Imperfect Cognitions

This is part of one week series of posts on a new journal,  Memory, Mind & Media . Today's post is by Kathleen Murphy-Hollies (PhD student at the University of Birmingham) who talks about the role of stories in public debates. She is summarising a paper co-authored with Lisa Bortolotti and recently published in the inaugural issue of  Memory, Mind & Media . The paper is available  open access here . Kathleen Murphy-Hollies We are all drawn to stories in their many forms, and the prevalence of them on digital media may be one reason why we have embraced those media so much. On social media we see lots of stories being told, often in support some general claim. For example, people have been sharing experiences of getting the COVID vaccine and of not getting the vaccine, often in the hopes of supporting general claims about whether people should get vaccinated. However, can personal stories be taken as evidence supporting general claims?  People’s stories about...

Hello! This is a post in a series where we are reflecting on the end of project PERFECT , offer an overview of our activities, and look at the future! So it's me first. Research Yesterday the project officially ended, after five intense and wonderful years. We did achieve the goals that we set for ourselves, investigating what we call the epistemic innocence of beliefs that are irrational and often false. Epistemic innocence is the capacity some beliefs have to support epistemic agency despite their obvious epistemic costs. In other words, it is good for us to have those beliefs in some respects, even if the beliefs themselves are not well-supported by, or responsive to, evidence. Our main focus was on those belief-like states that can be at the same time common in the non-clinical population and symptomatic of mental health issues: delusional beliefs, distorted memory beliefs, and confabulatory explanations. Indeed, we investigated these three cases in some d...

In this post I introduce a paper I wrote with Ema Sullivan-Bissett on the epistemic benefits of clinical memory distortions, which recently appeared open access in Mind and Language . It is one of the core outputs of two recent projects, the AHRC-funded Epistemic Innocence of Imperfect Cognitions and the ERC-funded project PERFECT . The key message in the paper has received some coverage in the press ( Medicalxpress , India Blooms , Laboratory Equipment,  and Health Canal ).  In Keeping Mum , Marianne Talbot describes how her mother was a great storyteller before she had dementia. One of her best stories was how one day, when she was 14, she was late for school because her mother had just given birth to twins. The headmistress did not believe that that was the reason for being late and punished her, which she felt was a great injustice. When dementia advanced, the story about the twins’ birth ended up being merged with other stories (for instance, other sto...

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...

In this post, Chris Weigel discusses her paper “Quotidian Confabulations: An Ethical Quandary Concerning Flashbulb Memories,” published in Theoretical and Applied Ethics in 2014. Chris is a professor of philosophy at Utah Valley University. She works mainly on experimental philosophy of free will and on cognitive biases. How did you find out about the planes crashing on September 11, 2001? What do you remember about the first time you met your spouse? Wait, don’t answer those questions! Your memories about those events are flashbulb memories—memories of surprising, monumental, and emotionally-laden events—and my paper invites us to rethink asking people for their memories about these events, such as the Challenger explosion, assassinations of important public figures, and terrorist attacks. My conclusion isn’t that we should never ask people about their flashbulb memories, but rather that sometimes asking people about their flashbulb memories is problematic. It’s problematic ...

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—...

The third year of our ERC-funded project PERFECT (logo above) has just started and it is time to look back at what we have done in the last year, and make plans for the future. What we have done in our second year The PERFECT team delivered many academic and outreach talks in the UK and internationally, wrote papers, and organised a series of interdisciplinary events sponsored by the project, including a mini-workshop on Belief and Emotion in November 2015, a public engagement event called Tricked by Memory  for the Arts and Science Festival in March 2016, and a symposium entitled Explaining Delusions at the International Congress of Psychology in Yokohama in July 2016. The main event was our first project workshop, PERFECT 2016, on False but Useful Beliefs , in February 2016. We had several papers accepted which will be published open access, including Ema's " Malfunction Defended " in Synthese;  a chapter on what makes beliefs delusional by Rachel G...

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 ...

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...

The second year of ERC-funded  project PERFECT  (logo above) has just started and it is time to look back at what we have done so far and make plans for the future. What we have done so far Ema, Magdalena, Michael and I have had a very busy time, delivering talks, writing papers, and sponsoring a series of really interesting, interdisciplinary events, including a public engagement event on Sight, Sound and Mental Health for the Arts and Science Festival 2015, a Delusion lunchtime seminar with experts on delusion formation, and a session on the Function of Delusions as part of the Royal College of Psychiatrists Annual Congress . We had three papers published open access: a review paper on costs and benefits of realism and optimism in Current Opinion in Psychiatry , a paper on the ethics of delusional belief in Erkenntnis , and a review paper on the nature and development of delusions in Philosophy Compass. Many more are in progress! We continued to dis...

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...

The Forum (BBC World Service) We all recall situations where our choice did not bring about the outcome we expected. This can happen to a couple planning a family, scientists predicting the result of a new experiment, politicians implementing a new policy to overcome a problem. For each of these individual situations there may be specific reasons that explain why the outcome was unexpected, but I am interested in the general question, Why is it that our actions have unintended consequences? We can think about the issue of unintended consequences in terms of the capacities that would make it more likely for us as human agents to reliably predict the events our actions give rise to when we make decisions, reflecting on the wealth of empirical data coming from the psychological literature. Being able to predict the outcomes of our actions would require good memory, sound reasoning, and effective deliberation. So, we could remember what consequences our previous actions have had, i...

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...

The Mental Health Foundation has made available on its website a literature review on truth-telling in dementia that I found really interesting to read. The review is part of an inquiry into distressing symptoms of dementia funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. The reviewer is Yulia Kartalova-O'Doherty. The upshot of the inquiry is supposed to consist in practical recommendations for carers and healthcare professionals who find themselves in a dilemma: on the one hand, challenging the patient's beliefs when they are delusional (e.g., the belief that a loved one is still alive when she has been dead for some time, or the belief that the spouse is a deceitful impostor) causes considerable distress to the patient; on the other hand, not challenging the beliefs seems wrong as it involves lying or implies disrespect towards the patient. One of the findings of the literature review is that current guidelines to healthcare professionals do not justify lying, but in practice...