The Nature of Memory Traces

Abstract

Memory trace was originally a philosophical term used to explain the phenomenon of remembering. Once debated by Plato, Aristotle, and Zeno of Citium, the notion seems more recently to have become the exclusive province of cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists. Nonetheless, this modern appropriation should not deter philosophers from thinking carefully about the nature of memory traces. On the contrary, scientific research on the nature of memory traces can rekindle philosopher's interest on this notion. With that general aim in mind, the present paper has three specific goals. First, it attempts to chart the most relevant philosophical views on the nature of memory traces from both a thematic and historical perspective. Second, it reviews critical findings in the psychology and the neuroscience of memory traces. Finally, it explains how such results lend support to or discredit specific philosophical positions on the nature of memory traces. This paper also touches upon the issues raised by recent empirical research that theories of memory traces need to accommodate in order to succeed.

Remembering the Personal Past: Beyond the Boundaries of Imagination

“…On this understanding, a memory trace is not a stored representation that is reactivated at recall, but is a disposition to enact or simulate some past experience of an event. These dispositions are properties that supervene on physical properties of the body and brain, and “they amount to the disposition of the brain to re-activate some pattern of activity” ( Caravà, 2020 , p. 8; see also De Brigard, 2014a , b ). Forgetting is conceived as the temporary or permanent inaccessibility of (dispositional) memory traces.…”

“…This appropriate causal connection is one that is maintained by a memory trace. There is no widely accepted definition of a memory trace in the literature, but the general idea is that memory traces bridge the gap between a past event and one's current memory experience of that past event (De Brigard, 2014b;Robins, 2017;Werning, 2020). Information about an event is encoded in a memory trace, which preserves this information over time and makes it available for subsequent retrieval.…”

Confabulating, Misremembering, Relearning: The Simulation Theory of Memory and Unsuccessful Remembering

“…Causal theorists of memory have often thought that memory traces can play this role. There is some controversy over the precise nature of memory traces (Sutton, 1998; De Brigard, 2014b). But regardless of how we understand the nature of memory traces, the thought is that a causal connection between an experienced event and a later memory representation of the event is sufficient for successful remembering only if it goes continuously via a memory trace: the trace must be produced by the experience, it must exist continuously during the interval between the time of the experience and the time of the later representation, and it must contribute to the production of the later representation.…”

Transactive Memory Reconstructed: Rethinking Wegner's Research Program

“…Thinking about the past, imagining the future, and considering counterfactual possibilities make use of a common cortical network, which includes the hippocampus, the posterior cingulate, the inferior parietal lobe, the medial prefrontal cortex, and the lateral temporal cortex Addis and Schacter 2008;Buckner and Carroll 2007;Schacter et al 2007). This core network plays a critical role in many tasks that require selfprojection and "mental time travel," and there reason to believe that neural systems can be redeployed in the service of multiple different tasks (Anderson 2007(Anderson , 2010de Brigard 2013). But if a system is involved in remembering the past, imagining the future, and counterfactual thinking, it must be a system that is sensitive to the fact that the future is never exactly like the past or present.…”

“… There is little consensus about the nature or structure of the skeletal representations that memory requires—though Nadel & Moscovitch () offer one promising account of a mechanism in the parahippocampal cortex that might carry out this task. For a review of the philosophical, psychological, and neuroscientific positions that have been taken on the nature of memory traces, see De Brigard .…”