Imperfect Cognitions

Christopher McCarroll is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Philosophical Psychology, University of Antwerp. He works on memory and mental imagery, with a particular interest in perspective in memory imagery. In this blog post Chris talks about his recently published book Remembering From the Outside: Personal Memory and the Perspectival Mind. In his 1883 study into psychological phenomena, Francis Galton described varieties in visual mental imagery. Writing about the fact that some people "have the power of combining in a single perception more than can be seen at any one moment by the two eyes", Galton notes that "A fourth class of persons have the habit of recalling scenes, not from the point of view whence they were observed, but from a distance, and they visualise their own selves as actors on the mental stage" (1883/1907: 68-69). Such people remember events from-the-outside. In the language of modern memory research such images are known as ‘ob...

This post is by Chris McCarroll (pictured above), who has just finished his PhD under the supervision of John Sutton at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders , Macquarie University. Here he summarises a paper currently in progress entitled 'Constructing and Reconstructing Observer Perspectives in Personal Memory'. In a previous post I discussed a puzzling aspect of memory imagery: when remembering events from one’s life one often sees the remembered scene as one originally experienced it, from one’s original point of view (field perspective). Sometimes, however, one sees oneself in the memory, as if one were an observer of the remembered scene (observer perspective). Memory imagery often involves visual points of view. Here, I summarise a recent paper I gave on this topic at the Australasian Association of Philosophy Conference , held at Macquarie University. My paper was entitled ‘Constructing and Reconstructing Observer Perspectives in Persona...

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 second in a series of three posts, you can read the first here . ES-B: What is observer memory?  JS: When I think about some experience I had, maybe a mundane event like having lunch yesterday with a lot of people, I can sometimes see myself in the remembered scene. So instead of being behind my own eyes when I remember that lunch yesterday, seeing my knife and fork coming up to my face as I eat, instead I can be looking at myself in the memory from an external perspective, and that is why we use the phrase ‘observer perspective’. It is as if I am above the group: I see them all and I see myself there in some way as part of that group. We contrast...