Imperfect Cognitions

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...

Sahba Besharati I am currently in the 3rd year of my PhD undergoing a split-site collaboration project with the University of Cape Town and University College London. This post will focus on a recent publication featured in Neuropsychological Rehabilitation with my supervisor, Katerina Fotopoulou , and our collaborator in Italy, Valentina Moro , on a prototypical form of unawareness called anosognosia for hemiplegia (AHP). Neurological disturbances in awareness can offer an important avenue to explore the construction of the bodily self. AHP is one such example of a disorder of self-awareness, where patients have a lack of recognition or awareness of their motor paralysis following a stroke. AHP can have various clinical presentations, ranging from blatant denial of limb paralysis and associated delusional beliefs to emotional indifference of one’s motor disabilities. Although AHP is often transient (sometimes recovering within days or weeks), motor unawareness can significant...

John Sutton and Chris McCarroll Currently I am a PhD student under the supervision of John Sutton at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders , Macquarie University. One of John’s research projects, and the topic of my PhD, is a philosophical investigation of visual perspective in autobiographical memory, and we recently gave a talk on this subject at the Philosophy of Memory Workshop in Adelaide. When remembering past experiences, one can remember the event from one’s original point of view, maintaining the same visual perspective on the scene with which one experienced the event. Many people, however, report sometimes seeing themselves in the remembered scene, from an external or third-person perspective. Following Nigro and Neisser’s seminal paper these are known within psychology as memories from field and observer perspectives respectively.