Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Robert Nash . Robert A. Nash is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Aston University , and a recent presenter at TEDxBrum. Much of his research is focused on biases and distortions of memory, and their implications in various real-life contexts. In this post, he talks about his recent edited book (with James Ost, University of Portsmouth), entitled False and Distorted Memories. Psychologists have been writing about and studying the reconstructive properties of memory for more than a century. Nowadays, hundreds of scientific papers are published every year that further propel our understanding of how people use memory to reconstruct the past. So why, despite all of these decades of studies, do so many of the general public still subscribe to the idea that remembering is infallible, like the re-playing of a video recording? Why hasn’t all this scientific research had a much more tangible influence on what people believe about memory? In our recent edited boo...

On 15th October 2017, a team of volunteers headed by Immy Kaur hosted TEDxBrum 2017 at the Birmingham Hippodrome. The theme for the day was Perspectives: " we learn more about reality by sharing perspectives ". On stage speakers and performers powerfully addressed the theme by reference to their own experiences, art, work, or research. Some talks discussed the importance of new technological advances and their potential challenges. Catherine Allen talked about virtual reality (VR) and argued that this new technology has a lot of potential but we should develop some critical distance from it. VR is special because it is not a rectangular space that represents reality (which is what TV, mobile phones, or laptops do) but it is a simulation of reality that enables people to do things rather than just watch, and to empathise with other people. Ade Adewunmi addressed the contradictions of a software-mediated world. Personal data are gathered by manufacturers, b...

The 43rd annual meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology  was held in Baltimore, Maryland, at Johns Hopkins University from 28-1 July, 2017. The meeting brought together philosophers, psychologists, and cognitive scientists working on issues of common interests. In this post, Federico Bongiorno (PhD student at the University of Birmingham) offers a summary of each of the keynote lectures presented in plenary sessions. On day 1, Daniel Schacter (Harvard) kicked off the conference with a talk on memory distortions and constructive aspects of remembering. Schacter views human memory as being far more a matter of constructive rather than reproductive processes that are sometimes susceptible to error and distortion. Two major themes were pursued. One is the idea that some types of memory distortions are side-effects of otherwise adaptive memory processes. The other is the critical role played by episodic memory, which is defined as the ability to recoll...

On May 5th, Project PERFECT hosted our workshop at the University of Cambridge. In a previous post on the workshop, the individual talks were summarised, so the current post focuses on some of the common themes that emerged in the talks and discussion: (a) the active nature of episodic memory and its potential to generate knowledge; (b) the implications of the existence of observer memories; (c) the role of others in the generation of knowledge through episodic memory. It seems obvious that we have knowledge of past episodes in our lives, but Kourken Michaelian and Dorothea Debus highlighted how humans are active in the process of forming our memories. This might seem to show that we cannot have knowledge through episodic memory because episodic memory systems do not passively represent the past. Michaelian discussed this point through the lens of work on the reconstructive nature of memory. In the cognitive sciences, it is now widely accepted that episodic memories are c...

PERFECT 2017 Memory Workshop We are very excited that on 5th May 2017 Project PERFECT will be holding its second annual workshop , at Jesus College, Cambridge. The workshop will feature leading experts in the field of philosophy of memory. The talks will focus on a wide-range of fascinating issues that dominate contemporary research on memory. The talks will be of interest to philosophers of mind, philosophers of psychology, epistemologists and psychologists, as well as other cognitive scientists interested in how we remember the past. Issues to be covered in the talks include how memory can generate knowledge; how false and distorted memories can be useful features of ordinary cognition; the nature of experiential memories; whether we can be immune from error due to misidentifying ourselves in a memory; and the role of shared memories in relationships. Many of the talks will have an interdisciplinary angle, highlighting how recent psychological research—...

This post is by Misia Temler , project coordinator of the recently launched Not Guilty Sydney Exoneration Project at the University of Sydney. She recently completed her PhD in Cognitive Science at Macquarie University in the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders . Her PhD dissertation was on how individual and social factors impact autobiographical memory variation across retellings.  In my last post , I discussed the general reconstructive nature of autobiographical memory. In this post I discuss the powerful effect of social influence on memory and summarise a study from my thesis.  Remembering with others can lead to the development of false memories. When individuals witness an event and then remember the event together they can change one another’s memory of what happened (Paterson & Kemp, 2006 ; Wright, Memon, Skagerberg & Gabbert, 2009 ). This has significant consequences in the forensic setting. Eyewitness memory distor...

This post is by Sarah Robins (pictured above), an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and affiliate member of the Cognitive and Brain Sciences Program in Psychology at the University of Kansas. Her research is at the intersection of philosophy and psychology, with a primary focus on memory. In this post she summarises her recent paper ‘ Misremembering ’, published in Philosophical Psychology. Thanks, Ema, for the invitation to talk about my recent paper ‘Misremembering ’ with Imperfect Cognitions readers. The paper began from my fascination with one of the most common experimental techniques for eliciting memory errors: the Deese-Roediger-McDermott, or DRM, paradigm (Deese 1959 ; Roediger and McDermott 1995 ). I am fascinated because these errors display a blend of success and failure (on which I will elaborate on below). In the paper, I argue that they are best viewed as a distinct type of error, misremembering. I go on to argue that we lack a theory of memory that can e...

The 2016 edition of the Arts and Science Festival at the University of Birmingham , whose theme was memory and forgetting, took place between 14th and 20th March.  The festival showcased research and collaboration at the University through talks, exhibitions, performances, workshops and screenings. Project  PERFECT and the Costs and Benefits of Optimism project hosted a lunchtime event open to the public, Tricked by Memory, organised and chaired by Lisa Bortolotti.  The talk by Magdalena Antrobus (pictured below) was entitled: "Sometimes I get lucky and forget. Depression, memory and negativity bias". First, she explored the relation between depression and the way we remember things. Magdalena discussed the phenomenon of depressive realism and asked whether suffering from low mood may enhance the accuracy of our memories. Second, she presented evidence suggesting that in severe forms of depression people remember their past in an overly negative way: they concen...

This post is by Aleea Devitt (pictured above), a recent PhD student in the School of Psychology at the University of Aukland. In this post Aleea summarises her paper ' Factors That Influence the Generation of Autobiographical Memory Conjunction Errors ',  co-written with Edwin Monk-Fromont, Daniel L. Schacter, and Donna Rose Addis,  published in Memory. When remembering a past event, we typically cannot pluck a whole memory neatly from our brains, as we would a folder from a filing cabinet. The individual features comprising a memory are distributed throughout our brains, so remembering a past experience is more similar to assembling a jigsaw puzzle; all the pieces must be located and assembled correctly to construct a coherent memory. This constructive memory system provides a flexibility that is generally adaptive (Schacter, Guerin, and St Jacques 2011 ), in that we can update memories with new information (Lee 2009 ), and assemble memory fragments in ...

This post is by Nevia Dolcini (pictured above), Assistant Professor in the Philosophy and Religious Studies Programme at the University of Macau. In this post Nevia talks about her research and announces two upcoming events. I am interested in how human reasoning works, and I take language and its underlying cognitive and semantic mechanisms to be the ideal starting point for the explanation of mental phenomena. I like to extend the methods of philosophy of language beyond its traditional domain of analysis, so as to include non-linguistic objects such as gestures, and perceptual contents. In my research activity, I often combine philosophy and psychology: scientific literature from developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, and comparative psychology is particularly relevant to my research activity, but I also enjoy reading fiction (which sometimes offers great cases for philosophical assessment). I have been doing extensive work on linguistic and non-linguistic index...

I am delighted to be joining Project PERFECT in its second year. My previous research focussed on issues at the intersection of philosophy of psychology and epistemology. I am extremely excited about joining a team of researchers who work in closely related areas. I am joining PERFECT at the beginning of the second strand of the project, which will focus on distorted memory. During the next year, I will begin working on two new projects relating to this topic. For the first project, I will be collaborating with Lisa on cases of memory distortion in the non-clinical population. In cases of memory distortion, individuals form false memories. They recollect things that did not happen. The recollections are false but can be strongly believed. We will consider potential epistemic benefits that might follow from false memories of this sort. This means that we will consider whether the possession of false memories can lead to the formation of other true beliefs, leading to an overall inc...

This is the third in our series of  posts  on the papers published in  a special issue of Consciousness and Cognition on the Costs and Benefits of Imperfect Cognitions. Here  Jordi Fernández  summarises his paper   ' What are the  Benefits  of Memory Distortion'. There are two intuitively appealing thoughts about episodic (or experiential) memory. One of them is that our memories are supposed to reproduce the contents of some of our past experiences, namely, those in which our memories originate. The other one is that our memories can be beneficial for us in a number of ways. They can, for example, help us make sense of how we feel and behave towards people and situations from our past. What is the connection between these two aspects of memory? One might think that memories are only beneficial for us to the extent that they reproduce the contents of some of our past experiences. In this paper, though, I describe t...

My name is Misia Temler and I am a forensic psychologist and a PhD candidate in Cognitive Science supervised by Professor Amanda Barnier , Professor John Sutton , and Associate Professor Doris McIlwain at Macquarie University in the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders . My PhD research investigates how our memory of recent personal events changes over subsequent retellings. Misia Temler Take a moment to remember your 21st birthday or other milestone birthday, or first date with your current partner. These events are often remembered quite vividly in detail as they are typically emotional, salient, and have frequently been retold on numerous occasions. Would it surprise you that some of these seemingly vivid details can change in just a week when you retell your event? Perhaps on your first date your partner wore a red shirt and not a blue shirt, or maybe that first date actually took place at noon and not in the evening. Did you feel happy and excited or did you...

I interviewed John Sutton , Professor of Cognitive Science at the ARC Centre for Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders at Macquarie University, Sydney. John is interested in memory, skill, and distributed cognition, and in his work he seeks to integrate philosophical, psychological, and historical ideas and methods. This is the first in a series of three posts. ES-B: Do you think that distorted autobiographical memories might have pragmatic benefits insofar as they may function to fill gaps in a person’s recollection of the past, or are distorted in a self-enhancing way? JS: "I think that’s a very difficult question, and it’s probably going to pan out differently for different kinds of memory pathology. In general, yes, for sure, the mechanisms which give rise to distortions can be adaptive mechanisms, distortions might just be a by-product of mechanisms that work well enough most of the time. I am uneasy about pushing the line that specific distortions themselves ...

On 8th-9th May Lisa Bortolotti and Ema Sullivan-Bissett hosted a workshop as part of the AHRC-funded project on the Epistemic Innocence of Imperfect Cognitions at the University of Birmingham. Papers were given by Ryan McKay (Royal Holloway), Maarten Boudry (Ghent), Lisa Bortolotti (Birmingham), Katerina Fotopoulou (UCL), Martin Conway (City University London), Ema Sullivan-Bissett (Birmingham), Petter Johansson (Lund), Lars Hall (Lund), Jules Holroyd (Nottingham), and Miranda Fricker (Sheffield). McKay on false beliefs McKay and Boudry opened the workshop with their discussion 'In Defence of False Beliefs?'; they approached the discussion as a mock trial with McKay arguing for the 'defence' and Boudry arguing for the 'prosecution'. McKay argued that there may be social, psychological, biological, and epistemic benefits to having false beliefs and also that they should be considered rational as they seem to be properly responsive to evidenc...

Aleea Devitt In our first blog post we discussed how a consequence of the constructive nature of memory is that we are susceptible to memory distortions. In this post I hope to bring together theories of how changes in the brain can increase susceptibility to false beliefs and memories as we age. Healthy aging is associated with reduced memory accuracy, as well as increased susceptibility to memory distortions, which can have serious consequences on the quality of life for older adults. For example, an individual might be confused about whether they had taken their medication or just imagined taking it. Older adults also tend to be more confident in their memory errors , which can have implications for everyday social interactions as well as more formal situations such as eye witness testimony.

University of Adelaide On Friday, November 15th, a workshop on the philosophy of memory took place at the University of Adelaide, South Australia. This workshop was organized by Suzanne Bliss and myself, and it was funded by a grant from the Australian Research Council for a project on the debate between the 'false memory' approach versus the 'recovered memory' approach to reports of long-forgotten memories of sexual abuse. The project is now finalizing its first phase, which has dealt with conceptual issues on the metaphysics of memory (what kind of causal history must a mental state have to count as a memory), the epistemology of memory (what kind of knowledge do we have of our own memories?) and the phenomenology of memory (what aspects of what it is like to remember something episodically are essential to memory, and what aspects could be missing from memory?). The workshop concentrated on conceptual issues for that reason.

Reece Roberts Our previous post outlined the evidence for episodic memory being a constructive process, and one that plays a necessary role in our ability to imagine future scenarios. In this post, I hope to sketch out a framework directly relating our work on episodic simulation to one of the main topics of this project: false beliefs and memories. The constructive nature of episodic simulation – whether it be remembering or imagining the future – allows for deeply rooted cognitive biases to play a role in these processes. In particular, biases that maintain (or increase) self-esteem have been shown to strongly modulate properties of episodic simulation. In the case of episodic memory, we tend to remember positive events in more detail than negative events, regard achievements as occurring more recently than failures when this is not case, and experience a more rapid loss of affect associated with negative events relative to positive events. Similar effects are observed when i...

Reece Roberts, Aleea Devitt, Donna Rose Addis  We’re a group of researchers in the Memory Lab at The University of Auckland. Our research interests are broad, ranging from autobiographical memory to false memory to imagination and creativity, and we approach these topics from both cognitive and neural perspectives. But the strand that threads all this research together is the constructive nature of memory. It is well established that episodic memory is a constructive process. Seminal work from Bartlett (1932) demonstrated the fallibility of memory, and also highlighted the ways in which it can be distorted. Building on this earlier work on false memory, Schacter and colleagues proposed a framework for the cognitive neuroscience of constructive memory in the early 1990s that has proved influential. Since that time, advances in neuroimaging have provided evidence to support three key ideas: (1) that features or elemental parts comprising an episode must be linked t...