Remembering the Personal Past: Beyond the Boundaries of Imagination

McCarroll, Christopher Jude

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.585352

Cited by 22 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…Taken together, our findings suggest how an imagery strategy at encoding improves memory. Perhaps the limits of imagining are not the same as the limits of remembering: Our memories are constrained but maybe our imagination is free ( McCarroll, 2020 ). Imaginary encoding surely seems to be a key strategy to create better learning environments, less prone to false memories, and empowering of our veridical memories.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Imagination Reduces False Memories for Everyday Action Sentences: Evidence From Pragmatic Inferences

et al. 2021

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Human memory can be unreliable, and when reading a sentence with a pragmatic implication, such as “the karate champion hit the cinder block,” people often falsely remember that the karate champion “broke” the cinder block. Yet, research has shown that encoding instructions affect the false memories we form. On the one hand, instructing participants to imagine themselves manipulating the to-be-recalled items increase false memories (imagination inflation effect). But on the other hand, instructions to imagine have reduced false memories in the DRM paradigm (imagination facilitation effect). Here, we explored the effect of imaginal encoding with pragmatic inferences, a way to study false memories for information about everyday actions. Across two experiments, we manipulated imaginal encoding through the instructions given to participants and the after-item filler task (none vs. math operations). In Experiment 1, participants were either assigned to the encoding condition of imagine+no filler; pay attention+math; or memorize+math. In Experiment 2, the encoding instructions (imagine vs. memorize) and the filler task (none vs. math) were compared across four separate conditions. Results from the two experiments showed that imagination instructions lead to better memory, by showing a higher proportion of correct responses and better performance in a memory benefit index. Similarly, a significant reduction of false memories was observed across both experiments, even though a complementary Bayesian analysis only supported this conclusion for Experiment 1. The findings show that imaginal encoding improves memory, suggesting the engagement of a distinctiveness heuristic and source-monitoring process.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Imagination Reduces False Memories for Everyday Action Sentences: Evidence From Pragmatic Inferences

et al. 2021

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“…Why think that the first case involves a "distinct cognitive process […] directed at the past", and what would such a process, distinctively, look like? Similarly, the addition, to the above definition of episodic memory, of the condition that the represented event belong to one's personal past just seems ad hoc and it is unclear why it should be seen to mark any real difference in the nature of the supposed 'systems' or 'processes' involved (on related issues, see also Aranyosi, 2020;McCarroll, 2020). 24 This should worry Michaelian in particular, as he describes himself as being motivated by a strong commitment to naturalism.…”

Section: Mechanist Two-factor Accountsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A knowledge-first approach to episodic memory

Hoerl

2022

Synthese

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This paper aims to outline, and argue for, an approach to episodic memory broadly in the spirit of knowledge-first epistemology. I discuss a group of influential views of epsiodic memory that I characterize as ‘two-factor accounts’, which have both proved popular historically (e.g., in the work of Hume, 1739-40; Locke 1690; and Russell 1921) and have also seen a resurgence in recent work on the philosophy of memory (see, e.g., Dokic 2014; Michaelian, 2016; Owens, 1996). What is common to them is that they try to give an account of the nature of episodic memory in which the concept of knowledge plays no explanatory role. I highlight some parallels between these two-factor accounts and attempts to give a reductive definition of knowledge itself. I then discuss some problems two-factor accounts of episodic memory face in explaining the distinctive sense in which episodic recollection involves remembering personally experienced past events, before sketching an alternative approach to episodic memory, which takes as basic the idea that episodic memory involves the retention of knowledge. I argue that we can give an exhaustive constitutive account of what episodic memory is, and how it differs from other types of mental states, by considering what particular type of knowledge is retained in episodic memory, and what exactly having that knowledge consists in.

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“…Many arguments for the causal theory and for discontinuism appeal explicitly to our intuitions about hypothetical cases of apparent memory-for example, to cases of relearning (Bernecker, 2017a;Michaelian, 2016b;Robins, 2017aRobins, , 2020b. Simulationism and continuism, meanwhile, have what appear to be highly counterintuitive implications (McCarroll, 2020). 5 It remains to be determined just how widely-shared the relevant intuitions are, and, as experimental philosophers often focus on eliciting intuitions from a wide range of subjects as a means of investigating the concepts that underlie them, the causalist-simulationist and discontinuist-continuist debates thus represent potentially fertile terrain for experimental philosophy.…”

Section: Philosophy Of Memorymentioning

confidence: 99%

Experimental philosophy of memory

Michaelian

Dranseika

Álvarez

2022

Acta Sci. Human Soc. Sci.

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Experimental philosophy is now some twenty years old and has a large body of work to its credit. Little of this work focusses directly on memory, but it has, as the philosophy of memory has come into its own over the last several years, become increasingly clear that there are numerous questions about the concept of memory to which the tools developed by experimental philosophers might profitably be applied. By describing a sample of these questions, explaining how and why they might be approached using experimental methods, and providing a snapshot of published and in-progress experimental work, this article makes a case for experimental philosophy of memory.

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Remembering the Personal Past: Beyond the Boundaries of Imagination

Cited by 22 publications

References 45 publications

Imagination Reduces False Memories for Everyday Action Sentences: Evidence From Pragmatic Inferences

Imagination Reduces False Memories for Everyday Action Sentences: Evidence From Pragmatic Inferences

A knowledge-first approach to episodic memory

Experimental philosophy of memory

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