Notes from lecture given by Amanda J. Barnier and John Sutton about memory.

Amanda J. Barnier

Experimental Cognitive Psychologist

7 things about memory

• Memory is everything
  • There are past memories and
  • it is important to remember things that are going to happen
  • knowledge but not memory (“remember” is in quotes)
  • Semantic dementia is semantic memory loss e.g. can’t remember what a dog is
  • cultural memories (memories of the holocaust or Abraham Lincoln)
• What is memory for?
  • navigation
    • Learning language, knowledge of the world, to plan the future
  • Serving the self
    • who we are, our connection to past, or a database of self
    • we can’t remember everything
  • To promote relationships (social)
    • teaching, developing and maintaining intimacy
• A balance in memory:
  • remembering has priority in our lives ( we worry: do I have a good memory?)
  • forgetting promotes cognitive efficiency
  • intrusive memory is when we can’t forget
  • forgetting is not a failure
• How memory works:
  • processes (like a computer):
  • external event is placed in sensory memory
  • given some attention this is then placed in short term memory
  • with rehearsal this can be put in long term memory
    • recall comes out of short term memory
    • memory is the product of these sequence
• The essence of remembering:
  • memories are a record of experience with reality
  • memories are samples of experience
  • remembering is a constructive mental process
  • memories are part of the present moment
  • memories are inherently subjective
  • and can only be checked with in-corroborating evidence
• Influences on memory:
  • time – memories become increasingly inaccessible
  • reminiscence bump
  • emotion
  • discussion with others
    • police don’t let witnesses talk to each other because they can egg each other on.
• Judging memories

Other things:

• Claire has both types of amnesia, retrograde and the other one (?)
• Available memory (stored and could influence you but may not) and accessible memory (things you can get right now)
• Listening to lectures doesn’t work! You have to be concentrating for it to enter your memory
• We don’t remember alone, we remember with others
• Infantile amnesia – the bit of life you can’t remember when you were first born
• if you show an amnesia sufferer someone else’s Sensecam pictures, would they have false memories?
• Reminiscence occurs only if the memory affected the fabric of your daily life
• Hotspots in trauma memory

John Sutton

Philosopher

• Remembering from the outside
  • I remember past events from my own point of view or i remember from the observer perspective
  • Remembering from outside must be a fabrication
  • Can observer memories really be memories? What is the significance of changing perspectives
  • How do I figure in my memories?
  • Movement skills (sport, dancing): sometimes it helps to visualise yourself
  • Embodied or kinaesthetic perspectives / cognitive and affective perspectives
    • blending the above views together, fuse into interesting combinations
  • Perspective in remembering, dreaming, navigating in spatial cognition, own body representation and gesturing
  • Does truth in memory require preservation and reproduction?
  • Field perspective memory can be constructed
  • Change in memory recounting is the norm, it doesn’t mean you aren’t telling the truth
  • Reports from your own eyes include more fantasy
• Embodied remembering
  • Distributed cognitive ecologies: using other people to remember
  • I do not identically reproduce a tennis stroke every time, it is a manufactured movement according to some schemata
  • Athletes etc.: I need to stop thinking and just do
  • There may be bodily skill.
  • The body moving in place is not separate from any form of memory
• Research on out of body experiences is now the most prestigious cognitive science now (Curious).
  • epilepsy sufferers have more out of body experience
• Women have more external perspectives of themselves due to the male gaze
• Wayne Rooney visualises himself from the outside when playing sport
• Story of the woman who designed her house the same as her childhood house to gain approval from her father