Feeling the Past: A Two-Tiered Account of Episodic Memory

How to Become a Memory: The Individual and Collective Aspects of Mnemicity

Human adults distinguish their mental event simulations along various dimensions-most prominently according to their "mnemicity": we track whether these simulations are outcomes of past personal experiences or not (i.e., whether we are "remembering" or "imagining"). This distinction between memory and imagination is commonly thought to reflect a deep architectural distinction in the mind. Against this idea, I argue that mnemicity is not based on a fundamentalstructural difference between memories and imaginations but is instead the result of metacognitive attribution and social construction. On this attributional view, mnemicity is likely a uniquely human capacity that both serves collective functions and has been shaped by collective norms. First, on the individual level, mnemicity attribution is an outcome of metacognitive learning: it relies on acquired interpretations of the phenomenal features of mental event simulations. Such interpretations are in part acquired through interactive reminiscing with other community members. Further, how the distinction between memory and imagination is drawn is likely sensitive to cultural norms about what remembering is, when it is appropriate to claim to remember, what can be remembered, and what remembering entails. As a result, how individuals determine whether they remember or imagine is bound to be deeply enculturated. Second, mnemicity attribution solves an important collective challenge: who to grant epistemic authority about the past. Solving this challenge is important because-for humans-the past represents not just an opportunity to learn about the future but to coordinate present social realities. How a community determines such social realities both draws on individuals' remembering and in turn shapes when, what, and how individuals remember.

Autonoesis and episodicity: Perspectives from philosophy of memory

The idea that episodic memory is distinguished from semantic memory by the fact that it involves autonoetic consciousness, initially introduced by Tulving, has been influential not only in psychology but also in philosophy, where a variety of approaches to autonoesis and to its relationship to episodicity have been developed. This article provides a critical review of the available philosophical approaches. Distinguishing among representational, metacognitive, and epistemic accounts of autonoesis, it considers these in relation to objective and subjective conceptions of episodicity and assesses them against immediacy and source criteria that any philosophical account of autonoesis should arguably aim to satisfy. This article is categorized under: Philosophy > Psychological Capacities Philosophy > Consciousness Psychology > Memory.

Opening a conceptual space for metamemory experience

The experiences associated with remembering, including metamemory feelings about the act of remembering and attempts at remembering, are not often integrated into general accounts of memory. For example, David Rubin (2022) proposes a unified, three-dimensional conceptual space for mapping memory states, a map that does not systematically specify metamemory feelings. Drawing on Rubin's model, we define a distinct role for metamemory in relation to first-order memory content. We propose a fourth dimension for the model and support the proposal with conceptual, neurocognitive, and clinical lines of reasoning. We use the modified model to illustrate several cases, and show how it helps to conceptualize a new category of memory state: autonoetic knowing, exemplified by déjà vu. We also caution not to assume that memory experience is directly correlated with or caused by memory content, an assumption Tulving (1989) labeled the doctrine of concordance.

Episodic representation: A mental models account

This paper offers a modeling account of episodic representation. I argue that the episodic system constructs mental models: representations that preserve the spatiotemporal structure of represented domains. In prototypical cases, these domains are events: occurrences taken by subjects to have characteristic structures, dynamics and relatively determinate beginnings and ends. Due to their simplicity and manipulability, mental event models can be used in a variety of cognitive contexts: in remembering the personal past, but also in future-oriented and counterfactual imagination. As structural representations, they allow surrogative reasoning, supporting inferences about their constituents which can be used in reasoning about the represented events.

Personality and Authenticity in Light of the Memory-Modifying Potential of Optogenetics

There has been a growing interest in research concerning memory modification technologies (MMTs) in recent years. Neuroscientists and psychologists are beginning to explore the prospect of controllable and intentional modification of human memory. One of the technologies with the greatest potential to this end is optogenetics-an invasive neuromodulation technique involving the use of light to control the activity of individual brain cells. It has recently shown the potential to modify specific long-term memories in animal models in ways not yet possible with other MMTs. As the therapeutic potential of optogenetics has already prompted approval of the first human trials, it is especially important and timely to consider the opportunities and dangers this technology may entail. In this article, we focus on possible consequences of optogenetics as an MMT by analyzing fundamental threats potentially associated with memory modifications: the potential disruption of personality and authenticity.

The Phenomenology of Remembering Is an Epistemic Feeling

This article aims to provide a psychologically informed philosophical account of the phenomenology of episodic remembering. The literature on epistemic or metacognitive feelings has grown considerably in recent years, and there are persuasive reasons, both conceptual and empirical, in favor of the view that the phenomenology of remembering-autonoetic consciousness, as Tulving influentially referred to it, or the feeling of pastness, as we will refer to it here-is an epistemic feeling, but few philosophical treatments of this phenomenology as an epistemic feeling have so far been proposed. Building on insights from the psychological literature, we argue that a form of feeling-based metacognition is involved in episodic remembering and develop an integrated metacognitive feeling-based view that addresses several key aspects of the feeling of pastness, namely, its status as a feeling, its content, and its relationship to the first-order memories the phenomenology of which it provides.

Autonoesis and reconstruction in episodic memory: Is remembering systematically misleading?

Mahr & Csibra (M&C) view autonoesis as being essential to episodic memories and construction as being essential to the process of episodic remembering. These views imply that episodic memory is systematically misleading, not because it often misinforms us about the past, but rather because it often misinforms us about how it informs us about the past.

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

This article develops a taxonomy of memory errors in terms of three conditions: the accuracy of the memory representation, the reliability of the memory process, and the internality (with respect to the remembering subject) of that process. Unlike previous taxonomies, which appeal to retention of information rather than reliability or internality, this taxonomy can accommodate not only misremembering (e.g., the DRM effect), falsidical confabulation, and veridical relearning but also veridical confabulation and falsidical relearning. Moreover, because it does not assume that successful remembering presupposes retention of information, the taxonomy is compatible with recent simulation theories of remembering.