drawing on Dussel's work on ethical hermeneutics, this paper argues that, in the act of remembering, other social imaginaries can be created as possibilities that go beyond the concrete present, and which occur from the vantage points of oppressed others

Abstract: Whoever paid the bill at the restaurant last night, will clearly remember doing it. Independently from the type of action, it is a common experience that being the agent provides a special strength to our memories. Even if it is generally agreed that personal memories (episodic memory) rely on separate neural substrates with respect to general knowledge (semantic memory), little is known on the nature of the link between memory and the sense of agency. In the present paper, we review results from two experiments investigating the effects of agency on both explicit and implicit memory traces. Performance of normal subjects is compared to that of schizophrenic patients in order to explore the role of awareness of action on memory. It is proposed that reliable first-person information is necessary to create a stable and coherent motor memory trace

Abstract: The following paper considers one important feature of our experiential or ‘recollective’ memories, namely their spatial perspectival characteristics. I begin by considering the ‘Past-Dependency-Claim’, which states that every recollective memory (or ‘R-memory’) has its spatial perspectival characteristics in virtue of the subject’s present awareness of the spatial perspectival characteristics of a relevant past perceptual experience. Although the Past-Dependency-Claim might for various reasons seem particularly attractive, I show that it is false. I then proceed to develop and defend the ‘Present-Dependency-Claim’, namely the claim that the spatial perspectival characteristics of an R-memory depend on the spatial perspectival characteristics of perceptual experiences that the subject has at the time at which the R-memory occurs. Lastly, I discuss the phenomenon of so-called ‘observer-memories’, which presents a special challenge for any attempt to account for the spatial perspectival characteristics of R-memories. I argue that we have no good reason to deny that the relevant experiences should count as memories, and I show that we can account for the spatial perspectival characteristics of observer-memories with the help of the ‘Present-Dependency-Claim’. More generally, the paper shows that certain events that occur in a subject’s mental life (namely, a subject’s R-memories) are necessarily dependent on other events that occur in the relevant subject’s mental life (namely, on certain perceptual experiences). This more general conclusion in turn should be relevant for any attempt to develop an appropriate account of a subject’s mental life as a whole

Abstract: Daniel C. Dennett

Is Perception the 'Leading Edge' of Memory?

Consciousness appears to us to consist of a sequence of contentful items, arranged in a sequence, the so-called "stream of consciousness," in which each item in turn bursts quite suddenly into consciousness and thereby enters memory, perhaps only briefly to be remembered, and then forgotten. I think that hidden in this comfortable and largely innocent picture of consciousness is a deep and seductive mistake. I intend to expose and elucidate that mistake, and describe an alternative vision

Abstract: The present study is part of recent attempts to specify the characteristics of the counterexample retrieval process during causal conditional reasoning. The study tried to pinpoint whether the retrieval of stored counterexamples (alternative causes and disabling conditions) for a causal conditional is completely automatic in nature or whether the search process also demands executive working memory (WM) resources. In Experiment 1, participants were presented with a counterexample generation task and a measure of WM capacity. We found a positive relation between search efficiency, as measured by the number of generated counterexamples in limited time, and WM capacity. Experiment 2 examined the effects of a secondary WM load on the retrieval performance. As predicted, burdening WM with an attention-demanding secondary task decreased the retrieval efficiency. Both low and high spans were affected by the WM load but load effects were less pronounced for the most strongly associated counterexamples. Findings established that in addition to an automatic search component, the counterexample retrieval draws on WM resources

Abstract: Two experiments examined the contribution of working memory (WM) to the retrieval and inhibition of background knowledge about counterexamples (alternatives and disablers, Cummins, 1995) during conditional reasoning. Experiment 1 presented a conditional reasoning task with everyday, causal conditionals to a group of people with high and low WM spans. High spans rejected the logically invalid AC and DA inferences to a greater extent than low spans, whereas low spans accepted the logically valid MP and MT inferences less frequently than high spans. In Experiment 2, an executive-attention-demanding secondary task was imposed during the reasoning task. Findings corroborate that WM resources are used for retrieval of stored counterexamples and that people with high WM spans will use WM resources to inhibit the counterexample activation when the type of counterexample conflicts with the logical validity of the reasoning problem

Abstract: (1) Non-projectable properties as opposed to the clamping of projectable properties play a primary role in triggering and guiding human action. (2) Embodiment in language-mediated memories should be qualified: (a) Language imposes a radical discretization on body constraints (second-order embodiment). (b) Metaphors rely on second-order embodiment. (c) Language users sometimes suspend embodiment

Abstract: Philosophy is often depicted as generically distinct from literature, myth, and history, as a discipline that eschews narration and relies exclusively on abstract reason. This book takes issue with that assumption, arguing instead that political philosophers have commonly presented their readers with a narrative, rather than a logic, of politics. The book maintains that philosophical texts frequently persuade through the creation of a 'role' that they invite their audience to inhabit. The author also investigates the place of narrative in politics in two ways. It offers a hypothesis of a broad connection between political identity and narrative, and it analyzes three major figures in the history of political thought - Locke, Hegel, and Nietzsche - to demonstrate that their work is best understood through the hypothesis. The author argues that each of these philosophers rewrites the past in an attempt to direct the future

Abstract: Following Karni's seminal work, Walker and other researchers have recently provided gradually convincing evidence that sleep is critical for the consolidation-based enhancement (CBE) of motor sequence learning. Studies in our laboratory using a motor adaptation paradigm, however, show that CBE can also occur after the simple passage of time, suggesting that sleep effects on memory consolidation are task-related, and possibly dependent on anatomically dissociable circuits

Abstract: This article focuses on the politics of memory and forgetting after Auschwitz and apartheid. In the first two sections Habermas' critical contribution to the German Historikerstreit is discussed. Important in this regard is the moral dimension of our relation to the past. In the next two sections the emphasis shifts to South Africa and more specifically the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The article ends with a general discussion of the dilemma of historical 'truth' and representation in contemporary societies. Key Words: apartheid • Habermas • Historikerstreit • history • South Africa

Abstract: In previous research, Toms, Morris, and Ward (1993) have shown that conditional reasoning is impaired by a concurrent task calling on executive functions but not by concurrent tasks that load on the slave systems of the working memory system as conceptualised by Baddeley and Hitch (1974). The present article replicates and extends this previous work by studying problems based on spatial as well as nonspatial relations. In the study 42 participants solved 16 types of spatial or nonspatial problems, both in a single-task condition and under concurrent matrix tapping, a task loading the visuo-spatial sketch pad. The findings were consistent with those of Toms et al. (1993) for problems with a nonspatial content. However, when the content was spatial, and only then, a dual-task impairment was observed: processing time of the first premise was lengthened, especially for problems with negations in the antecedent term, the consequent term, or both; moreover, the number of correctly solved problems with negations in both terms was smaller. The implications of these findings for the mental models theory and the mental logic theory are discussed

Abstract: In a series of preceding papers, the authors have developed the theory of Memory Evolutive Systems which represents a mathematical model (based on Category theory) for natural open self-organizing systems, such as biological, sociological or neural systems. In these systems, the dynamics is modulated by the cooperative or/and competitive interactions between the global system and a net of internal more or less specialized Centers of Regulation (CR) with a differential access to a central hierarchical Memory. Each CR operates at its own complexity level and time-scale, but their strategies are competitive, whence a 'dialectics between heterogeneous CRs which is at the root of higher order cognition. The problem tackled in the present paper is the emergence of a Semantics in the MES modeling a cognitive system; it relies on the detection of specific invariances by the CRs that leads to classify objects according to their main attributes, and form new formal units representing their invariance classes. The idea is that a (lower) CR, say E, classifies two objects B and C as having 'the same shape' if they activate the same pattern of its actors; however this classification remains implicit for E itself and it can be apprehended only by a higher Ievel CR which may memorize the invariance class by a higher object, called a 'E-concept'. The concepts with respect to the various CRs form the semantic memory which gives more flexibility in the evaluation, selection and memorization of appropriate strategies, as well as in internal or external communications

Abstract:   Robert Rosen has proposed several characteristics to distinguish “simple” physical systems (or “mechanisms”) from “complex” systems, such as living systems, which he calls “organisms”. The Memory Evolutive Systems (MES) introduced by the authors in preceding papers are shown to provide a mathematical model, based on category theory, which satisfies his characteristics of organisms, in particular the merger of the Aristotelian causes. Moreover they identify the condition for the emergence of objects and systems of increasing complexity. As an application, the cognitive system of an animal is modeled by the “MES of cat-neurons” obtained by successive complexifications of his neural system, in which the emergence of higher order cognitive processes gives support to Mario Bunge’s “emergentist monism.”

Abstract:   Most cognitive scientists are committed to some version of representationalism, the view that intelligent behavior is caused by internal processes that involve computations over representations. Phenomenologists, however, argue that certain types of intelligent behavior, engaged coping skills, are nonrepresentational. Recent neuroscientific work on multiple memory systems indicates that while many types of intelligent behavior are representational, the types of intelligent behavior cited by phenomenologists are indeed nonrepresentational. This neuroscientific research thus vindicates a key phenomenological claim about the nature of intelligent behaviour. It also provides a framework for the ongoing reconciliation of cognitive science and phenomenology

Abstract: In this commentary, we challenge the claim that Freud's thinking anticipated Bartlettian reconstructive theories of remembering. Erdelyi has ignored important divergences that demonstrate it is not the case that “The constructions and reconstructions of Freud and Bartlett are the same but for motive” (target article, sect. 5)

Abstract: Using a generalized conception of experience, from which all features characteristic for higher animals (such as consciousness and thought) have been removed, allowed relating experience to adaptive processes in lower organisms. The temporal vector character of every current experience, containing as well memories of past experiences as intentions for future activities, can then be found in the adaptive response of cyanobacteria to alterations in phosphate supply, particularly in energetic manifestations of this phenomenon. A possible analogy between adaptive events as the “atomic units” of physiological adaptation and Whitehead's actual occasion of experience is discussed

Abstract:   Recent research on the role of ethics in the organizational culture literature found practically the whole literature reduced to a debate between ethical rationalism and ethical relativism. The role of the past in the form of tradition to maintain and improve moral reflection is completely missing. To address this gap in the literature on the level of practice, the concepts of moral memory and moral tradition are applied to data on 22 companies that have long-standing moral practices. In this way, the practice of moral traditions can be explored with recent conceptual advances and a list of best practices delineated. Moral memory is the recollection of and attachment to the succession of past events and experiences that maintains moral tradition. Moral tradition is the continuing transmission and reception of related moral themes through multiple generations of employees. It is found that companies that maintain moral traditions tend to develop “family” cultures with considerable compassion for workers as persons who have non-economic needs and rights. These companies also temper the role of leadership, insisting that leaders are responsible for and are evaluated by the company’s moral traditions. Finally, moral traditions are essential mechanisms through which companies paradoxically both stimulate and limit competitive behavior

Abstract: If I remember something, I tend to believe that I have perceived it. Similarly, if I remember something, I tend to believe that it happened in the past. My aim here is to propose a notion of mnemonic contentaccounts for these facts. Certain proposals build perceptual experiences into the content of memories. I argue that they Have trouble with the second belief. Other proposals build references to temporal locations into mnemonic content. I argue that they have trouble with the second one. I propose a notion of mnemonic Content that can account for the rationality of both beliefs

Abstract: The purpose of this essay is to determine how we should construe the content of memories. First, I distinguish two features of memory that a construal of mnemic content should respect. These are the ‘attribution of pastness’ feature (a subject is inclined to believe of those events that she remembers that they happened in the past) and the ‘attribution of existence’ feature (a subject is inclined to believe that she existed at the time that those events that she remembers took place). Next, I distinguish two kinds of theories of memory, which I call ‘perceptual’ and ‘self-based’ theories. I argue that those theories that belong to the first kind but not the second one have trouble accommodating the attribution of existence. And theories that belong to the second kind but not the first one leave the attribution of pastness unexplained. I then discuss two different theories that are both perceptual and self-based, which I eventually reject. Finally, I propose a perceptual, self-based theory that can account for both the attribution of pastness and the attribution of past existence

Abstract: This stimulating collection is devoted to the life and work of the most flamboyant of twentieth-century philosophers, Paul Feyerabend. Feyerabend's radical epistemological claims, and his stunning argument that there is no such thing as scientific method, were highly influential during his life and have only gained attention since his death in 1994. The essays that make up this volume, written by some of today's most respected philosophers of science, many of whom knew Feyerabend as students and colleagues, cover the diverse themes in his extensive body of work and present a personal account of this fascinating thinker

Abstract: Language and the birth of "literature." A preface to transgression. Language to infinity. The father's "no." Fantasia of the library.--Counter-memory: the philosophy of difference. What is an author? Nietzsche, genealogy, history. Theatrum philosophicum.--Practice: knowledge and power. History of systems of thought. Intellectuals and power. Revolutionary action: "until now."

Abstract: This book is the outgrowth of a panel of papers on the theme of "memory," presented at the 1987 Annual Meeting of the Buddhism Section of the American Academy of Religion. Four of the contributors to this volume, including Western phenomenologist Edward Casey from SUNY Stony Brook, participated in that panel, though the papers were obviously further developed since that inceptional presentation. The book focusses on the crucial but heretofore almost entirely overlooked topic of memory and remembrance as it appears in the Indian and Tibetan Buddhist traditions. There are 11 papers here, plus an editor's introduction, and though some of them seem to overlap somewhat, none makes any of the others completely redundant or unnecessary. The result is a very thorough and novel treatment of a crucially important subject for Buddhologists, and is further a fine example of Comparative Philosophy

Abstract: Empirical results suggest that defocusing attention results in primary process or associative thought , conducive to finding unusual connections, while focusing attention results in secondary process or analytic thought , conducive to rule-based operations. Creativity appears to involve both. It is widely believed that it is possible to escape mental fixation by spontaneously and temporarily engaging in a more divergent or associative mode of thought. The resulting insight (if found) may be refined in a more analytic mode of thought. The question addressed here is: how does the architecture of memory support these two modes of thought, and what is happening at the neural level when one shifts between them? Recent advances in neuroscience shed light on this. It was demonstrated that activated cell assemblies are composed of multiple ‘neural cliques’, groups of neurons that respond differentially to general or context-specific aspects of a situation. I refer to neural cliques that would not be included in the assembly if one were in an analytic mode, but would be if one were in an associative mode, as ‘neurds’. It is posited that the shift to a more associative mode of thought conducive to insight is accomplished by recruiting neurds that respond to abstract or atypical subsymbolic microfeatures of the problem or situation. Since memory is distributed and content-addressable this fosters remindings and the forging of creative connections to potentially relevant items previously encoded in those neurons. Thus it is proposed that creative thought involves neither randomness, nor search through a space of predefined alternatives, but emerges naturally through the recruitment of neurds. It is suggested this occurs when there is a need to resolve conceptual gaps in ones’ internal model of the world, and resolution involves context-driven actualization of the potentiality afforded by its fine-grained associative structure

Abstract: Level of processing and generation effects were replicated in separate experiments in which recognition memory was tested using either short (500 ms) or long (1500 ms) response deadlines. These effects were similar at each deadline. Moreover, at each deadline these effects were associated with subsequent reports of remembering, not of knowing. And reports of both knowing and remembering increased following the longer deadline. These results imply that knowing does not index an automatic familiarity process, as conceived in some dual-process models of recognition, and that both remembering and knowing increase with the slower, more controlled processing permitted by the longer response time

Abstract: On pages 490-491, in describing the results of Experiment 2, the authors state that out of a total of 3840 responses, only 355 (or 9%) fell outside the response deadlines. In fact, the total number of responses in Experiment 2 was 3200 and so the 355 responses represented 11%, not 9%, of the total. This error has no other implications. The authors are grateful to Peter Graf (personal communication, March 12, 2000) for pointing out the error

Abstract: Although working memory capacity and executive function contribute to human intelligence, we question whether there is an equivalence between them and fluid intelligence. We contend that any satisfactory neurobiological explanation of fluid intelligence needs to include abstraction as an important computational component of brain processing. (Published Online April 5 2006)

Abstract: Patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) are often described as having impaired ability for planning and decision making despite retaining intact capacities for explicit reasoning. The somatic marker hypothesis is that the VMPFC associates implicitly represented affective information with explicit representations of actions or outcomes. Consequently, when the VMPFC is damaged explicit reasoning is no longer scaffolded by affective information, leading to characteristic deficits. These deficits are exemplified in performance on the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) in which subjects with VMPFC perform significantly worse than neurotypicals in a task which requires them learn from rewarding and punishing experience to make decisions. The somatic marker theory adopts a canonical theory of emotion, in which emotions function as part of a valencing system, to explain the role of affective processes. The first part of the paper argues against this canonical account. The second part provides a different account of the role of the role of the VMPFC in decision-making which does not depend on the canonical account of emotion. Together the first and second parts of the paper provide the basis for a different interpretation of results on the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT). In fact the IGT may be probing a deficit in what has been called mental time travel: the ability to access and use information from previous experience and imaginatively rehearse future experiences as part of the process of deliberation

Abstract: Tyler Burge has recently argued that quasi-memory-based psychological reductionist accounts of diachronic personal identity are deeply problematic. According to Burge, these accounts either fail to include appropriately de se elements or presuppose facts about diachronic personal identity—facts of the very kind that the accounts are supposed to explain. Neither of these objections is compelling. The first is based in confusion about the version of reductionism to which it putatively applies. The second loses its force when we recognize that reductionism is a metaphysical thesis, not an epistemological one

Abstract: Smith et al. show that monkeys and dolphins can respond adaptively under conditions of uncertainty, suggesting that they monitor subjective uncertainty and control their behavior accordingly. Drawing on our own work with humans on the strategic regulation of memory reporting, we argue that, so far, the distinction between monitoring and control has not been addressed sufficiently in metacognitive animal research

Abstract: is tendentious. (Throughout this paper I shall refer to this claim as

Abstract: Externalism1 is the thesis that some propositional attitudes depend for their individuation on features of the thinker’s (social and/or physical) environment. The doctrine of self-knowledge of thoughts is the thesis that for all thinkers S and occurrent thoughts that p, S has authoritative and non-empirical knowledge of her thought that p. A much-discussed question in the literature is whether these two doctrines are compatible. In this paper I attempt to respond to one argument for an incompatibilist conclusion, Boghossian’s 1989 ‘Memory Argument.’

Abstract: We study the logic of strategic ability of coalitions of agents with bounded memory by introducing Alternating-time Temporal Logic with Bounded Memory (ATLBM), a variant of Alternating-time Temporal Logic (ATL). ATLBM accounts for two main consequences of the assumption that agents have bounded memory. First, an agent can only remember a strategy that specifies actions in a bounded number of different circumstances. While the ATL-formula means that coalition C has a joint strategy which will make φ true forever, the ATLBM-formula means that C has a joint strategy which for each agent in C specifies what to do in no more than n different circumstances and which will make φ true forever. Second, an agent has bounded recall—a strategy can only take the last m states of the system into account. We use the logic to study the interaction between strategic ability, bounded number of decisions, bounded recall and incomplete information. We discuss the logical properties and expressiveness of ATLBM, and its relationship to ATL. We show that ATLBM can express properties of strategic ability under bounded memory which cannot be expressed in ATL

Abstract: Lang, B. Philosophy and the manners of art.--Hofstadter, A. Freedom, enownment, and philosophy.--Mehta, J. L. A stranger from Asia.--Fox, D. A. A passage past India.--Rucker, D. Philosophy and the constitution of Emerson's world.--Schneider, H. W. The pragmatic movement in historical perspective.--Barnes, H. E. Reflections on myth and magic.--Cauvel, J. The imperious presence of theater.--Seay, A. Musical conservatism in the fourteenth century.--Hochman, W. R. The enduring fascination of war.--Davenport, M. M. J. Glenn Gray and the promise of wisdom.

Abstract: Modality specificity in priming is taken as evidence for independent perceptual systems. However, Easton, Greene, and Srinivas (1997) showed that visual and haptic cross-modal priming is comparable in magnitude to within-modal priming. Where appropriate, perceptual systems might share like information. To test this, we assessed priming and recognition for visual and auditory events, within- and across- modalities. On the visual test, auditory study resulted in no priming. On the auditory priming test, visual study resulted in priming that was only marginally less than within-modal priming. The priming results show that visual study facilitates identification on both visual and auditory tests, but auditory study only facilitates performance on the auditory test. For both recognition tests, within-modal recognition exceeded cross-modal recognition. The results have two novel implications for the understanding of perceptual priming: First, we introduce visual and auditory priming for spatio-temporal events as a new priming paradigm chosen for its ecological validity and potential for information exchange. Second, we propose that the asymmetry of the cross-modal priming observed here may reflect the capacity of these perceptual modalities to provide cross-modal constraints on ambiguity. We argue that visual perception might inform and constrain auditory processing, while auditory perception corresponds to too many potential visual events to usefully inform and constrain visual perception

Abstract: Theories of perception and of memory are closely allied. The binding problem (which considers how bits of perception are reassembled by the brain) leads to neurophysiological subjectivism. This could be outflanked by arguing with Bergson that perceiving consciousness is out in the world. Thus the brain would bind only behavioral “maps.” In turn, consciousness would retain our personal pasts. Such personal (episodic) memories both help us to recognize present objects and to perform creative acts. Memory, although retentive, is also creative. This is important in rethinking biological and evolutionary memory

Abstract: Here the distinguished philosopher Ian Hacking uses the MPD epidemic and its links with the contemporary concept of child abuse to scrutinize today's moral...

Abstract: In The Blue Book, Wittgenstein defined a category of uses of “I” which he termed “I”-as-subject, contrasting them with “I”-as-object uses. The hallmark of this category is immunity to error through misidentification (IEM). This article extends Wittgenstein’s characterisation to the case of memory-judgments, discusses the significance of IEM for self-consciousness—developing the idea that having a first-person thought involves thinking about oneself in a distinctive way in which one cannot think of anyone or anything else—and refutes a common objection to the claim that memory-judgments exhibit IEM

Abstract: Reid rejects the image theory --the representative or indirect realist position--that memory-judgements are inferred from or otherwise justified by a present image or introspectible state. He also rejects the trace theory , which regards memories as essentially traces in the brain. In contrast he argues for a direct knowledge account in which personal memory yields unmediated knowledge of the past. He asserts the reliability of memory, not in currently fashionable terms as a reliable belief-forming process, but more elusively as a principle of Commonsense. There remains a contemporary consensus against Reid's position. I argue that Reid's critique is essentially sound, and that the consensus is mistaken; personal memory judgements are spontaneous and non-inferential in the same way as perceptual judgements. But I question Reid's account of the connection between personal memory and personal identity. My primary concern is rationally reconstructive rather than scholarly, and downplays recent interpretations of Reid's faculty psychology as a precursor of functionalism and other scientific philosophies of mind

Abstract: This article deals with two aspects of psychoanalytic history. The first is the history of ideas, specifically the notions of a one- and two-person psychology that are in such wide use today. Second, the authors attend, much more critically, to a disturbance of memory (repeated distortion, omission, selective representation, and misrepresentation) that has accompanied scholarly discussion of these ideas for the past 50 years. Finally, the authors attempt to restore the original meaning of the person-psychology concept and illustrate its relevance for contemporary psychoanalytic debate

Abstract: The ability to reason independently from one's own goals or beliefs has long been recognised as a key characteristic of the development of formal operational thought. In this article we present the results of a study that examined the correlates of this ability in a group of 10-year-old children ( N  = 61). Participants were presented with conditional and relational reasoning items, where the content was manipulated such that the conclusion to the arguments were either congruent, neutral, or incongruent with beliefs, and either logically valid or logically invalid. Participants also received a measure of working memory capacity (the counting span task) and a measure of inhibitory control (the stop signal task). Indices of belief bias and logical reasoning on belief-based problems were predicted independently by both measures. In contrast logical reasoning on belief neutral problems was predicted by working memory alone. The findings suggest that executive functions play a key role in the development of children's ability to decontextualise their thinking

Abstract: Neurally inspired models of human cognition exude explanatory power without necessarily making predictions that can be verified behaviorally. This is the case for Tsuda's dynamic model. It is suggested that a simpler principle based on the nonlinear dynamic interaction between modules based on control of chaos, can achieve a similar theoretical goal in a cognitively verifiable way

Abstract: Blair equates the constructs of working memory (WM), executive function, and general fluid intelligence (gF). We argue that there is good reason not to equate these constructs. We view WM and gF as separable but highly related, and suggest that the mechanism behind the relationship is controlled attention – an ability that is dependent on normal functioning of the prefrontal cortex. (Published Online April 5 2006)

Abstract: Lockeans, as well as their critics, have pointed out that the memory criterion is likely to mean that none of us were ever fetuses or even infants due to the lack of direct psychological connections between then and now. But what has been overlooked is that the memory criterion leads to either backward causation and a violation of Locke’s own very plausible principle that we can have only one origin, or backward causation and a number of overlapping people where we thought there was just one. I will argue that such problems cannot be avoided by replacing direct psychological connections with overlapping chains of connectedness—what has been called “psychological continuity.”

Abstract: We identify a particular type of causal reasoning ability that we believe is required for the possession of episodic memories, as it is needed to give substance to the distinction between the past and the present. We also argue that the same causal reasoning ability is required for grasping the point that another person's appeal to particular past events can have in conversation. We connect this to claims in developmental psychology that participation in joint reminiscing plays a key role in memory development.

Abstract: This paper defends the claim that, in order to have a concept of time, subjects must have memories of particular events they once witnessed. Some patients with severe amnesia arguably still have a concept of time. Two possible explanations of their grasp of this concept are discussed. They take as their respective starting points abilities preserved in the patients in question: (1) the ability to retain factual information over time despite being unable to recall the past event or situation that information stems from, and (2) the ability to remember at least some past events or situations themselves (typically because retrograde amnesia is not complete). It is argued that a satisfactory explanation of what it is for subjects to have a concept of time must make reference to their having episodic memories such as those mentioned under (2). It is also shown how the question as to whether subjects have such memories, and thus whether they possess a concept of time, enters into our explanation of their actions

Abstract: What is the connection between the way we represent time and things in time, on the one hand, and our capacity to remember particular past events, on the other? This is the substantive question that has stood behind the project of putting together this volume. The methodological assumption that has informed this project is that any progress with the difficult and fascinating set of issues that are raised by this question must draw on the resources of various areas both in philos- ophy and in psychology

Abstract: Machine generated contents note: List of illustrations * Notes On Contributors * Introduction: B.Biebuyck, G.Buelens, O.de Graef, D.Hoens, S.Jttkandt * Who or What Decides: For Derrida: A Catastrophic Theory of Decision--J.Hillis Miller * Catastrophic Narratives and Why the Catastrophe to Catastrophe Might Have Already Happened--E.Vogt * Breath of Relief: Sloterdijk and the Politics of the Intimate--S.van Tuinen * Man is a swarm animal--J.Clemens * Notes on the Bird War: Biopolitics of the Visible (in the Era of Climate Change)--T.Cohen * Dialectical Catastrophe: Hegels Allegory of Physiognomy and the Ethics of Survival--P.Moll * Catastrophe, Citationality and the Limits of Responsibility in Disgrace--G.Buelens * Unpredictable Inevitability and the Boundaries of Psychic Life; D.Nobus * Who is Nietzsche?--A.Badiou * Is Pleasure a Rotten Idea?--A.Schuster * Nationalist Ext(im)asy: Maurice Barrs and the Roots of Fascist Enjoyment--G.Chaitin * Topography of the Border: Derrida Rewriting Transcendental Aesthetics--J.Hodge * Index List of illustrations * Notes On Contributors * Introduction: B.Biebuyck, G.Buelens, O.de Graef, D.Hoens, S.Jttkandt * Who or What Decides: For Derrida: A Catastrophic Theory of Decision--J.Hillis Miller * Catastrophic Narratives and Why the Catastrophe to Catastrophe Might Have Already Happened--E.Vogt * Breath of Relief: Sloterdijk and the Politics of the Intimate--S.van Tuinen * Man is a swarm animal--J.Clemens * Notes on the Bird War: Biopolitics of the Visible (in the Era of Climate Change)--T.Cohen * Dialectical Catastrophe: Hegels Allegory of Physiognomy and the Ethics of Survival--P.Moll * Catastrophe, Citationality and the Limits of Responsibility in Disgrace--G.Buelens * Unpredictable Inevitability and the Boundaries of Psychic Life; D.Nobus * Who is Nietzsche?--A.Badiou * Is Pleasure a Rotten Idea?--A.Schuster * Nationalist Ext(im)asy: Maurice Barrs and the Roots of Fascist Enjoyment--G.Chaitin * Topography of the Border: Derrida Rewriting Transcendental Aesthetics--J.Hodge * Index.

Abstract: Jackendoff's criticisms of the current state of theorization in cognitive neuroscience are defused by recent work on the computational complementarity of the hippocampus and neocortex. Such considerations lead to a grounding of Jackendoff's processing model in the complementary methods of pattern analysis effected by independent component analysis (ICA) and principle component analysis (PCA)

Abstract: both the initial justification for adopting it and the justification for retaining it provided by seeming memories. This view captures our intuitions about justification in several cases, while none of the alternative views can

Abstract: Book Information Time and Memory: Issues in Philosophy and Psychology. Time and Memory: Issues in Philosophy and Psychology Christoph Hoerl and McCormack Teresa , eds., Oxford: Clarendon Press , 2001 , xiii + 419 , £45 ( cloth ), £17.99 ( paper ) Edited by Christoph Hoerl; and McCormack Teresa . Oxford: Clarendon Press. Pp. xiii + 419. £45 (cloth:), £17.99 (paper:)

Abstract: To date, 1.7 million US military service personnel have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Of those, one in five are suffering from diagnosable combat-stress related psychological injuries including Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). All indications are that the mental health toll of the current conflicts on US troops and the medical systems that care for them will only increase. Against this backdrop, research suggesting that the common class of drugs known as beta-blockers might prevent the onset of PTSD is drawing much interest. I urge caution against accepting too quickly the use of beta-blockers for dealing with the psychological injuries that combat experiences can wreak. Beta-blockers are thought to work by disrupting the formation of emotionally disturbing memories that typically occur in the wake of traumatic events and that in some people manifest as PTSD. Focusing on a single dimension of soldiers' experience in combat, namely, their perpetration of other-directed violence, I argue that some of the emotional memories blunted by beta-blockers play important roles in the recovery of moral aspects of soldiers' selves damaged by experiences of combat violence — specifically, in the achievement of a state of grace — and, therefore, that the use of beta-blockers may come with distinct moral costs

Abstract: An approach to phenomenology, by D. Cairns.--Husserl's critique of psychologism: its historic roots and contemporary relevance, by J. Wild.--The ideal of a presuppositionless philosophy, by M. Farber.--On the intentionality of consciousness, by A. Gurwitsch.--The "reality-phenomenon" and reality, by H. Spiegelberg.--The phenomenological concept of "horizon", by H. Kuhn.--Phenomenology and logical empiricism, by F. Kaufmann.--Phenomenology and the history of science, by J. Klein.--Phenomenology and the social sciences, by A. Schuetz.--Art and phenomenology, by F. Kaufmann.--The relation of science to philosophy in the light of Husserl's thought, by L. O. Kattsoff.--Husserl and the social structure of immediacy, by C. Hartshorne.--A materialist approach to Husserl's philosophy, by V. J. McGill.--Outline-sketch of a system of metaphysics, by W. E. Hocking.--Men and the law, by G. Husserl.--The ghost of modality, by H. Weyl.--Supplement: Grundlegende untersuchungen zum phänomenologischen ursprung der räumlichkeit der natur, by E. Husserl

Abstract: Memory of historical trauma has a unique power to generate works of art. This book analyzes the relation of public memory to history, forgetting, and selective memory in Berlin, Buenos Aires, and New York—three late-twentieth-century cities that have confronted major social or political traumas. Berlin experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall and the city’s reemergence as the German capital; Buenos Aires lived through the dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s and their legacy of state terror and disappearances; and New York City faces a set of public memory issues concerning the symbolic value of Times Square as threatened public space and the daunting task of commemorating and rebuilding after the attack on the World Trade Center. Focusing on the issue of monumentalization in divergent artistic and media practices, the book demonstrates that the transformation of spatial and temporal experience by memory politics is a major cultural effect of globalization

Abstract: A concert pianist the second author videotaped herself learning J.S. Bach's Italian Concerto Presto , and commented on the problems she encountered as she practised. Approximately two years later the pianist wrote out the first page of the score from memory. The pianist's verbal reports indicated that in the early sessions she identified and memorised the formal structure of the piece, and in the later sessions she practised using this organisation to retrieve the memory cues that controlled her playing. The practice and recall data supported this account. Both were organised by the formal structure of the music. Practice segments were more likely to start and stop at boundaries of the formal structure than at other locations, and recall was higher for the beginnings of sections than for later portions. Like other forms of expert memory, pianistic memory appears to be based on use of a highly practised retrieval scheme which permits rapid retrieval of information from long-term memory

Abstract: This commentary focuses on how bottom-up neocortical models can be developed into eigenfunction expansions of probability distributions appropriate to describe short-term memory in the context of scalp EEG. The mathematics of eigenfunctions are similar to the top-down eigenfunctions developed by Nunez, despite different physical manifestations. The bottom-up eigenfunctions are at the local mesocolumnar scale, whereas the top-down eigenfunctions are at the global regional scale. Our respective approaches have regions of substantial overlap, and future studies may expand top-down eigenfunctions into the bottom-up eigenfunctions, yielding a model of scalp EEG expressed in terms of columnar states of neocortical processing of attention and short-term memory. Footnotes1 The author is also affiliated with DRW Investments LLC, 311 S. Wacker Drive, Chicago, IL 60606

Abstract: While Q ian Mu intentionally avoided systematic philosophical arguments, his references to memory, language, and emotions, as expressed in a book he wrote in 1948, were suggestive of new interpretations of traditional Chinese, and especially Confucian, ideas such as human autonomy, mind, human nature, morality, immortality, and spirituality. The foremost contribution of Qian’s humanist synthesis rests in its articulation of the idea of the person. Across the context of memory, language, and emotions, the tiyong dynamics of mind and human nature recreate, in modern terms, the traditional Chinese concept of the person who is individually unique and simultaneously interrelated. Avoiding the extreme polarities of individualism and collectivism, he stresses rather their coexistence. His synthesis explains to the Chinese people something about who they are, the meaning in life in the framework of their culture, and how their (revitalized) way of life is at its best in the most important area, that of human relations

Abstract: Bickle argues for both a narrow causal reductionism, and a broader ontological-explanatory reductionism. The former is more successful than the latter. I argue that the central and unsolved problem in Bickle's approach to reductionism involves the nature of psychological terms. Investigating why the broader reductionism fails indicates ways in which phenomenology remains more than a handmaiden of neuroscience

Abstract: Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission

Abstract: Whitehead does not provide us with a systematic account of the various types of experience to which the word “memory” is applied. Nevertheless, he does provide us with a way of understanding the world, and living creatures who inhabit it, that places the discussion in a different context from the usual one: the diverse features of human experience that we call memory are developed forms of basic patterns of relationship that characterize all actual entities. I will first review the relevant features of Whitehead's conceptuality, then contrast the resulting view with its usual formulation, and then speculate about some forms of memory in Whiteheadian categories

Abstract: One of the peculiar characteristics of the vast body of Jain commentarial literature is the primacy given to artha , meaning, over sūtra , the root text itself. It is the task of the commentator—or, in a pedagogical context, the teacher—to retrieve and explain a text’s true, hidden meaning, which often appears to stretch and even contradict its apparent meaning. This article examines the interpretive processes in one of the most important Jain commentaries on monastic discipline, the Bṛhatkalpabhāṣya attributed to the sixth-century CE Śvetāmbara Jain exegete Saṅghadāsa. An examination of passages where the commentator claims to uncover the real—but sometimes less-than-apparent—meaning of monastic rules enables us to detect the interpretive moves involved and the underlying assumptions about the nature of text and the work of commentary. I argue that this commentarial tradition presupposes particular practices of memory, and a degree of internalizing the traditional hermeneutical methods, on the part of a monastic practitioner who wants to understand the text correctly and live according to its true meaning

Abstract: ces, learning facts and gaining conceptual knowlge, recognizing objects and people, and acquiring ills and habits. Scientific thinking about memory was minated for many years by the assumption that mory is a unitary or monolithic entityRi2;a single ulty of the mind and brain. However, the assumpri of a unitary memory has been challenged by conging evidence from psychology and neuroscience inting toward multiple memory systems that can be sociated from one another. This chapter provides a torical introduction to the issue and summarizes..

Abstract: Introduction : cinema, memory, modernity: the return of memory as film -- No escape from time : memory and redemption in the international postwar art film -- The "crisis" of memory : "traumatic identity" in the contemporary memory film -- "Global memory" : cinema as lingua franca and the commodification of the image -- The eye of history : memory, surveillance and ethicality in the contemporary art film -- "Prosthetic memory" and transnational cinema : globalized identity and narrative recursivity in City of God -- Conclusion: remembering to forget: the catachreses of modernity.

Abstract: Decay gradients are usually drawn facing the wrong direction. Righting them emphasizes the role of stimuli that mark the response, and leads to different inferences concerning the factors controlling response–reinforcer associations. A simple model of the concatenation of stimulus traces provides some insight to the problems of impulse control relevant to ADHD

Abstract:      If all of the motive forces of the physical world, physically of the world, can be agreed upon to occur from the conceptual/ethereal as a confrontation of the logically entailed with its' antithesis, as the paradox, a scheme might be evolved to detail all phenomenon as occurrences that are the result of an elemental universal construction effected by the inversion, then one might account for the sciences, its' theory, the questions of nature, natural history, human history, rather than as explanation, as if seeking explanation for existence in the third person, but as an accounting that is closer conceptually to the innately perceived. If it is at the juncture of paradox where the pursuits of civilization seem to expand in a never ending seeking, perhaps one might reorient his frame to define in terms of paradox. Though this reorientation does not appear on the surface as potentially productive, does not resolve the paradox, one might assume it to be the only route available and, if not productive, one might also potentially assume that all efforts to extract a knowledge of nature are in vain in the sense that one might only arrive at paradox, originating itself from an active pursuit to bear fruit for continuance. At the surface of this inquiry is presentation of a valid criteria for the ubiquitous existence of paradox throughout all of nature, though more in line with presentation first of paradox and subsequently exposed as ubiquitous and employed for explanation. Since paradox arises from the willed/active application of the intellect to the external world there is no ground to assume that it is innate itself in a simpler setting of nature, the natural world and its' processes, in this presentation I will try to establish that paradox, defined as logically irreconcilable conflict, other than being solely the product of active perception, is, in an analogous corresponding form, ubiquitously companioned ,and tangential to direction, a partner to the inversion that pervades the universe. The inversion is given as a substrate for the faces of the paradox and the two combined as an elemental unit of nature. With regards to paradoxes of mind and matter, an ultimate conceptually/philosophically arrived paradox, a synthesis of the physical/biological/philosophical concepts with the empirical, DNA is given a role as the actual embodiment of all that can and does ensue in the universe - path and memory. In light of theory and current research results in the science of physics, DNA is elevated, with potential, scientific validity, to possess both a ubiquitous nature and unique existence confined to biological entities as 'a physical piece of physical path', a biological source of all memory, perception and cognition, a physically energetic absolute and fixed differential standard of path/emergence in physical form, contained physical emergence that serves to energetically emerge, and defining of all from a first perspective beholding to the possessor of life as a sole criteria for perspective and reference with which to scientifically organize experiences of nature

Abstract: Four experiments assessed the relative involvement of different working memory components in two types of reasoning tasks: propositional and spatial reasoning. Using the secondary-task methodology, visual, central-executive, and phonological loads were realised. Although the involvement of visuospatial resources in propositional reasoning has traditionally been considered to be small, an overall analysis of the present data suggests an alternative account. A theoretical analysis of the pattern of results in terms of Evans' (1984, 1989) twostage theory of reasoning is proposed and tested in Experiments 3 and 4, in which direct evidence for the alternative account was obtained: significant disruption of propositional reasoning by a concurrent spatial load

Abstract:   Emerging technologies raise the possibility that we may be able to treat trauma victims by pharmaceutically dampening factual or emotional aspects of their memories. Such technologies raise a panoply of legal and ethical issues. While many of these issues remain off in the distance, some have already arisen. In this brief commentary, I discuss a real-life case of memory erasure. The case reveals why the contours of our freedom of memory—our limited bundle of rights to control our memories and be free of outside control—already merit some attention

Abstract: "The main spine of this book stems from a comprehensive series of interviews with subjects recalling their experiences of 1930s cinemagoing. Your feel the breath of life in these spectators, a rarity in film studies, thanks to the painstaking work contracting the interview subjects and recording and tabulating their testimony."- JUMPCUT In the 1930s, Britain had the highest annual per capita cinema attendance in the world, far surpassing ballroom dancing as the nation's favorite pastime. It was, as historian A.J.P. Taylor said, the "essential social habit of the age." And yet, although we know something about the demographics of British cinemagoers, we know almost nothing of their experience of film, how film affected them, how it fit into their daily lives, what role cinema played in the larger culture of the time, and in what ways cinemagoing shaped the generation that came of age in the 1930s. In Dreaming of Fred and Ginger , Annette Kuhn draws upon contemporary publications, extensive interviews with cinemagoers themselves, and readings of selected film, to produce a provocative and perspective-altering ethno-historical study. Taking cinemagoers' accounts of their own experiences as both "the engine and product of investigation," Kuhn enters imaginatively into the world of 1930s cinema culture and analyzes its place in popular memory. Among the topics she examines are the physical space of the cinemas; the role film played in growing up; the experience of being a member of a cinema audience; film-inspired fantasies of American life; the importance of cinema to adolescence in offering role models, ideals of romance, as well as practical opportunities for courtship; and the sheer pleasure of watching such film stars as Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Nelson Eddy, Ronald Colman, and many others. Engagingly written and painstakingly researched, with contributions to film history, cultural studies, and social history, Dreaming of Fred and Ginger offers an illuminating account of a key moment in British cultural memory

Abstract: An action-oriented theory of embodied memory is favorable for many reasons, but it will not provide a quick yet clean solution to the grounding problem in the way Glenberg (1997t) envisages. Although structural mapping via analogical representations may be an adequate mechanism of cognitive representation, it will not suffice to explain representation as such

Abstract:   The prospect of using memory modifying technologies raises interesting and important normative concerns. We first point out that those developing desirable memory modifying technologies should keep in mind certain technical and user-limitation issues. We next discuss certain normative issues that the use of these technologies can raise such as truthfulness, appropriate moral reaction, self-knowledge, agency, and moral obligations. Finally, we propose that as long as individuals using these technologies do not harm others and themselves in certain ways, and as long as there is no prima facie duty to retain particular memories, it is up to individuals to determine the permissibility of particular uses of these technologies

Abstract: Glenberg focuses on conceptualizations that change from moment to moment, yet he dismisses the concept of working memory (sect. 4.3), which offers an account of temporary storage and on-line cognition. This commentary questions whether Glenberg's account adequately caters for observations of consistent data patterns in temporary storage of verbal and visuospatial information in healthy adults and in brain-damaged patients with deficits in temporary retention

Abstract: Values are critical for intelligent behavior, since values determine interests, and interests determine relevance. Therefore we address relevance and its role in intelligent behavior in animals and machines. Animals avoid exhaustive enumeration of possibilities by focusing on relevant aspects of the environment, which emerge into the (cognitive) foreground, while suppressing irrelevant aspects, which submerge into the background. Nevertheless, the background is not invisible, and aspects of it can pop into the foreground if background processing deems them potentially relevant. Essential to these ideas are questions of how contexts are switched, which defines cognitive/behavioral episodes, and how new contexts are created, which allows the efficiency of foreground/background processing to be extended to new behaviors and cognitive domains. Next we consider mathematical characterizations of the foreground/background distinction, which we treat as a dynamic separation of the concrete space into (approximately) orthogonal subspaces, which are processed differently. Background processing is characterized by large receptive fields which project into a space of relatively low dimension to accomplish rough categorization of a novel stimulus and its approximate location. Such background processing is partly innate and partly learned, and we discuss possible correlational (Hebbian) learning mechanisms. Foreground processing is characterized by small receptive fields which project into a space of comparatively high dimension to accomplish precise categorization and localization of the stimuli relevant to the context. We also consider mathematical models of valences and affordances, which are an aspect of the foreground. Cells processing foregound information have no fixed meaning (i.e., their meaning is contextual), so it is necessary to explain how the processing accomplished by foreground neurons can be made relative to the context. Thus we consider the properties of several simple mathematical models of how the contextual representation controls foreground processing. We show how simple correlational processes accomplish the contextual separation of foreground from background on the basis of differential reinforcement. That is, these processes account for the contextual separation of the concrete space into disjoint subspaces corresponding to the foreground and background. Since an episode may comprise the activation of several contexts (at varying levels of activity) we consider models, suggested by quantum mechanics, of foreground processing in superposition. That is, the contextual state may be a weighted superposition of several pure contexts, with a corresponding superposition of the foreground representations and the processes operating on them. This leads us to a consideration of the nature and origin of contexts. Although some contexts are innate, many are learned. We discuss a mathematical model of contexts which allows a context to split into several contexts, agglutinate from several contexts, or to constellate out of relatively acontextual processing. Finally, we consider the acontextual processing which occurs when the current context is no longer relevant, and may trigger the switch to another context or the formation of a new context. We relate this to the situation known as "breakdown" in phenomenology

Abstract: Lorazepam has been repeatedly shown to induce memory impairments. The effects of this benzodiazepine on the processes involved in the strategic regulation of memory accuracy have not as yet been explored. An experimental procedure that delineates the role of monitoring and control processes was used. Fifteen lorazepam and 15 placebo subjects were examined using a semantic memory task that combined both a forced- and a free-report option and a no-incentive and an incentive condition. Memory accuracy was lower in the lorazepam than in the placebo group. Lorazepam impaired control sensitivity (the extent to which volunteering of answers is affected by the confidence judgments). While the absolute aspect of monitoring was impaired (calibration scores), both the discriminative aspect (the ability to distinguish between correct and incorrect answers) and the response criterion setting (the confidence threshold set for volunteering a report) were spared. The pharmacological dissociation between monitoring effectiveness and control sensitivity indicates that these two components involve distinct processes

Abstract: I want to know whether I consumed the Canada Health recommended portion of fruits and vegetables yesterday. I try to remember, and I conclude that I ate five servings of fruits and vegetables during the course of the day. Presumably, propositions like the following figure in my calculations: 1. For lunch yesterday, I ate a grilled tomato with my hamburger. Usually, the remembered image of eating the tomato will figure in the provenance of remembering 1

Abstract: The essays in this collection were written by an international body of scholars in memory of Professor Bimal K. Matilal. They discuss Vedanta, Nyaya, and Buddhism; thematically they deal with problems of relativism, evil, suffering, emotions, and value judgement

Abstract: Consistent with Ruchkin and colleagues' proceduralist account, recent research on grouping and verbal-spatial binding in immediate memory shows continuity across short- and long-term retention, and activation of classes of information extending beyond those typically allowed in modular models. However, Ruchkin et al.'s account lacks well-specified mechanisms for the retention of serial order, binding, and the control of activation through attention

Abstract: The mathematical approach to such essentially biological phenomena as perseverative reaching is most welcome. To extend these results and make them more accurate, levels of analysis and neural centers should he distinguished. The navigational nature of sensorimotor control should be characterized more clearly, including the continuous dynamics of neural processes hut not limited to it. In particular, discrete conditions should be formalized mathematically as part of the biological process

Abstract:   Much of the plausibility of epistemic conservatism derives from its prospects of explaining our rationality in holding memory beliefs. In the first two parts of this paper, I argue for the inadequacy of the two standard approaches to the epistemology of memory beliefs, preservationism and evidentialism. In the third, I point out the advantages of the conservative approach and consider how well conservatism survives three of the strongest objections against it. Conservatism does survive, I claim, but only if qualified in certain ways. Appropriately qualified, conservatism is no longer the powerful anti-skeptical tool some have hoped for, but a doctrine closely connected with memory

Abstract: McNamara challenges the instructivist view that memories occur when information from the environment is transferred into the mind.

Abstract: Semantic priming has been a focus of research in the cognitive sciences for more than 30 years and is commonly used as a tool for investigating other aspects of perception and cognition, such as word recognition, language comprehension, and knowledge representations. Semantic Priming: Perspectives from Memory and Word Recognition examines empirical and theoretical advancements in the understanding of semantic priming, providing a succinct, in-depth review of this important phenomenon, framed in terms of models of memory and models of word recognition. The first section examines models of semantic priming, including spreading activation models, the verification model, compound-cue models, distributed network models, and multistage activation models (e.g. interactive-activation model). The second section examines issues and findings that have played an especially important role in testing models of priming and includes chapters on the following topics: methodological issues (e.g. counterbalancing of materials, choice of priming baselines); automatic vs. strategic priming; associative vs. "pure" semantic priming; mediated priming; long-term semantic priming; backward priming; unconscious priming; the prime-task effect; list context effects; effects of word frequency, stimulus quality, and stimulus repetition; and the cognitive neuroscience of semantic priming. The book closes with a summary and a discussion of promising new research directions. The volume will be of interest to a wide range of researchers and students in the cognitive sciences and neurosciences

Abstract: Intimacy and Alienation puts forward the author's unique paradigm for psychotherapy and counselling based on the assumption that each patient has suffered a disruption of the `self', and that the goal of the therapist is to identify and work with that disruption. Using many clinical illustrations, and drawing on self psychology, attachment therapy and theories of trauma, Russell Meares looks at the nature of self and how it develops, before going on to explore the form and feeling of experience when self is disrupted in a traumatic way, and focusing on ways towards the restoration of the self. Written in an accessible style from the author's singular perspective, Intimacy and Alienation will appeal to professionals in the fields of psychotherapy, counseling, social work and psychiatry, as well as to students and the lay reader

Abstract: The view that posterior brain systems engaged in lower-order perceptual functions are activated during sustained retention is challenged by fMRI data, which show consistent retention-related activation of higher-order memory representations for a variety of working-memory materials. Sustained retention entails the dynamic link of these higher-order memories with schemata for goal-oriented action housed by the frontal lobes

Abstract: Erdelyi argues persuasively for his unified theory of repression. Beyond this, what can studying repression bring to our understanding of other aspects of emotional function? Here we consider ways in which work on repression might inform the study of, on one hand, emotional memory, and on the other, the emotional numbing seen in patients with chronic persistent depersonalization symptoms

Abstract: There is considerable interest in the use of neuroimaging techniques for forensic purposes. Memory detection techniques, including the well-publicized Brain Fingerprinting technique (Brain Fingerprinting Laboratories, Inc., Seattle WA), exploit the fact that the brain responds differently to sensory stimuli to which it has been exposed before. When a stimulus is specifically associated with a crime, the resulting brain activity should differentiate between someone who was present at the crime and someone who was not. This article reviews the scientific literature on three such techniques: priming, old/new, and P300 effects. The forensic potential of these techniques is evaluated based on four criteria: specificity, automaticity, encoding flexibility, and longevity. This article concludes that none of the techniques are devoid of forensic potential, although much research is yet to be done. Ethical issues, including rights to privacy and against self-incrimination, are discussed. A discussion of legal issues concludes that current memory detection techniques do not yet meet United States standards of legal admissibility

Abstract: Abstract The article is a reading, in conjunction with one-another, of Time and Being and What is metaphysics. Its scope is that of raising questions on certain Heideggerian topics that are here formulated as thesis. Namely, first that the turn in Heidegger’s thinking is not a change in his process of thinking, but rather an essential trait of what Heidegger calls the matter at hand (Sachverhalt). Secondly, that this turn of the matter at hand is in itself memory in a twofold way: as metaphysics in its relation to being and time, and as questioning of this metaphysical relation. And finally, that this turn is a technical one, in the sense of technique as this latter is, in Heidegger’s thinking, the original determination of Being as Anwesenheit.

Abstract: There is no general agreement as to the meaning of long-term potentiation, but this cannot be resolved by using it to explain additional phenomena. Increased attention to recently experienced stimuli is a form of learning known to neuropsychologists as repetition priming. As more is learned about the neurochemistry of synaptic change, the term LTP will wither

Abstract: Memory brings the past into the present. It is a feature of human temporality, contingency, and identity. Attention to memory's psychological and social importance suggests new vistas for work in religious ethics. This essay examines four recent works on memory's importance for self-interpretation, social criticism, and public justice. My focus will be on normative questions about memory. The works under review ask whether, and on what terms, we have an obligation to remember, whether memory is linked to neighbors near and distant, how memory is related to justice and forgiveness, and whether memory sits easily with the kind of relationships that allegedly characterize life in democratic public culture

Abstract: Although it is not their fault, Shors & Matzel's attempt to review the LTP and learning hypothesis suffers from there being no clear published statement of the idea. Their summary of relevant evidence is not without error, however, and it oversimplifies fundamental issues relating to NMDA receptor function. Their attentional hypothesis is intriguing but requires a better systems-level understanding of how attention contributes to cognitive function

Abstract: Jacques Derrida has written much in recent years on the topic of mourning. This essay takes Derrida's insights into mourning in general and collective mourning in particular in order to ask about the relationship between mourning and politics. Taking a lead from a recent work of Derrida's on Jean-François Lyotard, the essay develops its argument through two examples, one from ancient Greece and one from twentiethcentury America: the role mourning plays in the constitution and maintenance of the state in Plato's Laws and the controversy surrounding the consecration of the tomb of the Unknown Soldier of Vietnam in Arlington National Cemetery. This latter example provides the occasion for questioning the possibilities of mourning the unknown or the unidentifiable and for addressing some of the ways in which the United States has mourned or failed to mourn, remembered or failed to remember, in the wake of September 11

Abstract: Aggleton & Brown rightly point out the shortcomings of the medial temporal lobe hypothesis as an approach to anterograde amnesia. Their broader perspective is a necessary corrective, and one hopes it will be taken very seriously. Although they correctly note the dangers of conflating recognition and recall, they themselves make a similar mistake in discussing familiarity; we suggest an alternative approach. We also discuss implications of their view for an analysis of retrograde amnesia. The notion that there are two routes by which the hippocampus can reactivate neuronal ensembles in the neocortex could help us understand some currently puzzling facts about the dynamics of memory consolidation

Abstract: I believe that pandas eat bamboo shoots, that Kampala is in Uganda and that Buffalo Bill’s last name was Cody. I can’t remember how I first acquired these beliefs, and can’t support them by appeal to anything else I know about pandas, African geography or the Wild West. In recent years, beliefs of just this type— call them trivia beliefs—have attracted considerable attention from participants in epistemology’s internalism-externalism debate.1 Externalists see trivia beliefs as clear counterexamples to the internalist theory of justification, the theory that maintains that all of the factors determining whether a belief is justified must be accessible to the subject. Externalists claim that (1) there is nothing accessible to the subject to support trivia beliefs; and (2) such beliefs are nonetheless obviously justified, or enjoy some positive epistemic status.2 It does seem odd to suggest we should give up such beliefs, or that we are irresponsible to hold them: indeed we’re inclined to say that these little tidbits of forgotten origin are things that we know. Pondering the status of trivia beliefs in light of these externalist arguments, it can start to seem mysterious why anyone would have been attracted to internalism in the first place

Abstract:   The definition of memory knowledge that p put forward in this paper is nontraditional in that the justification for the belief that p which constitutes that knowledge is not located in any memory-impression or other present state of the subject. Rather it is the subject's actual past justification for p, or a proper part thereof, that justifies this present belief that p. It is argued (1) that the notion under definition is that of knowing straight from memory, (2) that an adequate definition here must take into account a difference, as to conflicting evidence one does not possess, between evidence one has forgotten and evidence one has never had, (3) that compared to Ginet's traditional definition (1975), the definition has several advantages, and (4) that the definition handles at least one type of situation where there can be memory knowledge that p without previous knowledge that p

Abstract: Temporal binding via 40-Hz synchronization of neuronal discharges in sensory cortices has been hypothesized to be a necessary condition for the rapid selection of perceptually relevant information for further processing in working memory. Binocular rivalry experiments have shown that late stage visual processing associated with the recognition of a stimulus object is highly correlated with discharge rates in inferotemporal cortex. The hippocampus is the primary recipient of inferotemporal outputs and is known to be the substrate for the consolidation of working memories to long-term, episodic memories. The prefrontal cortex, on the other hand, is widely thought to mediate working memory processes, per se. This article reviews accumulated evidence for the role of a subcortical matrix in linking frontal and hippocampal systems to select and ''stream'' conscious episodes across time (hundreds of milliseconds to several seconds). ''Streaming'' is hypothesized to be mediated by the selective gating of reentrant flows of information between these cortical systems and the subcortical matrix. The physiological mechanism proposed for this temporally extended form of binding is synchronous oscillations in the slower EEG spectrum (< 8 Hz)

Abstract: This article traces some modern conceptions of memory in history (Halbwachs, Nora), indirectly comparing them with the ancient poetic tradition of so-called “catalogue poetry.” In the discussion of memory and oblivion, I argue that history encompasses multiple histories rather than constituting one single teleological and universal history. Every history is produced by a historical narrative that follows and interprets what may be called the historical proper, which comprises lists of names of people, things, or events that have to be kept and transmitted within a history. The historical and the narrative within a history are relatively independent, insofar as the narrative that interprets the historical may in principle change, whereas the historical has to be preserved, which is the primary task of historical memory. Historical being, then, is being remembered within a history

Abstract: Preface/Introduction

The question under discussion is metaphysical and truly elemental. It emerges in two aspects – how did we come to be conscious of our own existence, and, as a deeper corollary, do existence and awareness necessitate each other? I am bold enough to explore these questions and I invite you to come along; I make no claim to have discovered absolute answers. However, I do believe I have created here a compelling interpretation. You’ll have to judge for yourself.



What follows is the presentation of three essays I have worked on over the past several years seeing publication for the first time. “Hollows of Experience” was written first as an invited chapter for a collection on the ontology of consciousness. However, when cuts became necessary, my chapter got the knife. Its length has prohibited it from publication in any print journal. “Myth and Mind” was written next as a journal article, but as my involvement with it grew so did its length, so it has also idled on my websty awaiting its call. “From Panexperiential-ism to Conscious Experience” was written most recently, but it is the only one to have been available to the public elsewhere than my own website. Under the name, “The Continuum of Experience”, it was Target Article #95 on the recently closed Karl Jaspers Forum (for discussion purposes only).



I have put them in a different sequence here, for reasons of logical sense. Up first, “Panexperientialism” deals with an idea difficult for many to accept, namely that conscious experience is a particular mode of symbolically reflected experience that is largely unique to our species. However, I aver that experienced sensation in itself (as found, for example, in autonomic sensory response systems) goes “all the way down” into nature, and thus the title, panexperientialism.



Understanding this idea is helpful to dealing with the focus on language in Part I of “Hollows”, next, since here speech and general symbolic interaction in general are found to be the catalysts for the creation of our consciously experienced world (our “lived reality”). In Part II, however, I explore how experienced sensations must be coeval with existence, and, with even greater temerity, how all this sensational existence might have arisen within some literally inconceivable background of awareness-in-itself that yet has a dynamism that occasionally breaks into existence as experiential events and entities. (The latter may sound wacky, but physicists and cosmologists are themselves attempting to come to terms with that which seethes with vast potential energy in what they refer to as the quantum vacuum.)



“Myth and Mind” was put third since it deals with a major lacuna in “Hollows” – that presumed prehistoric period when members of our species made the painful crossing of the symbolic threshold into the beginnings of cultural consciousness. Speech plays a central role here, too, but I look more at narrative structures from the dawn of self-awareness when ritual and myth became vital to human survival. Why would fantastic stories and bizarre rituals be necessary? I speculate that growing foresight led to the unavoidable realization of certain mortality, from which, in turn, emerged the secondary realization that we were now alive. In contrast to our yet-to-come death, we have life here and now, and by ritually identifying with a symbolically expanded mythic, i.e., sacred, reality, we may continue to live on after bodily death, just as our ancestors and loved ones must also do. Language and mythmaking are necessary to avoid mortal despair and they remain at the core of human consciousness.



As Ernst Cassirer (1944) has noted, language and myth are “twin creatures”, both metaphoric webs over a reality we can never wholly comprehend. We live in the symbolic and construct our works of imagination and wars of conquest to make life meaningful, to feel immortal, and to sense that we ourselves participate in a reality greater than ourselves. No doubt we do, but this does not mean our culturally constructed self-identities survive the death of our bodies, and it does not imply that our symbolic concepts can ever indicate the ultimate truth. We simply must symbolize an extended reality that was sacred to our ancestors: “Is it not our way, as illusory as it may be, to force continuance on our world and our life in the face of their inevitable ending? Are we not compelled to extend those imagi-nary horizons as far as we can despite the terror and the sometime joy their extension incites? Is their closure not a form of death?” (Crapanzano, p. 210)



Of course, this leaves me in the uncomfortable position of being forced to admit that this venture of mine must inevitably be another attempt at meaningful mythmaking. But what else could it be? This is certainly not a scientific proof though it is indeed an academically rigorous exploration. (Just try to count the citations!) I hope the reader will judge my thesis on the basis of its coherence, the sense of meaning it evokes, my intellectual responsibility, and, finally, the engagement it inspires. If you have read my expositions and found yourself immersed in the timeless questions I here call forth, I would call these writings successful (even if you violently disagree with my answers).



I am very grateful to Huping Hu for granting me this special issue of JCER in which to present my ideas in some detail. He has patiently dealt with my exuberant approach and allowed the many changes I kept coming up with right until the final publication date. I also wish to thank the many potential commentators who politely replied to my invitation, and, even more, I thank those who made time to write actual commentaries.



References



Cassirer, E. (1944). An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Hu-man Culture. New Haven/London: Yale UP.



Crapanzano, V. (2004). Imaginative Horizons: An Essay in Literary-Philosophical Anthropology. Chicago: U of Chicago Press.



Gregory M. Nixon

University of Northern British Columbia

Prince George, British Columbia, Canada

Email: doknyx@shaw.ca

Websty: http://members.shaw.ca/doknyx















Contents



Preface/Introduction 213



From Panexperientialism to Conscious Experience:

The Continuum of Experience 216



Hollows of Experience 234



Myth and Mind:

The Origin of Human Consciousness in the Discovery of the Sacred 289

Abstract: Nielsen's covert REM process model explains much of the mentation found in REM and NREM sleep, but stops short of postulating an interaction of waking cognitive processes with the dream mechanisms of REM sleep. It ranks with the Hobson et al. paper as a major theoretical advance. The Solms article does not surmount the ever-present problem of defining dreams in a manner conducive to advancing dream theory. Vertes & Eastman review the REM sleep and learning literature, but make questionable assumptions in doing so. [Hobson et al.; Nielsen; Solms; Vertes & Eastman]

Abstract: At least since 2003, when the US President’s Council on Bioethics published Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness , there has been heated debate about the ethics of using pharmacology to reduce the intensity of emotions associated with painful memories. That debate has sometimes been conducted in language that obfuscates as much as it illuminates. I argue that the two sides of the debate actually agree that, in general, it is good to reduce the emotional intensity of memories associated with traumatic events, when (as in the case of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) the intensity of those memories is dis proportionate to the precipitating traumatic event. Both sides also agree that, in general—not as an ironclad rule—it is bad to reduce the emotional intensity of memories associated with difficult but normal human problems of living, when the intensity of the emotions is proportionate to those problems. Between those two areas of agreement, there is a zone of ambiguity, in which reasonable people, who proceed from different but equally ethical frameworks, may indeed reach different conclusions about the same set of facts. But I will argue that even in the zone of ambiguity, there is more agreement than the language favored by the different frameworks sometimes suggests. Ultimately, I suggest that if we see the extent to which the substantive differences between the two frameworks are smaller than their articulators’ language sometimes suggests, we can engage in a more productive conversation about whether a particular intervention will facilitate or diminish human flourishing

Abstract: Cowan fails to obtain a magical number of 7 because his analysis is faulty. This is revealed by an alternative analysis of Cowan's own tasks. The analysis assumes a number 7 for adults, and neoPiagetian mental- capacity values for children. Data patterns and proportions of success (reported in Cowan's Figs. 2 and 3) are thus quantitatively explained in detail for the first time

Abstract: We argue that episodic remembering, understood as the ability to re-experience past events, requires a particular kind of introspective ability and understanding. It requires the understanding that first person experiences can represent actual events. In this respect it differs from the understanding required by the traditional false belief test for children, where a third person attribution (to others or self) of a behavior governing representation is sufficient. The understanding of first person experiences as representations is also required for problem solving with images. In support of this argument we review developmental evidence that children’s episodic remembering is independent of and emerges after mastery of the false belief task but emerges together with the use of imagery for solving visual rotation tasks

Abstract: We provide additional support for Cowan's claim that short term memory (STM) involves a range of 3–5 tokens, on the basis of language correlational analyses. If language is at least partly learned, linguistic dependency structure should reflect properties of the cognitive components mediating learning; one such component is STM. In this view, the range over which statistical regularity extends in ordinary text would be suggestive of STM span. Our analyses of eight languages are consistent with STM span being about four chunks

Abstract: We propose that Bloom's focus on cognitive factors involved in word learning still lacks a broader perspective. We emphasize the crucial relevance of working memory in learning elements of language. Specifically, we demonstrate through our data that in impaired populations knowledge of some linguistic elements can be dissociated according to the subcomponent of working memory (visual or verbal) involved in a task. Further, although Bloom's concentration on theory of mind as a precondition for word learning is certainly correct, theory of mind being a necessary condition does not make it a sufficient one. On the basis of our studies we point out the importance of a theory of mind related goal preference in acquiring spatial language. In general, we claim that more specific cognitive preferences and constraints should be outlined in detail for the preconditions of acquiring linguistic elements

Abstract: On confession -- Confession, time and sexual difference -- The sexual politics of nostalgia -- Film theory, masculinity and mourning -- Remembering ourselves.

Abstract: Haack, S. Is truth flat or bumpy?--Chihara, C. S. Ramsey's theory of types.--Loar, B. Ramsey's theory of belief and truth.--Skorupski, J. Ramsey on Belief.--Hookway, C. Inference, partial belief, and psychological laws.--Skyrms, B. Higher order degrees of belief.--Mellor, D. H. Consciousness and degrees of belief.--Blackburn, S. Opinions and chances.--Grandy, R. E. Ramsey, reliability, and knowledge.--Cohen, L. J. The problem of natural laws.--Giedymin, J. Hamilton's method in geometrical optics and Ramsey's view of theories.

Abstract: The present paradigm involved manipulating the congruency of the perceptual processing during the study and test phases of a recognition memory task. During each trial, a gaze-contingent window was used to limit the stimulus display to a region either inside or outside a 108 square centred on the participant’s point of gaze, constituting the Central and Peripheral viewing modes respectively. The window position changed in real time in concert with changes in gaze position. Four experiments documented better task performance when viewing modes at encoding and retrieval matched than when they mismatched (i.e., perceptual specificity effects). Viewing mode congruency effects were demonstrated with both verbal and non-verbal stimuli. The present research is motivated and discussed in terms of theoretical views proposed in the 1970s including the levels-of-processing framework and the proceduralist viewpoint. In addition, implications for current processing and multiple systems views of memory are outlined

Abstract: We report on a new visual search task in which observers make highly accurate two-alternative forced-choice responses within 100-400 ms of display onset. This is a striking result, since accurate responding in a difficult search of this kind is usually possible only after at least 500 ms from display onset. The conditions under which such rapid responses are obtained involve brief initial glimpses of a search display interrupted by either a blank screen or a glimpse of a second display. On re-presentation of the original display, a significant proportion of responses are made within 100-500 ms. Since these responses are never made in the absence of display re-presentation, they are evidence of "rapid resumption" of the search task. We report experiments exploring the conditions critical for rapid resumption and consider its implications for memorial processes in visual search

Abstract: The mnemonic arts and the idea of a universal language that would capture the essence of all things were originally associated with cryptology, mysticism, and other occult practices. And it is commonly held that these enigmatic efforts were abandoned with the development of formal logic in the seventeenth century and the beginning of the modern era. In his distinguished book, Logic and the Art of Memory Italian philosopher and historian Paolo Rossi argues that this view is belied by an examination of the history of the idea of a universal language. Based on comprehensive analyses of original texts, Rossi traces the development of this idea from late medieval thinkers such as Ramon Lull through Bruno, Bacon, Descartes, and finally Leibniz in the seventeenth century. The search for a symbolic mode of communication that would be intelligible to everyone was not a mere vestige of magical thinking and occult sciences, but a fundamental component of Renaissance and Enlightenment thought. Seen from this perspective, modern science and combinatorial logic represent not a break from the past but rather its full maturity. Available for the first time in English, this book (originally titled Clavis Universalis ) remains one of the most important contributions to the history of ideas ever written. In addition to his eagerly anticipated translation, Steven Clucas offers a substantial introduction that places this book in the context of other recent works on this fascinating subject. A rich history and valuable sourcebook, Logic and the Art of Memory documents an essential chapter in the development of human reason

Abstract: Shors & Matzel's conclusion that LTP is not related to learning is similar to one we reached several years ago. We discuss some methodological advances that have relevance to the issue and applaud the authors for challenging existing dogma

Abstract: Pylyshyn's concentration on form perception to demonstrate that early vision is cognitively impenetrable neglects that color perception is also part of early vision. Thus, the finding of Duncker (1939), Bruner et al. (1951), and Delk and Fillenbaum (1965) that the expected color of objects affects how they are perceived challenges Pylyshyn's thesis

Abstract: According to memory foundationalism, seeming to remember that P is prima facie justification for believing that P. There is a common objection to this theory: If I previously believed that P carelessly (i.e. without justification) and later seem to remember that P, then (according to memory foundationalism) I have somehow acquired justification for a previously unjustified belief. In this paper, I explore this objection. I begin by distinguishing between two versions of it: One where I seem to remember that P while also seeming to remember being careless in my original believing that P and the other where I seem to remember that P while not seeming to remember my past carelessness. I argue that the former case is the real challenge for memory foundationalism. After establishing the case of unforgotten carelessness as objection to memory foundationalism, I recast memory foundationalism in way that allows it to escape this objection

Abstract: Contemporary philosophical discussion of personal identity has centered on refinements and defenses of the “psychological continuity theory”—the view that identity is created by the links between present and past provided by autobiographical experience memories. This view is structured in such a way that these memories must be seen as providing simple connections between two discrete, well-defined moments of consciousness. There is, however, a great deal of evidence—both introspective and empirical—that autobiographical memory often does not provide such links, but instead summarizes, and condenses life experiences into, a coherent narrative. A brief exploration of some of the mechanisms of this summarizing and condensing work furthers the philosophical discussion of personal identity by showing why a view with the structure of the psychological continuity theory will not work, and by illuminating the role of autobiographical memory in the constitution of personal identity

Abstract: I wish to show that living is composed of events that are defined by memories, that memories are inclusive of what we might call animality, that memories are definitive of the occurrence of time, and that experiences of light and of animality are inseparably associated. Our ability to communicate With animals, our projections onto them, and our own experiences of animality show memories of something that is intrinsic to our lives and to events of appearance as well as something that Heidegger leaves out of his thought. Time belongs to memory in the sense that time happens with and in memories. Without memory time does not occur. Without time memory does not occur. The phrase, the memory of time, when one maximizes the ambiguity of the ''of'', means that each belongs to the other and although we might find time passing through memory, we will also find memory marking time. The account suggests that the ''light'' of appearing happens in a fleshly way that requires considerable modification of Heidegger''s descriptive accounts of dasein and being

Abstract:   In this paper I argue that internalistic foundationalist theories of the justification of memory belief are inadequate. Taking a discussion of John Pollock as a starting point, I argue against any theory that requires a memory belief to be based on a phenomenal state in order to be justified. I then consider another version of internalistic foundationalism and claim that it, too, is open to important objections. Finally, I note that both varieties of foundationalism fail to account for the epistemic status of our justified nonoccurrent beliefs, and hence are drastically incomplete

Abstract: What is encoded in working memory may be a content-addressable pointer, but a critical portion of the information that is addressed includes the motor information to achieve deictic reference in the environment. Additionally, the same strategy that is used to access environment information just in time for its use may also be used to access long-term memory via the pre-frontal cortex

Abstract: A great deal of effort has been, and continues to be, devoted to developing consciousness artificially (A small selection of the many authors writing in this area includes: Cotterill (J Conscious Stud 2:290–311, 1995 , 1998 ), Haikonen ( 2003 ), Aleksander and Dunmall (J Conscious Stud 10:7–18, 2003 ), Sloman ( 2004 , 2005 ), Aleksander ( 2005 ), Holland and Knight ( 2006 ), and Chella and Manzotti ( 2007 )), and yet a similar amount of effort has gone in to demonstrating the infeasibility of the whole enterprise (Most notably: Dreyfus ( 1972/1979 , 1992 , 1998 ), Searle ( 1980 ), Harnad (J Conscious Stud 10:67–75, 2003 ), and Sternberg ( 2007 ), but there are a great many others). My concern in this paper is to steer some navigable channel between the two positions, laying out the necessary pre-conditions for consciousness in an artificial system, and concentrating on what needs to hold for the system to perform as a human being or other phenomenally conscious agent in an intersubjectively-demanding social and moral environment. By adopting a thick notion of embodiment—one that is bound up with the concepts of the lived body and autopoiesis (Maturana and Varela 1980 ; Varela et al. 2003 ; and Ziemke 2003 , 2007a , J Conscious Stud 14(7):167–179, 2007b )—I will argue that machine phenomenology is only possible within an embodied distributed system that possesses a richly affective musculature and a nervous system such that it can, through action and repetition, develop its tactile-kinaesthetic memory, individual kinaesthetic melodies pertaining to habitual practices, and an anticipatory enactive kinaesthetic imagination. Without these capacities the system would remain unconscious, unaware of itself embodied within a world. Finally, and following on from Damasio’s ( 1991 , 1994 , 1999 , 2003 ) claims for the necessity of pre-reflective conscious, emotional, bodily responses for the development of an organism’s core and extended consciousness, I will argue that without these capacities any agent would be incapable of developing the sorts of somatic markers or saliency tags that enable affective reactions, and which are indispensable for effective decision-making and subsequent survival. My position, as presented here, remains agnostic about whether or not the creation of artificial consciousness is an attainable goal

Abstract: This paper deals with the sudden change in the mood, themes and style of Korean literature in the 1990s, which was brought on by the inauguration of the first civilian government in three decades and the lifting of the oppressive shadow of military dictatorship. Under military dictatorship, serious Korean writers all felt obligated to be the conscience of the nation, so the emphasis of their works tended to be on social and political injustice and the lives of the exploited workers or helpless and powerless citizens. Their tone, therefore, was that of harsh protest. However, with the demise of military dictatorship, Korean writers felt free to focus on personal relationships and the inner psyche. Shin Kyoung-suuk and Choi Yoon are just two among the many new talents who emerged in the Korean literary scene since the end of the 1980s. They awakened the deep-seated repression of the Korean psyche and fueled the exuberance of psychic liberation

Abstract: This article investigates several consequences of a recent trend in philosophy of mind to shift the relata of realization from mental state–physical state to function‐mechanism. It is shown, by applying both frameworks to the neuroscientific case study of memory consolidation, that, although this shift can be used to avoid the immediate antireductionist consequences of the traditional argument from multiple realizability, what is gained is a far more modest form of reductionism than recent philosophical accounts have intimated and neuroscientists themselves have claimed. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, University of Alabama at Birmingham, HB 414A, 900 13th Street South, Birmingham, AL 35294‐1260; e‐mail: jas1@uab.edu

Abstract: Historical Cognitive Science I am lucky to strike three reviewers who extract so clearly my book's spirit as well as its substance. They all both accept and act on my central methodological assumption; that detailed historical research, and consideration of difficult contemporary questions about cognition and culture, can be mutually illuminating. It's gratifying to find many themes which recur in different contexts throughout _Philosophy and Memory_ _Traces_ so well articulated here. The reviews catch my desires to interweave discussion of cognitive theories of memory with moral questions of psychological control and self-mastery, to evoke the virtues and the pleasures of strange, baroque beliefs about fickle 'animal spirits' coursing through the nerves and the brain, to demonstrate that mechanistic explanation (even in its blunt old Cartesian form) can acknowledge complexity, and to develop scientific conceptions of dynamic memory traces and representations which can survive uncharitable philosophical criticism. The book's insistent interdisciplinarity is just an inchoate quest to acknowledge the daunting variety of the phenomena: remembering is both natural and cultural, and is studied by narrative theorists as well as neurobiologists, by physicists as well as psychologists. By fusing the rangy detail of a history of early modern neurophysiology with the committed, even gullible fervor of a defence of 'new connectionist' cognitive science, I wanted to pull out the carpet from all those who are happy to let 'scientific' and 'cultural' approaches to the mind run along independently. Once this general project is given space, as it is by all three reviewers, we can get down to specifics

Abstract: in Jeremy McKenna (ed), At the Boundaries of Cricket, to be published in 2007 as a special issue of the journal Sport in Society and as a book in the series Sport in the Global Society (Taylor and Francis)

Abstract: in special collective memory issue of Social Research: an international quarterly of the social sciences (winter 2007-08, volume 75 number 1)

Abstract: The early development of autobiographical memory is a useful case study both for examining general relations between language and memory, and for investigating the promise and the difficulty of interdisciplinary research in the cognitive sciences of memory. An otherwise promising social-interactionist view of autobiographical memory development relies in part on an overly linguistic conception of mental representation. This paper applies an alternative, ‘supra-communicative’ view of the relation between language and thought, along the lines developed by Andy Clark, to this developmental framework. A pluralist approach to current theories of autobiographical memory development is sketched: shared early narratives about the past function in part to stabilize and structure the child’s own autobiographical memory system

Abstract: in Massimo Marraffa, Mario de Caro, & Francesco Ferretti (eds.), Cartographies of the Mind: philosophy & psychology in intersection (Springer), pp. 81-92

Abstract: for Lambros Malafouris and Carl Knappett (eds), Material Agency: towards a non-anthropocentric approach (Springer, late 2007)

Abstract: If cognition is distributed as well as embodied, then explanation in cognitive science must often highlight more or less transient extended systems spanning embodied brains, social networks or resources and key parts of the natural and the cultural world. These key parts of material culture are not simply cues which trigger the truly cognitive apparatus inside the head but instead form ‘‘a continuous part of the machinery itself’’, as ‘‘systemic components the interaction of which brings forth the cognitive process in question’’ (Malafouris, 2004:58). On this view, cognitive science is thus not just the study of the brain: indeed, even neuroscience cannot be the study of the brain alone, for brains coupled with external resources may have unique functional and dynamical characteristics apparent only when we also attend to the nature of those resources and the peculiarities of the interaction. This chapter argues that if cognition is indeed thus distributed, then cognition is also historical and heterogeneous and must also be analysed diachronically and differentially. If mind is extended, that is to say, then historical cognitive sciences are essential to the interdisciplinary enterprise. This is not just because individual brains themselves are ‘‘biosocial organs permeated by history’’ (Cowley, 2002:75) but also on the longer scale because of dramatic historical diversity in the nature, properties and use of cognitive artefacts. According to Andy Clark, ‘‘the single most important task’’ for ‘‘a science of the bio-technological mind’’ is to understand ‘‘the range and variety of types of cognitive scaffolding and the different ways in which non-biological scaffolding can augment (or impair) performance’’ (Clark, 2002:29, my italics). Unique historical and cultural features of human beings extended cognitive make-up are thus not accidental extras added to a basic biologically given mind. Rather, such changing media, objects, routines, institutions and practices have....

Abstract: A talk in the 2007 Blackheath Philosophy Forum series on the Truth Wars, July 28

Abstract: Sometimes I remember my past experiences from an ‘observer’ perspective, seeing myself in the remembered scene. This paper analyses the distinction in personal memory between such external observer visuospatial perspectives and ‘field’ perspectives, in which I experience the remembered actions and events as from my original point of view. It argues that Richard Wollheim’s related distinction between centred and acentred memory fails to capture the key phenomena, and criticizes Wollheim’s reasons for doubting that observer ‘memories’ are genuine personal memories. Since field perspectives in personal memory are also likely to be the product of constructive processes, we should reject the common assumption that such constructive processes inevitably bring distortion and error. Yet field perspectives tend to be treated as privileged also in the domains of memory for skilled movement, and memory for trauma. In each case, it is argued that visuospatial perspective in personal memory should be distinguished from other kinds of perspective such as kinesthetic perspective and emotional perspective

Abstract: Published in Darren Tofts, Annemarie Jonson, and Alessio Cavallaro (eds), _Prefiguring Cyberculture: an intellectual history_ (MIT Press and Power Publications, December 2002). Please do send comments: email me. Back to my main publications page . Back to my home page

Abstract: Philip Robbins and Murat Aydede (eds), The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 217-235.

Abstract: The Psychological Study of Social Memory Phenomena Very often our memories of the past are of experiences or events we shared with others. And “in many circumstances in society, remembering is a social event” (Roediger, Bergman, & Meade, 2000, p.129): parents and children reminisce about significant family events, friends discuss a movie they just saw together, students study for exams with their roommates, colleagues remind one another of information relevant to an important group decision, and complete strangers discuss a crime they happened to witness together. Psychology is at the heart of recent interdisciplinary efforts to understand the relationships between an individual remembering alone, an individual remembering in a group, and the group itself remembering

Abstract: 1. Introduction: memory and interdisciplinarity (footnote 1) Memory is studied at a bewildering number of levels, in a daunting range of disciplines, and with a vast array of methods. Is there any sense at all in which memory theorists - from neurobiologists to narrative theorists, from the developmental to the postcolonial, from the computational to the cross-cultural - are studying the same phenomena? This exploratory review paper sketches the bare outline of a positive framework for understanding current work on memory, both within the various cognitive sciences and across the gulfs between the cognitive and the social sciences

Abstract: The paper presents a study examining the role of working
memory in quantifier verification. We created situations similar to the
span task to compare numerical quantifiers of low and high rank, parity
quantifiers and proportional quantifiers. The results enrich and support
the data obtained previously in and predictions drawn from a computational
model.

Abstract: Cellular mechanisms hypothesized to underlie sleep-dependent memory consolidation are expressed throughout the brain during sleep. Use of sleep deprivation to evaluate the functional importance of these mechanisms is confounded by degradation in waking performance resulting from impaired vigilance. There is a need for methods that will permit disruption of specific mechanisms during sleep only in the neuronal circuits most critically involved in learning. This should be accomplished without global sleep disruption and with preservation of the restorative aspects of sleep

Abstract: The dynamic developmental theory of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) proposes that hypodopaminergic functioning results in anomalous delay-of-reinforcement gradients in ADHD, which in turn might account for many of the observed behavioral and cognitive characteristics. However, hyperdopaminergic functioning might also impair mnemonic representation of codes for spatial, motoric, and reward information and contribute to the purported shorter delay gradients in ADHD

Abstract: The development of the semantic externalism in the 1970s was followed by a debate on the compatibility of externalism and self-knowledge. Boghossian’s memory argument is one of the most important arguments against the compatibilist view. However, some compatibilists attack Boghossian’s argument by pointing out that his understanding of memory is internalistic. Ludlow and others developed the externalist view of memory to defend the compatibility of externalism and self-knowledge. However, the externalist view of memory undermines the epistemic status of memory since it gives memory a burden that is too heavy for it to carry. This paper argues that only if we take the content of memory to be narrow and take that of self-knowledge to be wide and replace Cartesian self-knowledge with contextually constrained self-knowledge, can the compatibility of externalism and self-knowledge be effectively defended

Abstract: Although considerable attention has been paid to the possible involvement of sleep in memory processing, there is no substantial evidence for it. Walker describes a phenomenon of consolidation-based enhancement (CBE), whereby performance on select procedural tasks improves with overnight sleep; that is, without additional practice on the tasks. CBE, however, appears restricted to a few tasks, and even with these tasks CBE is not confined to sleep but also occurs during wakefulness. Sleep serves no unique role in this process. At best, CBE is a slow, time-dependent process of consolidation that begins with task acquisition in waking and can under some circumstances extend to sleep

Abstract: Glenberg's account falls short in several respects. Besides requiring clearer explication of basic concepts, his account fails to recognize the autonomous nature of perception. His account of what is remembered, and its description, is too static. His strictures against connectionist modeling might be overcome by combining the notions of psychological space and principled learning in an embodied and situated network

Abstract: Matthew Walker's model overcomes the unrefined classical concept of consolidation as a unitary process. Presently still confined in its scope to selective data mainly referring to procedural motor learning, the model nonetheless provides a valuable starting point for further refinements, which would be required for a more comprehensive account of different types and aspects of human memory consolidation

Abstract: Research in the neurosciences continues to provide evidence that sleep plays a role in the processes of learning and memory. There is less of a consensus, however, regarding the precise stages of memory development during which sleep is considered a requirement, simply favorable, or not important. This article begins with an overview of recent studies regarding sleep and learning, predominantly in the procedural memory domain, and is measured against our current understanding of the mechanisms that govern memory formation. Based on these considerations, I offer a new neurocognitive framework of procedural learning, consisting first of acquisition, followed by two specific stages of consolidation, one involving a process of stabilization, the other involving enhancement, whereby delayed learning occurs. Psychophysiological evidence indicates that initial acquisition does not rely fundamentally on sleep. This also appears to be true for the stabilization phase of consolidation, with durable representations, resistant to interference, clearly developing in a successful manner during time awake (or just time, per se). In contrast, the consolidation stage, resulting in additional/enhanced learning in the absence of further rehearsal, does appear to rely on the process of sleep, with evidence for specific sleep-stage dependencies across the procedural domain. Evaluations at a molecular, cellular, and systems level currently offer several sleep specific candidates that could play a role in sleep-dependent learning. These include the upregulation of select plasticity-associated genes, increased protein synthesis, changes in neurotransmitter concentration, and specific electrical events in neuronal networks that modulate synaptic potentiation. Key Words: consolidation; enhancement; learning; memory; plasticity; sleep; stabilization

Abstract: Although Michael Kelly, in his article, “On the Mind’s Pronouncement of Time” (Proceedings of the ACPA 78 [2005]: 247–62), is correct to maintain that Augustine and Husserl share a common conception of time-consciousness, I argue that the similarity does not lie where he thinks nor is it restricted to Husserl’s early period. Instead I locate the source of this commonality in a shared response to a particular Platonic problematic, which I find expressed at Parmenides 151e–152e. This essay shows how the Neoplatonic conception of time, which I claim inspired Augustine, emerged from that problematic and how Husserl, in a thought experimentfrom 1901, wrestles with a similar problematic before adopting a model of time-consciousness roughly analogous to that of Augustine. It is suggested that Kelly is misled by his Aristotelian approach, which causes him to regard the Augustinian and Husserlian models of memory as “trapped” in the present. The point is a significant one if, as I conclude, there is no escaping the conception of time as absolute flow, once we abandon the Platonic view of time as a completedsuccession of nows, eternally fixed

Abstract: This paper surveys the impact on neuropsychology of Wittgenstein's elucidations of memory. Wittgenstein discredited the storage and imprint models of memory, dissolved the conceptual link between memory and mental images or representations and, upholding the context-sensitivity of memory, made room for a family resemblance concept of memory, where remembering can also amount to doing or saying something. While neuropsychology is still generally under the spell of archival and physiological notions of memory, Wittgenstein's reconceptions can be seen at work in its leading-edge practitioners. However, neuroscientists, generally, are finding memory difficult to demarcate from other cognitive and noncognitive processes, and I suggest this is largely due to their considering automatic responses as part of memory, termed nondeclarative or implicit memory. Taking my lead from Wittgenstein's On Certainty, I argue that there is only remembering where there is also some kind of mnemonic effort or attention, and, therefore, that so-called implicit memory is not memory at all, but a basic, noncognitive certainty.

Abstract: Drawing on Iris Marion Young’s essay, “House and Home: Feminist Variations on a Theme,” Weir argues for an alternative ideal of home that involves: (1) the risk of connection, and of sustaining relationship through conflict; (2) relational identities, constituted through both relations of power and relations of mutuality, love, and flourishing; (3) relational autonomy: freedom as the capacity to be in relationships one desires, and freedom as expansion of self in relationship; and (4) connection to past and future, through reinterpretive preservation and transformative identification

Abstract: The issue of capacity limits in visual short-term memory (VSTM) has been an area of active research since the 19th Century (Cattell, 1886). A common metaphor suggests that VSTM is akin to a limited capacity urn, able to hold only three-to-six items (Cowan, 2001). The 11 experiments in this thesis explore implications of this metaphor. Experiments 1-4 suggest that items in VSTM are not stored as coherent objects, contrary to recent suggestions (Luck & Vogel, 1997; Vogel, Woodman, & Luck, 2001). Experiments 5-6 contrast two distinct experimental techniques used to probe the structure of information encoded in VSTM. The "single-shot" technique measures sensitivity to differences across two sequential arrays (Luck & Vogel, 1997); the "flicker" technique measures response times to the detection of change, across multiple successive presentations of two alternate displays (Rensink, O'Regan, & Clark, 1997). It is shown that observers' underlying sensitivity to change, and by implication the structure of information encoded, is the same for these two techniques. Experiments 7-9 examine the relationship between observers' performance for detection and identification of change between two successive visual arrays. It is demonstrated that this relationship fails to meet basic assumptions inherent in the urn metaphor. An alternate model is proposed, which suggests that the capacity limit in VSTM is not determined by the number of items stored, but by the amount of information able to be extracted from a visual display. In Experiments 10-11, this alternative model is used to examine the short-term storage of visual information. Overall, the findings of the thesis are inconsistent with a model in which limits in the detection and identification of change are the result of a single process, which operates on a limited number of coherent objects held in a high-level memory store.

Abstract: Aggleton & Brown propose that familiarity-based recognition depends on a perirhinal-medial dorsal thalamic system. However, connections between these structures are sparse or absent. In contrast, the perirhinal cortex is connected to midline/intralaminar nuclei. In a human, a lesion in this thalamic domain, sparing the medial dorsal nucleus, impaired familiarity-based recognition while sparing recollective-based recognition. It is thus more likely that the intralaminar/midline nuclei are involved in recognition

Abstract: The issue of hemispheric processing of art works, either alone or in relation to a certain aspect of language, was investigated in normal subjects. Three experiments were performed. In the first, memory for surrealistic versus realistic pictures was investigated. In the second, memory for metaphoric versus literal titles of these pictures was measured. In the third, memory for the paintings was determined as a function of the same titles. The results of the first experiment showed a right visual field (RVF) advantage for the surrealistic pictures. No field difference emerged for the realistic pictures. The results of the second experiment indicated a RVF advantage in memory for metaphoric titles. Moreover, in the RVF, there was an advantage for titles from surrealistic-metaphoric pairs over all other pairings. Results of experiment three showed a RVF advantage in remembering pictures from surrealistic-metaphoric pairs and in the left visual field (LVF) there was advantage for pictures with literal titles. Taken together, the results suggest left hemisphere advantage in processing meaningful, yet incongruous arrays, both pictorial and linguistic. The results are discussed in terms of hemispheric memory for art works, metaphors, and the relationship between the two in the brain

Abstract: The absence of a clear influence of an animal's behavioral responses to Hebbian associative learning in the cerebral cortex requires some changes in the Hebbian learning rules. The participation of the brain monoaminergic systems in Hebbian associative learning is considered

Abstract: One of the fundamental questions raised by Ruchkin, Grafman, Cameron, and Berndt's (Ruchkin et al.'s) interpretation of no distinct specialized neural networks for short-term storage buffers and long-term memory systems, is that of the link between perception and memory processes. In this framework, we take the opportunity in this commentary to discuss a specific working memory task involving percept formation, temporary retention, auditory imagery, and the attention-based maintenance of information, that is, the verbal transformation effect

Abstract: This paper argues that the biochemistry of memory consolidation provides valuable model systems for exploring the multiple realization of psychological states

Abstract: A functional theory of memory has already been developed as part of a general functional theory of cognition. The traditional conception of memory as “reproductive” touches on only a minor function. The primary function of memory is in constructing values for goal-directedness of everyday thought and action. This functional approach to memory rests on a solid empirical foundation

Abstract: The limited capacity of immediate memory “rides” on the even more limited capacity of consciousness, which reflects the dynamic activity of the thalamocortical core of the brain. Recent views of the conscious narrow-capacity component of the brain are explored with reference to global workspace theory (Baars 1988; 1993; 1998). The radical limits of immediate memory must be explained in terms of biocognitive brain architecture

Abstract: Recent studies have shown that schizophrenia may be a disease affecting the states of consciousness. The present study is aimed at investigating metamemory, i.e., the knowledge about one's own memory capabilities, in patients with schizophrenia. The accuracy of the Confidence level (CL) in the correctness of the answers provided during a recall phase, and the predictability of the Feeling of Knowing (FOK) when recall fails were measured using a task consisting of general information questions and assessing semantic memory. Nineteen outpatients were paired with 19 control subjects with respect to age, sex, and education. Results showed that patients with schizophrenia exhibited an impaired semantic memory. CL ratings as well as CL and FOK accuracy were not significantly different in the schizophrenic and the control groups. However, FOK ratings were significantly reduced for the patient group, and discordant FOK judgments were also observed more frequently. Such results suggest that FOK judgments are impaired in patients with schizophrenia, which confirms that schizophrenia is an illness characterized by an impaired conscious awareness of one's own knowledge

Abstract:   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

Abstract: (1) Substituting (as Solms does) forebrain for brainstem in the search for a dream “controller” is counterproductive, since a distributed system need have no single controller. (2) Evidence against episodic memory consolidation does not show that REM sleep has no role in other types of memory, contra Vertes & Eastman. (3) A generalization of Revonsuo's “threat simulation” model in reverse is more plausible and is empirically testable. [Hobson et al.; Solms; Revonsuo; Vertes & Eastman]

Abstract: Glenberg's theory is rich and provocative, in our view, but we find fault with the premise that all memory representations are embodied. We cite instances in which that premise mispredicts empirical results or underestimates human capabilities, and we suggest that the motivation for the embodiment idea – to avoid the symbol-grounding problem – should not, ultimately, constrain psychological theorizing

Abstract: A distinction between interpretive processing and post-interpretive processing calls for a consideration of interface relations in systems of verbal memory. Syntactic movement of a phrase and the cognitive system of thought/mind interact. Systems of declarative memory and procedural memory interact

Abstract: Erdelyi's unified theory includes the idea that traumatic memories can be unconsciously repressed so that they are enduringly inaccessible to deliberate recall. I argue here that clinical evidence for repressed memory is illusory, and illustrate this claim by examining previous studies of putative repressed memories and also recent research on nonverbal behaviors among survivors of childhood sexual abuse

Abstract: MacNeilage's target article develops a theory for the evolution of human speech articulation along the lines of “slot- filler” structure. His content/frame schema commits him to the tenets of embodiment, muscle sense, and a memory for speech. My commentary ties these aspects together in their historical and current perspective

Abstract: We agree with Caplan & Waters that there are problems with the single-resource theory of sentence comprehension. However, we challenge their dual-resource alternative on theoretical and empirical grounds and point to a more coherent solution that abandons the notion of working memory resources

Abstract: Walker's target article proposes a refinement of the well known two-stage model of memory formation to explain the positive effects of sleep on consolidation. After a first stage in which a labile memory representation is formed, a further stabilisation of the memory trace takes place in the second stage, which is dependent on (REM) sleep. Walker has refined the latter stage into a stage in which a consolidation-based enhancement occurs. It is not completely clear what consolidation-based enhancement implies and how it can be dissociated from a stage for memory-stabilisation. A more serious consideration, however, is whether a second stage in memory consolidation that is solely dependent on sleep, is really necessary. The classical, passive, interference theory is able to explain adequately the findings related to the effects of sleep and memory, and can lead perhaps better to an understanding of the highly variable data in this field

Abstract: The present commentary agrees with many of the points made by Ruchkin et al., but brings up several important differences in assumptions. These assumptions have to do with the nature of the capacity limit in working memory and the possible bases of working-memory activation

Abstract: Ruchkin et al. use brain-activity data from healthy subjects to assess the physiological validity of a cognitive working memory model and to propose modifications. The conclusions drawn from this data are interesting and plausible, but they have limitations. Much of what is known about the neural mechanisms of working memory comes from single neuron recordings in animals, and it is currently not fully understood how these translate to scalp recordings of EEG

Abstract: Unfortunately, some researchers think a good scientific theory is one that has been repeatedly confirmed, and a bad theory is one that has not received consistent confirmation. However, confirmation of a theory depends on the extent to which a hypothesis exposes itself to disconfirmation. One confirmation of a highly specific, falsifiable experiment can have a far greater impact than the disconfirmation of twenty experiments that are virtually unfalsifiable. This commentary (1) counteracts misleading biases regarding the REM sleep/memory consolidation theory, and (2) demonstrates how chaotic cerebral activation during sleep is an essential component of long-term memory storage processes. [Vertes & Eastman]

Abstract: This commentary provides a critique of Tsuda's target article, focusing on the hippocampus and episodic long-term memory. More specifically, the relevance of Cantor coding and chaotic itinerancy for long-term memory functioning is considered, given what we know about the involvement of the hippocampus in the mediation of long-term episodic memory (based on empirical neuroimaging studies and investigations of brain-damaged amnesic patients)

Abstract: In this target article, Walker seeks to clarify the current state of knowledge regarding sleep and memory. Walker's review represents an impressively heuristic attempt to synthesize the relevant literature. In this commentary, we question the focus on procedural memory and the use of the term “consolidation,” and we consider the extent to which empirically testable predictions can be derived from Walker's model

Abstract: With reference to Ruchkins et al.'s framework, this commentary briefly considers the history of working memory, and whether, heuristically, this is a useful concept. A neuropsychologically motivated critique is offered, specifically with regard to the recent trend for working-memory researchers to conceptualise this capacity more as a process than as a set of distinct task-specific stores

Abstract: Single-unit data from the cortex of monkeys performing working-memory tasks support the main point of the target article. Those data, however, also indicate that the activation of long-term memory is essential to the processing of all cognitive functions. The activation of cortical long-term memory networks is a key neural mechanism in attention (working memory is a form thereof), perception, memory acquisition and retrieval, intelligence, and language

Abstract: We applaud Aggleton & Brown's affirmation of limbic diencephalic-hippocampal interaction as a key memory substrate. However, we do not agree with a thesis of diencephalic-hippocampal strict dedication to episodic memory. Instead, this circuitry supports the production of context-specific patterns of activation that subserve retrieval for a broad class of memory phenomena, including goal-directed instrumental behavior of animals and episodic memory of humans

Abstract: My aim in this paper is to show that consciousness entails self-consciousness by focusing on the relationship between consciousness and memory. More specifically, I addreess the following questions: (1) does consciousness require episodic memory?; and (2) does episodic memory require self-consciousness? With the aid of some Kantian considerations and recent empirical data, it is argued that consciousness does require episodic memory. This is done after defining episodic memory and distinguishing it from other types of memory. An affirmative answer to (2) is also warranted especially in the light of the issues raised in answering (1). I claim that 'consciousness entails self-consciousness' is thereby shown via the route through episodic memory, i.e. via affirmative answers to (1) and (2). My aim is to revive this Kantian thesis and to bring together current psychological research on amnesia with traditional philosophical perspectives on consciousness and memory

Abstract: I address the commentators' calls for clarification of theoretical terms, discussion of similarities to other proposals, and extension of the ideas. In doing so, I keep the focus on the purpose of memory: enabling the organism to make sense of its environment so that it can take action appropriate to constraints resulting from the physical, personal, social, and cultural situations

Abstract:   Ideas from random graph theory are used to give an heuristic argument that associative memory structure depends discontinuously on pattern recognition ability. This argument suggests that there may be a certain minimal size for intelligent systems

Abstract: The propositional account of explicit and implicit knowledge interprets cognitive differences between direct and indirect test performance as emerging from the elements in different hierarchical levels of the propositional representation that have been made explicit. The hierarchical nature of explicitness is challenged, however, on the basis of neuropsychological dissociations between direct and indirect tests of memory, as well as the stochastic independence that has been observed between these two types of tests. Furthermore, format specificity on indirect test of memory challenges the basic notion of a propositional theory of implicit and explicit knowledge

Abstract: Aggleton & Brown (A&B) propose that the hippocampal-anterior thalamic and perirhinal-medial dorsal thalamic systems play independent roles in episodic memory, with the hippocampus supporting recollection-based memory and the perirhinal cortex, recognition memory. In this commentary we discuss whether there is experimental support for the A&B model from studies of long-term memory in semantic dementia

Abstract: Different hypotheses about the mechanisms underlying working memory lead to different predictions about working memory capacity when information is distributed across the two hemispheres. We present preliminary data suggesting that memory scanning time (a parameter often associated with working memory capacity) varies depending on how information is subdivided across hemispheres. The data are consistent with a distributed model of working memory

Abstract: Corresponding to Glenberg's distinction between the automatic and effortful modes of memory, I propose a distinction between cued and detached mental representations. A cued representation stands for something that is present in the external situation of the representing organism, while a detached representation stands for objects or events that are not present in the current situation. This distinction is important for understanding the role of memory in different cognitive functions like planning and pretense

Abstract: Subjects classified visible 2-digit numbers as larger or smaller than 55. Target numbers were preceded by masked 2-digit primes that were either congruent (same relation to 55) or incongruent. Experiments 1 and 2 showed prime congruency effects for stimuli never included in the set of classified visible targets, indicating subliminal priming based on long-term semantic memory. Experiments 2 and 3 went further to demonstrate paradoxical unconscious priming effects resulting from task context. For example, after repeated practice classifying 73 as larger than 55, the novel masked prime 37 paradoxically facilitated the “larger” response. In these experiments task context could induce subjects to unconsciously process only the leftmost masked prime digit, only the rightmost digit, or both independently. Across 3 experiments, subliminal priming was governed by both task context and long-term semantic memory

Abstract: I discuss how the work in Walker's article adds to the considerable body of research on dreaming, sleep, and memory that appeared in the early days of modern sleep research. I also consider the issue of REM-independent and REM-dependent kinds of learning. This requires including emotional issues in our discussion, and therefore emphasizes the importance of studying and understanding dreams

Abstract: We argue that by neglecting the fact that procedural memory may also have episodic qualities, and by considering only a systems approach to memory, Walker's account of consolidation of learning during subsequent sleep ignores alternative accounts of how sleep stages may be interdependent. We also question the proposition that sleep-based consolidation largely bypasses hippocampal structures

Abstract: Neural models have proposed how short-term memory (STM) storage in working memory and long-term memory (LTM) storage and recall are linked and interact, but are realized by different mechanisms that obey different laws. The authors' data can be understood in the light of these models, which suggest that the authors may have gone too far in obscuring the differences between these processes

Abstract: Modern investigators of cognition ask about the conditions under which faculties occur rather than about their existence. This tendency, combined with the axiom of parsimony, emphasizes a paradigm shift in the fundamental principles of economic thought in science, mimicking evolutionary conceptualizations. The Ruchkin model of memory-related brain activity replaces less economic models. From interdisciplinary approaches, proceduralist models for other memory-related processes analogously support this model

Abstract: Future work is needed to establish that pure short-term memory is a coherent individual difference attribute that is separable from traditional compound short-term memory measures. Psychometric support for latent pure short-term memory capacity will provide an important starting point for future fine-grained analyses of the intrinsic factors that influence individual differences in math skills

Abstract: Recent empirical work indicates that reduced autobiographical memory specificity can act as an avoidant processing style. By truncating the memory search before specific elements of traumatic memories are accessed, one can ward off the affective impact of negative reminiscences. This avoidant processing style can be viewed as an instance of what Erdelyi describes as the “subtractive” class of repressive processes

Abstract: In the verbal domain, there is only very weak evidence favoring the view that working memory is an active state of long-term memory. We strengthen existing evidence by reviewing two recent fMRI studies of verbal working memory, which clearly demonstrate activation in the superior temporal lobe, a region known to be involved in processing speech during comprehension tasks

Abstract: Memory dynamics need both stable and unstable properties simultaneously. Hence memory dynamics cannot be simulated by chaotic itinerant dynamics alone, with no real world correspondence. Memory dynamics are constrained by both semantics and causalities in the embodied cognition

Abstract: Attentional processes that operate on the contents of memory to produce the activation that is described as working memory by Ruchkin et al. and others, involve a network of brain regions that include both prefrontal and parietal sites. This network appears to mimic the one that is activated by attentional processes that operate on information entering via the senses

Abstract: Cowan's concept of a pure short-term memory (STM) capacity limit is equivalent to that of memory subitizing. However, a robust phenomenon well known in the Sternberg paradigm, that is, the linear increase of RT as a function of memory set size is not consistent with this concept. Cowan's STM capacity theory will remain incomplete until it can account for this phenomenon

Abstract: Three experiments explore the role of working memory in motor skill acquisition and performance. Traditional theories postulate that skill acquisition proceeds through stages of knowing, which are initially declarative but later procedural. The reported experiments challenge that view and support an independent, parallel processing model, which predicts that procedural and declarative knowledge can be acquired separately and that the former does not depend on the availability of working memory, whereas, the latter does. The behaviour of these two processes was manipulated by providing or withholding visual (and auditory) appraisal of outcome feedback. Withholding feedback was predicted to inhibit the use of working memory to appraise success and, thus, prevent the formation of declarative knowledge without affecting the accumulation of procedural knowledge. While the first experiment failed to support these predictions, the second and third experiments demonstrated that procedural and declarative knowledge can be acquired independently. It is suggested that the availability of working memory is crucial to motor performance only when the learner has come to rely on its use

Abstract: Individuals may differ in the general-attention executive component or in the subordinate domain-specific “slave” components of working memory. Tasks requiring sustained memory representations across attention shifts are reliable, valid indices of executive abilities. Measures emphasizing specific processing skills may increase reliability within restricted samples but will not reflect the attention component responsible for the broad predictive validity of span tasks

Abstract: Pickering & Garrod's (P&G's) interactive alignment model explains the existence of alignment between speakers via an automatic priming mechanism. We propose that it may be preferable to explain alignment through processes of memory retrieval. Our discussion highlights how memory retrieval can produce the same results as the priming mechanism and presents data that favor the memory-based view

Abstract: Ruchkin et al.'s view of working memory as activated long-term memory is more compatible with language processing than models such as Baddeley's, but it raises questions about individual differences in working memory and the validity of domain-general capacity estimates. Does it make sense to refer to someone as having low working memory capacity if capacity depends on particular knowledge structures tapped by the task?

Abstract: In challenging current conceptions of the role of working memory in sentence processing, Caplan & Waters consider studies comparing young and older adults on sentence processing. This commentary raises two challenges to Caplan & Waters's conclusions: first, working memory tasks appear to be age invariant. Second, the production of complex syntactic constructions appears not to be age invariant

Abstract: We focus on the functional specificity of theta and alpha oscillations and show that theta is related to working memory, whereas alpha is related to semantic long-term memory. Recent studies, however, indicate that alpha oscillations also play an important role during short-term memory retention and retrieval. This latter finding provides support for the basic hypothesis suggested by Ruchkin et al

Abstract: In response to Cohen, we point out that many of the assessment difficulties raised by the correspondence metaphor stem from the assessment of memory in meaningful, real-life contexts rather than from the assessment of memory accuracy per se; these difficulties are equally troublesome for the assessment of memory quantity in such contexts. Moreover, the need to focus on particular aspects of memory performance – correspondence-oriented or quantity-oriented – does not preclude the development of useful and general theoretical models. In response to Shanon, we argue that (1) the distinction between the correspondence and storehouse metaphors of memory is metatheoretical, not substantive or methodological, (2) the correspondence metaphor is compatible with both a “representationalist” view of memory and a more “direct” view, and (3) as an epistemological strategy, metaphorical pluralism is both acceptable and desirable

Abstract: Glenberg provides a new and exciting view that is especially useful for capturing some functional aspects of memory. However, memory and its functions are too multifarious to be handled by any one conceptualization. We suggest that Glenberg's proposal be restricted to its own “focus of convenience.” In addition, its value will ultimately depend on its success in generating detailed and testable theories

Abstract: The problem of neural memory storage is discussed, based on the results of studies of memory impairment after hippocampal lesions, motor learning, and electrophysiological research on “spinal memory.” I support Shors & Matzel's major statements. The absence of reliable evidence on the LTP memory storage function and other data cast doubt on the synaptic theory of memory

Abstract: A promising approach to more refined models consistent with the Caplan & Waters hypothesis is based on similarity-based interference, a general principle that applies across working memory domains. This may explain both the fine details of syntactic working memory phenomena and the gross fractionation for which Caplan & Waters have found evidence. Detailed models of syntactic processing that embody similarity-based interference fare well cross-linguistically

Abstract: Working-memory retention as activated long-term memory fails to capture orchestrated processing and storage, the hallmark of the concept of working memory. The event-related potential (ERP) data are compatible with working memory as a mental workspace that holds and manipulates information on line, which is distinct from long-term memory, and deals with the products of activated traces from stored knowledge

Abstract: Can memory be cast as a system that meshes events to actions? This commentary considers the concepts of mesh versus association, arguing that thus far the distinction is inadequate. However, the goal of shifting to an action-based view of memory has merit, most notably in emphasizing memory as a skill and in focusing on processes as opposed to structures

Abstract: To model potential interactions, memory must not only mesh prior patterns of action, as Glenberg proposes, but also their internal consequences. This is necessary both to discriminate sensorimotor information by its relevance and to explain how go als about the world develop. In the absence of internal feedback, Glenberg is forced to reintroduce a grounding problem into his otherwise sound model by presupposing interactive goals

Abstract: We challenge Ruchkin et al.'s claim in reducing short-term memory (STM) to the active part of long-term memory (LTM), by showing that their data cannot rule out the possibility that activation of posterior brain regions could also reflect the contribution of a verbal STM buffer

Abstract: Although the working memory capacity involved in syntactic processing may be separate from the capacity involved in word list recall, other aspects of initial sentence interpretation appear to depend on some of the same capacities tapped by span tasks. Specifically, there appears to a capacity for lexical–semantic retention involved in both sentence comprehension and span measures

Abstract: Three experiments explore the role of working memory in motor skill acquisition and performance. Traditional theories postulate that skill acquisition proceeds through stages of knowing, which are initially declarative but later procedural. The reported experiments challenge that view and support an independent, parallel processing model, which predicts that procedural and declarative knowledge can be acquired separately and that the former does not depend on the availability of working memory, whereas, the latter does. The behaviour of these two processes was manipulated by providing or withholding visual (and auditory) appraisal of outcome feedback. Withholding feedback was predicted to inhibit the use of working memory to appraise success and, thus, prevent the formation of declarative knowledge without affecting the accumulation of procedural knowledge. While the first experiment failed to support these predictions, the second and third experiments demonstrated that procedural and declarative knowledge can be acquired independently. It is suggested that the availability of working memory is crucial to motor performance only when the learner has come to rely on its use

Abstract: As reported by Vertes & Eastman, convincing evidence rules out any role for REM sleep in memory consolidation. However, they do not provide convincing evidence for their claim that sleep in generaI – as opposed to REM sleep per se – has no influence on memory consolidation. Recent correlational data suggest that the number of NREM/REM cycles is associated with performance on a verbal recall task. [Vertes & Eastman]

Abstract: Memory researchers have discussed the relationship between consciousness and memory frequently in the last few decades. Beginning with research by Warrington and Weiskrantz (1968; 1970), memory has been shown to influence task performance even without awareness of retrieval. Data from amnesic patients show that a study episode influences task performance despite their lack of conscious memory for the study session. More recently, issues of intentionality, awareness, and the relationship between conscious and unconscious forms of memory have come to the forefront. Conscious memory has sometimes been defined by intention to retrieve and sometimes by awareness of retrieval. This distinction has been debated as measurement methodologies have developed. In addition, the functional relationship between conscious and automatic forms of memory has implications for measurement of memory processes and the development of models of memory task performance. Several measurement techniques for conscious and automatic memory are reviewed. The current state of these issues is also discussed

Abstract: We discuss the role of short-term auditory verbal storage within a working memory system. Data from single case studies of patients with left parietal lesions and selective impairment of memory span are discussed in order to address the question of the functions of short-term memory in language processing. The backup resource of auditory verbal short-term memory is required for those tasks that necessitate backtracking in order to integrate a verbal message within a developing central cognitive representation

Abstract: Using explicit memory measures, Cowan predicts a new circumstance in which the central capacity limit of 4 chunks should obtain. Supporting results for such an experiment, using continuous old-new recognition, are described. With implicit memory measures, Cowan assumes that short-term repetition priming reflects the central capacity limit. I argue that this phenomenon instead reflects limits within individual perceptual processing modules

Abstract: Glenberg tries to explain how and why memories have semantic content. The theory succeeds in specifying the relations between two major classes of memory phenomena – explicit and implicit memory – but it may fail in its assignment of relative importance to these phenomena and in its account of meaning. The theory is syntactic and extensional, instead of semantic and intensional

Abstract: Dreaming in sleep must depend on the activity of the brain as does cognition and memory in wakefulness. Yet our understanding of the physiological subtleties of state differences may still be too primitive to guide theories adequately in these areas. One can state nonetheless unequivocally that the brain in REM is poorly equipped to practice for eventualities of wakefulness through dreaming, or for consolidating into memory the complex experiences of that state. [Hobson et al., Nielsen, Solms, Vertes & Eastman, Revonsuo]

Abstract: There is remarkable agreement between Ruchkin et al.'s psychophysiological views and my own model, based on developmental-experimental evidence, of working memory as activated long-term memory (LTM). I construe subvocal rehearsal as an operative scheme that maintains order information and demands attentional resources. Encoding and retrieving operations also demand attention. Another share of resources is used for keeping activated specific LTM representations

Abstract: Partial matching theory, which maintains that some memory representations of target items in immediate memory are overwritten by others, can predict both a “theoretical” and an “actual” maximum memory span provided no chunking takes place during presentation. The latter is around 4 ± 2 items, the exact number being determined by the degree of similarity between the memory representations of two immediately successive target items

Abstract: Using a particular formula for quantifying the effortlessness that Perruchet & Vinter suggest accompanies the detection of repetition among a set of representations concurrently in consciousness, it is shown that both the Sternberg function and the Cavanagh function, associated with immediate probed recognition tasks and memory span tasks, can be predicted

Abstract: There are three major weaknesses with Glenberg's theory. The first is that his theory makes assumptions about internal representations that cannot be adequately tested. The second is that he tries to accommodate data from three disparate domains: mental models, linguistics, and memory. The third is that he makes light of advances in cognitive neuroscience

Abstract: Memory and forgetting are inextricably intertwined. Any account of short-term memory (STM) should address the following question: If three, four, or five chunks are being held in STM, what happens after attention is diverted?

Abstract: The functional theory of memory set out in Glenberg's target article accords with recent proposals in the developmental literature with respect to event memory, conceptualization, and language acquisition from an embodied, experiential view. The theory, however, needs to be supplemented with a recognition of the sociocultural contribution to these cognitive processes and emerging structures

Abstract: O'Regan & Noë's (O&N's) theoretical framework for studying visual perception and awareness is intriguing. This framework, based on sensorimotor contingency, can be examined in recent visual brain theories using neuroimaging methodologies. Here, I consider how a working memory (WM) system explains the sensorimotor account of visual consciousness. I believe WM inside the brain provides at least partial support for O&N's theory

Abstract: The authors' results support a functionalist conception of working memory: a manifold repertoire of schemes/schemas (long-term memory) and a small set of general-purpose “hidden operators.” Using some of these operators I define mental (i.e., endogenous) attention. Then, analyzing two of the authors' unexplained important findings, I illustrate the mental-attention model's explanatory power. Multivariate methodology that varies developmental, task differences, and individual differences is recommended

Abstract: We consider Walker's thorough review in the context of thinking about future research on the relation between sleep and memory. We first address methodological issues including type of memory and sleep-stage dependency. We suggest a broader investigation of potential signaling molecules that may be critical to sleep-related consolidation. A brief review of the importance of the stress hormone cortisol illustrates this point

Abstract: Caplan & Waters propose a dedicated linguistic working memory to handle “interpretive” language comprehension, but there are data suggesting that more general working memory capacity can predict syntactic comprehension difficulty, and their claims depend on the existence of a principled distinction between “interpretive” and “post-interpretive” processes, which seems unlikely. Other conceptions of the source of individual differences also deserve consideration, as more flexible explanations of the phenomena

Abstract: Walker proposes that procedural memory formation involves two specific stages of consolidation: wake-dependent stabilization, followed by sleep-dependent enhancement. If sleep-based enhancement of procedural memory formation is now well supported by evidence obtained at different levels of cognitive and neurophysiological organization, wake-dependent mechanisms for stabilization have not been demonstrated as convincingly, and still require more systematic characterization

Abstract: Imagery has played an important, albeit controversial, role in the study of memory psychophysics. In this commentary we critically examine the available data bearing on whether pictorial based depictions of remembered perceptual events are activated and scanned in each of a number of different psychophysical tasks

Abstract: Matthew Walker's article has prompted us to consider neuropsychiatric disorders and pharmacological effects associated with sleep alterations, and aspects of memory affected. Not all disorders involving insomnia show memory impairment, and hypersomnias can be associated with memory deficits. The use of cholinergic medication in dementia indicates that consideration of the link between sleep and memory is more than academic

Abstract: Religionists often presuppose that “mysticism” aims at somehow emptying the mind. In the light of evidence, however, meditation seems rather to consist of ritualized action without an explicit emphasis on subjective experience. Boyer & Lienard's (B&L's) theory of ritualized action as “swamping” working memory thus might help explain the effects of meditation without postulating experiential goals the “mystics” obviously do not have. (Published Online February 8 2007)

Abstract: We suggest a neurophysiological account of the short-term memory capacity limit based on a model of visual working memory (Raffone & Wolters, in press). Simulations have revealed a critical capacity limit of about four independent patterns. The model mechanisms may be applicable to working memory in general and they allow a reinterpretation of some of the issues discussed by Cowan

Abstract: 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

Abstract: The originality of Glenberg's theoretical account lies in the claim that memory works in the service of physical interaction with the three-dimensional world. Little consideration is given, however, to the role of memory in action. We present and discuss data on spatial memory for action. These empirical data constitute the first step of reasoning about the link between memory and action, and allow several aspects of Glenberg's theory to be tested

Abstract: Dissociations in infant memory: Rethinking the development of implicit and explicit memory. Psychological Review, 104, 467-^198. Rovee-Collier, C., Adler, ...

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

Abstract: The identity of working-memory and long-term memory representations follows from many lines of evidence. However, the data provided by Ruchkin et al. are hardly compelling, as they make unproved assumptions about hypothetical generators. We cite studies from our lab in which congruent slow-wave topographies were found for short-term and long-term memory tasks, strongly suggesting that both activate identical cell assemblies

Abstract: High temporal resolution event-related brain potential and electroencephalographic coherence studies of the neural substrate of short-term storage in working memory indicate that the sustained coactivation of both prefrontal cortex and the posterior cortical systems that participate in the initial perception and comprehension of the retained information are involved in its storage. These studies further show that short-term storage mechanisms involve an increase in neural synchrony between prefrontal cortex and posterior cortex and the enhanced activation of long-term memory representations of material held in short-term memory. This activation begins during the encoding/comprehension phase and evidently is prolonged into the retention phase by attentional drive from prefrontal cortex control systems. A parsimonious interpretation of these findings is that the long-term memory systems associated with the posterior cortical processors provide the necessary representational basis for working memory, with the property of short-term memory decay being primarily due to the posterior system. In this view, there is no reason to posit specialized neural systems whose functions are limited to those of short-term storage buffers. Prefrontal cortex provides the attentional pointer system for maintaining activation in the appropriate posterior processing systems. Short-term memory capacity and phenomena such as displacement of information in short-term memory are determined by limitations on the number of pointers that can be sustained by the prefrontal control systems. Key Words: coherence; event-related potentials; imaging; long-term memory; memory; short-term memory; working memory

Abstract: The goal of our target article is to establish that electrophysiological data constrain models of short-term memory retention operations to schemes in which activated long-term memory is its representational basis. The temporary stores correspond to neural circuits involved in the perception and subsequent processing of the relevant information, and do not involve specialized neural circuits dedicated to the temporary holding of information outside of those embedded in long-term memory. The commentaries ranged from general agreement with the view that short-term memory stores correspond to activated long-term memory (e.g., Abry, Sato, Schwartz, Loevenbruck & Cathiard [Abry etal.], Cowan, Fuster, Grote, Hickok & Buchsbaum, Keenan, Hyönä & Kaakinen [Keenan et al.], Martin, Morra), to taking a definite exception to this view (e.g., Baddeley, Düzel, Logie & Della Sala, Kroger, Majerus, Van der Linden, Colette & Salmon [Majerus et al.], Vallar)

Abstract: Ruchkin et al. ascribe a pivotal role to long-term memory representations and binding within working memory. Here we focus on the interaction of working memory and long-term memory in supporting on-line representations of experience available to guide on-going processing, and we distinguish the role of frontal-lobe systems from what the hippocampus contributes to relational long-term memory binding

Abstract: Although O'Regan & Noë (O&N) claim that the world may serve as the viewers' external visual memory, findings from the field of memory research have demonstrated the existence of internal visual representations. These representations are stored in the viewer's brain, contain information regarding visual objects and their relations, guide subsequent exploration of the visual world and promote change detection

Abstract: Cowan argues that the true short-term memory (STM) capacity limit is about 4 items. Functional neuroimaging data converge with this conclusion, indicating distinct neural activity patterns depending on whether or not memory task-demands exceed this limit. STM for verbal information within that capacity invokes focal prefrontal cortical activation that increases with memory load. STM for verbal information exceeding that capacity invokes widespread prefrontal activation in regions associated with executive and attentional processes that may mediate chunking processes to accommodate STM capacity limits

Abstract: Carruthers’ notion that natural language(s) might serve as the medium of non-domain-specific, propositionally based inferential thought is extended to the case of effortful retrieval of autobiographical memory among bilinguals. Specifically, the review suggests that the resources of bilingual inner speech might play a role in the cyclical activation of information from various informational domains during memory retrieval

Abstract: Cowan defines a chunk as “a collection of concepts that have strong associations to one another and much weaker associations to other chunks currently in use.” This definition does not impose any constraints on the nature and number of elements that can be bound into a chunk. We present an experiment to demonstrate that such limitations exist for visual short-term memory, and that their analysis may lead to important insights into properties of visual memory

Abstract: In this commentary the “incredibly robust” evidence for the relationship between sleep and procedural memory is questioned; inconsistencies in the existing data are pointed out. In addition, some suggestions about extending research are made, for example, studying REM sleep augmentation or memory consolidation in patients with sleep disorders. Last, the possibility of a relationship between dreaming and memory processes is discussed

Abstract: Shors & Matzel set up a straw man, that LTP is a memory storage mechanism, and knock him down without due consideration of the important relations among different levels of organization and analysis regarding LTP, learning, and memory. Assessing these relationships requires analysis and hypotheses linking specific brain regions, neural circuits, plasticity mechanisms, and task demands. The issue addressed by the authors is important, but their analysis is off target

Abstract: Does sleep restore brain function or does it consolidate memory? I argue that memory consolidation during sleep is an offshoot of restitution. Continual learning causes local synapse-specific neural fatigue, which then masks expression of that learning, especially on time-limited tests of procedural skills. Sleep serves to restore the fatigued synapses, revealing the consolidation-based enhancement observed as a “latent” overnight improvement in learning

Abstract: The neurophysiological phenomenon of LTP (long term potentiation) is considered by many to represent an adequate mechanism for acquiring or storing memories in the mammalian brain. In our target article, we reviewed the various arguments put forth in support of the LTP/memory hypothesis. We concluded that these arguments were inconsistent with the purported data base and proposed an alternative interpretation that we suggested was at least as compatible with the available data as the more widely held view. In doing so, we attempted to illustrate that the inadequacy of present experimental designs did not permit us to distinguish between equally viable hypotheses. In the four years since we wrote the first draft of our target article, hundreds of additional studies on LTP have been published and their results have been incorporated into current theories about memory. A diverse group of commentators responded to our target article with their own theories of how memories might be stored in the brain, some of which rely on LTP. Some commentators doubted whether memories can be stored through modifications of synaptic strength. Some assert that it will never be possible to understand the neural mechanisms of memory; still others remain hopeful that we will accomplish some semblance of a resolution, provided we appreciate LTP's role in a subset of seemingly amorphous memory systems. In summary, although it is commonly written that “LTP is a memory storage device,” the divergence of views among the commentators suggests, at least as strongly as our target article, that such conviction is unwarranted and fails to acknowledge both the lack of consensus regarding the role of LTP in memory and the complexity of the phenomenon of memory itself

Abstract: Long-term potentiation (LTP) is a long-lasting increase in synaptic efficacy that many consider the best candidate currently available for a neural mechanism of memory formation and/or storage in the mammalian brain. In our target article, LTP: What's learning got to do with it?, we concluded that there was insufficient data to warrant such a conclusion. In their commentaries, Jeffery and Zhadin raise a number of important issues that we did not raise, both for and against the hypothesis. Although we agree with a number of these issues, we maintain that there remains insufficient evidence that LTP is a memory mechanism

Abstract: The function of REM, or any other stage of sleep, can currently only be conjectured. A rational evaluation of the role of REM in memory processing requires systematic testing of hypotheses that are optimally derived from a complete synthesis of existing knowledge. Our view is that the large number of studies supporting a relationship between REM-related brain activity and memory is not easily explained away. [Vertes & Eastman]

Abstract: The model of memory as a store, from which records can be retrieved, is taken for granted by many contemporary researchers. On this view, memories are stored by memory traces, which represent the original event and provide a causal link between that episode and one's ability to remember it. I argue that this seemingly plausible model leads to an unacceptable conception of the relationship between mind and brain, and that a non-representational, connectionist, model offers a promising alternative. I also offer a new reading of Wittgenstein's paradoxical remarks about thought and brain processes: as a critique of the cognitivist thesis that information stored in the brain has a linguistic structure and a particular location. On this reading, Wittgenstein's criticism foreshadows some of the most promising contemporary work on connectionist models of neural functioning

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

Abstract: I introduce the seven papers in this special issue, by Andy Clark, J

Abstract: There are many different ways to think about what has happened before. I think about my own recent actions, and about what happened to me a long time ago; I can think about times before I lived, and about what will happen after my death. I know many things about the past, and about what has happened because people did things before now, or because some good or bad things happened to me

Abstract: The metric devised by Halford, Wilson & Phillips may have considerable potential in distinguishing between the working memory demands of different tasks but may be less effective in distinguishing working memory capacity between individuals. Despite the strengths of the metric, determining whether an effect is caused by relational complexity or by differential levels of expertise is currently problematic

Abstract: The limited capacity for unrelated things is a fact that needs to be explained by a general theory of memory, rather than being itself used as a means of explaining data. A pure storage capacity is therefore not the right assumption for memory research. Instead an explanation is needed of how capacity limitations arise from the interaction between the environment and the cognitive system. The ACT-R architecture, a theory without working memory but a long-term memory based on activation, may provide such an explanation

Abstract: This article reviews some recent research on the development of temporal cognition, with reference to Weist's (1989) account of the development of temporal understanding. Weist's distinction between two levels of temporal decentering is discussed, and empirical studies that may be interpreted as measuring temporal decentering are described. We argue that if temporal decentering is defined simply in terms of the coordination of the temporal locations of three events, it may fail to fully capture the properties of mature temporal understanding. Characterizing the development of mature temporal cognition may require, in addition, distinguishing between event-dependent and event-independent thought about time. Experimental evidence relevant to such a distinction is described; these findings suggest that there may be important changes between 3 and 5 years in children's ability to think about points in time independently of the events that occur at those times.

Abstract: The target article differentiates a new, syntactic component in verbal working memory. We suggest that several more components could be differentiated to make a model of working memory complete. Next, syntax is not always separable from the subject's verbal memory capacity as measured by standard working memory tasks. Finally, interference between different processes cannot be taken as evidence for the processes sharing the same resources. Interference might be a result of active mutual inhibition

Abstract: Cowan has written a meticulous and thought-provoking review of the literature on short-term memory. However, reflections on one area of evidence, that of working memory span, shows the extent to which the research debate can be circumscribed by choice of experimental paradigms

Abstract: What exactly is going on via fornical connections? Aggleton & Brown's target article correctly stresses their importance, but a detailed understanding of their role in memory appears to require fresh research approaches

Abstract: Everyday tasks, such as getting groceries en route from work, involve two distinct components, one prospective (i.e., remembering the plan) and the other retrospective (i.e., remembering the grocery list). The present investigation examined the size of the age-related performance declines in these components, as well as the relationship between these components and age-related differences in processing resources. The subjects were 133 community-dwelling adults between 65 and 95 years of age. They completed a large battery of tests, including tests of pro- and retrospective memory as well as tests for indexing processing resources. The results showed similar age-related declines in pro- and retrospective memory. There was only a weak relationship between pro- and retrospective memory, and the age-related decline in processing resources was related more strongly to retro- than prospective memory

Abstract: The view that short-term memory should be conceived of as being a process based on the activation of long-term memory is inconsistent with neuropsychological evidence. Data from brain-damaged patients, showing specific patterns of impairment, are compatible with a vision of memory as a multiple-component system, whose different aspects, in neurologically unimpaired subjects, show a high degree of interaction

Abstract: While sharing the author's interest in the development of an action-based framework for memory research, I think the present version is neither new nor particularly productive. More differentiation is needed to describe memory functioning in a variety of domains and on the many levels of activity regulation. Above all, Glenberg's proposals seem to contradict empirical data

Abstract: As revealed by standard neuropsychological testing, patients with damage either to the frontal lobe or to the hippocampus suffer from distinct impairments of working memory. It is unclear how Ruchkin et al.'s model integrates the role played by the hippocampus

Abstract: We believe that this has been a constructive debate on the topic of memory consolidation and REM sleep. It was a lively and spirited exchange – the essence of science. A number of issues were discussed including: the pedestal technique, stress, and early REMD work in animals; REM windows; the processing of declarative versus procedural memory in REM in humans; a mnemonic function for theta rhythm in waking but not in REM sleep; the lack of cognitive deficits in patients on antidepressant drugs that suppress or eliminate REM sleep; the disposition of conscious (dreams) and nonconscious material of REM sleep; and finally our theory of REM sleep. Although our position was strongly challenged, we still hold that REM sleep serves no role in the processing and consolidation of memory

Abstract: We agree with Shors & Matzel's general hypothesis that the proposed link between NMDA-dependent LTP and memory is weak. They suggest that NMDA-dependent LTP is important to arousal or attentional processes which influence learning in an anterograde manner. However, current evidence is also consistent with the view that NMDA receptors modulate memory consolidation retroactively, as occurs in several other receptor classes

Abstract: Following on from the target article, which presented a new model of procedural skill memory development, in this response I will reflect on issues raised by invited commentators and further expound attributes of the model. Discussion will focus on: evidence against sleep-dependent memory processing, definitions of memory stages and memory systems, and relationships between memory enhancement, sleep-stages, dreaming, circadian time, and sleep-disorders

Abstract: Caplan & Waters's model differentiating levels of processing and the role of working memory is important and likely right. However, their claim rests on a lack of correlation between working memory and structural complexity. We examine sources of variability in these measures that remain unaccounted for (by anyone), variability that muddies a straightforward claim that the lack of correlation is cleanly established

Abstract: Despite the fact that the number of neurons in the human brain has been identified in cognitive and neural sciences, the magnitude of human memory capacity is still unknown. This paper reports the discovery of the memory capacity of the human brain, which is on the order of 10 8432 bits. A cognitive model of the brain is created, which shows that human memory and knowledge are represented by relations, i.e., connections of synapses between neurons, rather than by the neurons themselves as the traditional container metaphor described. The determination of the magnitude of human memory capacity is not only theoretically significant in cognitive science, but also practically useful to unveil the human potential, as well as the gap between the natural and machine intelligence

Abstract: In their target article, Ruchkin et al. propose sustained neuronal interaction of prefrontal and posterior cortex involved in memory-storage mechanisms with respect to electrophysiological findings on the relationship of short-term and long-term memory processes. We will evaluate this claim in light of recent evidence from our laboratory on EEG coherence analysis of memory processes accompanying language comprehension

Abstract: Caplan & Waters argue that the processing resources used for sentence comprehension are not drawn from an undifferentiated verbal working memory resource. This commentary cites data from normal aging to support this position. Still lacking in theory development is a specification of the transient memory representations necessary for interpretive and post-interpretive operations

Abstract: Models of working memory challenge some aspects of Carruthers’ account but enhance others. Although the nature of the phonological store and central executive appear fully congruent with Carruthers’ proposal, current models of the visuo-spatial sketchpad provide a better account of skilled action. However, Carruthers’ model may provide a way around the homunculus problem that has plagued models of working memory

Abstract: It is sometimes claimed that non-human animals (and perhaps also young children) live their lives entirely in the present and are cognitively ‘stuck in time’. Adult humans, by contrast, are said to be able to engage in ‘mental time travel’. One possible way of making sense of this distinction is in terms of the idea that animals and young children cannot engage in tensed thought, which might seem a preposterous idea in the light of certain findings in comparative and developmental psychology. I try to make this idea less preposterous by looking into some of the cognitive requirements for tensed thought. In particular, I suggest that tensed thought requires a specific form of causal understanding, which animals and young children may not possess.

Abstract: According to the theory Russell defends in The Analysis of Mind, ‘true memories’ (roughly, memories that are not remembering-hows) are recollections of past events accompanied by a feeling of familiarity. While memory images play a vital role in this account, Russell does not pay much attention to the fact that imagery plays different roles in different sorts of memory. In most cases that Russell considers, memory is based on an image that serves as a datum (imagebased memories), but there are other cases in which memory judgment requires an image without being based on it (answer-memories). A good example for the former is when a person, asked what the colour of the sea was last afternoon, recalls an image and forms a judgment on this basis. In the second case she may recognize the sea and entertain a memory image of it without ‘reading off’ the memory judgment from this picture. That is, the image does not prompt but itself is part of the propositional content of answer memories. Since in this latter case the feeling of familiarity is constitutive of the recollection but cannot serve as its explanans, answer memories do not conform to Russell’s account. According to Lindsay Judson this is not a vice of the theory, since Russell never meant to extend it to answer memories. Despite having a certain appeal of benevolence, Judson’s interpretation is not supported by textual evidence. Taking side with David Pears, I will argue that Russell did not properly differentiate between image-based memory and answer memory, and illegitimately extended his theory to the latter.