Formed in 2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue archivist collective dedicated to saving copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of history and digital heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and has expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital history.
John Sutton
URL: http://www.johnsutton.net/
I was born (in 1965) and schooled in Scotland, where my parents had moved from Ireland. My first degree was in Classics, at New College, Oxford - I'd wanted to study English, but no-one from my school had ever got in, and Classics was a 4-year degree with three free summers for cricket, drama, and more. On graduating, in Thatcher's Britain, I took a PhD in Philosophy at the University of Sydney (I'd spent part of a gap year living on the beach in Cronulla), and Sydney has been home since. I live in Summer Hill, at the edge of the inner west: my partner (and collaborator) Doris McIlwain died of cancer in April 2015.
I’ve had stints as visiting fellow at UCLA (1995), Edinburgh (1999), UC San Diego (2003), Warwick (2008), and King's College London (2016), and in 2017 I am Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy in London. I started as a lecturer in Philosophy at Macquarie Uni in Sydney in mid-1992, and submitted my PhD in Jan 1993. I resigned from Macquarie in 1994, to take up postdocs at UCLA and then Sydney Uni, but returned in mid-1998. In 2008, I moved from Philosophy to MACCS, the Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science.
My research is insistently interdisciplinary. I started as a humanities researcher (English, Classics, history), shifted into philosophy, and now work in cognitive science, integrating conceptual, ethnographic, and experimental methods. The hope is to be driven by topic not tradition. This takes time and energy and the good fortune to find wonderful, tolerant collaborators and interlocutors: I’m wildly lucky in my networks of research collaborators and past and present students.
Much of my research is on memory. My earlier work addressed the history of theories of memory. My PhD, supervised by Stephen Gaukroger, became *Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to connectionism* (Cambridge UP, 1998), which reconsidered early modern and contemporary theories of memory, and the history of the 'animal spirits' in light of new connectionism. It was an experiment in historical cognitive science, hoping that the interdisciplinary study of memory could exemplify the simultaneous attention to brain, body, and culture towards which psychological sciences can aspire.
For the first 10-15 years of my academic career I didn’t publish lots else: then, we could throw ourselves into teaching, and go more slowly in developing interests. I continued to try to bring cognition and culture together, more thoroughly integrating my historical interests with the ideas of philosopher Andy Clark and anthropologist Ed Hutchins on extended mind and distributed cognition. These frameworks have driven my projects since, the idea being that remembering and other psychological processes are sometimes spread or ‘distributed’ across brain, body, and world (both social and material). The mind is thus not just the brain, and ‘I’ am not in my head. I argue, in particular, for a '2nd-wave' account of extended cognition based on the complementarity of internal and external resources.
An invitation to speak in a series on memory in science at the LSE in 2000 brought me back to memory, and since then I’ve tried to apply these distributed/ extended cognition frameworks to four main research areas. In a longstanding, fruitful collaboration with cognitive psychologists Amanda Barnier, Celia Harris, and team, we study shared remembering and collective cognition in small groups. With personality psychologist/ emotion theorist Doris McIlwain and team, we study expert movement and embodied skills, bringing our ‘applying intelligence to the reflexes’ framework to specific case studies in sport (especially cricket), yoga, dance, music, and theatre. With Shakespeare scholar and literary/ cultural historian Lyn Tribble at Otago, we study cognitive history and ecologies of skill in early modern England, now extending into a larger group project on Conversions, based at McGill. Finally, Chris McCarroll and I are obsessed with questions about perspective or point of view in autobiographical remembering, and how visual perspectives relate to emotional, embodied, or narrative perspectives on our past. These projects and collaborations are funded by various bodies and organizations to whom I’m extremely grateful. Most work is up here and at http://johnsutton.net/. Please email me (john.sutton@mq.edu.au) if you have suggestions or queries.
Address: Department of Cognitive Science,
Macquarie University,
Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia
I was born (in 1965) and schooled in Scotland, where my parents had moved from Ireland. My first degree was in Classics, at New College, Oxford - I'd wanted to study English, but no-one from my school had ever got in, and Classics was a 4-year degree with three free summers for cricket, drama, and more. On graduating, in Thatcher's Britain, I took a PhD in Philosophy at the University of Sydney (I'd spent part of a gap year living on the beach in Cronulla), and Sydney has been home since. I live in Summer Hill, at the edge of the inner west: my partner (and collaborator) Doris McIlwain died of cancer in April 2015.
I’ve had stints as visiting fellow at UCLA (1995), Edinburgh (1999), UC San Diego (2003), Warwick (2008), and King's College London (2016), and in 2017 I am Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy in London. I started as a lecturer in Philosophy at Macquarie Uni in Sydney in mid-1992, and submitted my PhD in Jan 1993. I resigned from Macquarie in 1994, to take up postdocs at UCLA and then Sydney Uni, but returned in mid-1998. In 2008, I moved from Philosophy to MACCS, the Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science.
My research is insistently interdisciplinary. I started as a humanities researcher (English, Classics, history), shifted into philosophy, and now work in cognitive science, integrating conceptual, ethnographic, and experimental methods. The hope is to be driven by topic not tradition. This takes time and energy and the good fortune to find wonderful, tolerant collaborators and interlocutors: I’m wildly lucky in my networks of research collaborators and past and present students.
Much of my research is on memory. My earlier work addressed the history of theories of memory. My PhD, supervised by Stephen Gaukroger, became *Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to connectionism* (Cambridge UP, 1998), which reconsidered early modern and contemporary theories of memory, and the history of the 'animal spirits' in light of new connectionism. It was an experiment in historical cognitive science, hoping that the interdisciplinary study of memory could exemplify the simultaneous attention to brain, body, and culture towards which psychological sciences can aspire.
For the first 10-15 years of my academic career I didn’t publish lots else: then, we could throw ourselves into teaching, and go more slowly in developing interests. I continued to try to bring cognition and culture together, more thoroughly integrating my historical interests with the ideas of philosopher Andy Clark and anthropologist Ed Hutchins on extended mind and distributed cognition. These frameworks have driven my projects since, the idea being that remembering and other psychological processes are sometimes spread or ‘distributed’ across brain, body, and world (both social and material). The mind is thus not just the brain, and ‘I’ am not in my head. I argue, in particular, for a '2nd-wave' account of extended cognition based on the complementarity of internal and external resources.
An invitation to speak in a series on memory in science at the LSE in 2000 brought me back to memory, and since then I’ve tried to apply these distributed/ extended cognition frameworks to four main research areas. In a longstanding, fruitful collaboration with cognitive psychologists Amanda Barnier, Celia Harris, and team, we study shared remembering and collective cognition in small groups. With personality psychologist/ emotion theorist Doris McIlwain and team, we study expert movement and embodied skills, bringing our ‘applying intelligence to the reflexes’ framework to specific case studies in sport (especially cricket), yoga, dance, music, and theatre. With Shakespeare scholar and literary/ cultural historian Lyn Tribble at Otago, we study cognitive history and ecologies of skill in early modern England, now extending into a larger group project on Conversions, based at McGill. Finally, Chris McCarroll and I are obsessed with questions about perspective or point of view in autobiographical remembering, and how visual perspectives relate to emotional, embodied, or narrative perspectives on our past. These projects and collaborations are funded by various bodies and organizations to whom I’m extremely grateful. Most work is up here and at http://johnsutton.net/. Please email me (john.sutton@mq.edu.au) if you have suggestions or queries.
Address: Department of Cognitive Science,
Macquarie University,
Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia
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The book’s historical argument is anchored by a reinterpretation of Descartes’ dynamic physiology of memory and strange philosophy of the body. English critics of Descartes’ view of memories as motions complained that mechanistic neurophilosophy could not guarantee order in memory, and instead sought techniques for controlling the brain. In a new account of 18th-century philosophers’ fears of confusion in remembering, the author demonstrates the role of bizarre body fluids in moral physiology, as philosophers from Locke to Reid and Coleridge struggled to control their own innards and impose cognitive discipline on ‘the phantasmal chaos of association’. Finally, in a defence of connectionism against Jerry Fodor and against phenomenological and Wittgensteinian critics of passive mental representations, the author shows how problems of the self are implicated in contemporary sciences of mind. The book is an experiment in historical cognitive science, based on a belief that the interdisciplinary study of memory can exemplify the simultaneous attention to brain, body, and culture towards which psychological sciences must aim.
CONTENTS (Download at http://www.johnsutton.net/PhilosophyandMemoryTraces.htm)
1 Introduction: traces, brains, and history
Appendix: memory and connectionism
Part I Animal spirits and memory traces
Introduction to Part I: Animal Spirits and Memory Traces
2 Wriggle-work: the quick and nimble animal spirits
3 Memory and 'the Cartesian philosophy of the brain'
Appendix 1: nerves, spirits, and traces in Descartes
Appendix 2: Malebranche on memory
Part II Inner discipline
Introduction to Part II: Inner Discipline
4 Spirit sciences, memory motions
5 Cognition, chaos, and control in English responses to Descartes' theory of memory
6 Local and distributed representations
7 John Locke and the neurophilosophy of self
Appendix: memory and self in Essay II.27
8 The puzzle of survival
9 Spirits, body, and self
10 The puzzle of elimination
Part III 'The phantasmal chaos of association'
Introduction to Part III: 'The phantasmal chaos of association'
11 Fodor, connectionism, and cognitive discipline
12 Associationism and neo-associationism
13 Hartley's distributed model of memory
14 Attacks on neurophilosophy: Reid and Coleridge
Part IV Connectionism and the philosophy of memory
Introduction to Part IV: connectionism and the philosophy of memory
15 Representations, realism, and history
16 Attacks on traces
17 Order, confusion, remembering
References
Index
psychological research on collaborative recall and social memory to the philosophical
debate on extended and distributed cognition. We start by examining the case for
extended cognition based on the complementarity of inner and outer resources, by which
neural, bodily, social, and environmental resources with disparate but complementary
properties are integrated into hybrid cognitive systems, transforming or augmenting the
nature of remembering or decision-making. Adams and Aizawa, noting this distinctive
complementarity argument, say that they agree with it completely: but they describe it as
“a non-revolutionary approach” which leaves “the cognitive psychology of memory as
the study of processes that take place, essentially without exception, within nervous
systems.” In response, we carve out, on distinct conceptual and empirical grounds, a rich
middle ground between internalist forms of cognitivism and radical anti-cognitivism.
Drawing both on extended cognition literature and on Sterelny’s account of the
“scaffolded mind” (this issue), we develop a multidimensional framework for
understanding varying relations between agents and external resources, both technological
and social. On this basis we argue that, independent of any more “revolutionary”
metaphysical claims about the partial constitution of cognitive processes by external
resources, a thesis of scaffolded or distributed cognition can substantially influence or
transform explanatory practice in cognitive science. Critics also cite various empirical
results as evidence against the idea that remembering can extend beyond skull and skin.
We respond with a more principled, representative survey of the scientific psychology of
memory, focussing in particular on robust recent empirical traditions for the study of
collaborative recall and transactive social memory. We describe our own empirical
research on socially distributed remembering, aimed at identifying conditions for
mnemonic emergence in collaborative groups. Philosophical debates about extended,
embedded, and distributed cognition can thus make richer, mutually beneficial contact
with independentlymotivated research programs in the cognitive psychology of memory.
this framework will require a more dramatic integration of levels, fields, and methods than has yet been achieved. The challenge arises from the fact that memory often takes us out of the current situation: in remembering episodes or experiences in my personal
past, for example, I am mentally transported away from the social and physical setting in which I am currently embedded. Our ability
to make psychological contact with events and experiences in the past was one motivation, in classical cognitive science and cognitive psychology, for postulating inner mental representations to hold information across the temporal gap. Theorists of situated cognition thus have to show how such an apparently representation-hungry and decoupled high-level cognitive process may nonetheless be fruitfully understood as embodied, contextualized, and distributed.
The book’s historical argument is anchored by a reinterpretation of Descartes’ dynamic physiology of memory and strange philosophy of the body. English critics of Descartes’ view of memories as motions complained that mechanistic neurophilosophy could not guarantee order in memory, and instead sought techniques for controlling the brain. In a new account of 18th-century philosophers’ fears of confusion in remembering, the author demonstrates the role of bizarre body fluids in moral physiology, as philosophers from Locke to Reid and Coleridge struggled to control their own innards and impose cognitive discipline on ‘the phantasmal chaos of association’. Finally, in a defence of connectionism against Jerry Fodor and against phenomenological and Wittgensteinian critics of passive mental representations, the author shows how problems of the self are implicated in contemporary sciences of mind. The book is an experiment in historical cognitive science, based on a belief that the interdisciplinary study of memory can exemplify the simultaneous attention to brain, body, and culture towards which psychological sciences must aim.
CONTENTS (Download at http://www.johnsutton.net/PhilosophyandMemoryTraces.htm)
1 Introduction: traces, brains, and history
Appendix: memory and connectionism
Part I Animal spirits and memory traces
Introduction to Part I: Animal Spirits and Memory Traces
2 Wriggle-work: the quick and nimble animal spirits
3 Memory and 'the Cartesian philosophy of the brain'
Appendix 1: nerves, spirits, and traces in Descartes
Appendix 2: Malebranche on memory
Part II Inner discipline
Introduction to Part II: Inner Discipline
4 Spirit sciences, memory motions
5 Cognition, chaos, and control in English responses to Descartes' theory of memory
6 Local and distributed representations
7 John Locke and the neurophilosophy of self
Appendix: memory and self in Essay II.27
8 The puzzle of survival
9 Spirits, body, and self
10 The puzzle of elimination
Part III 'The phantasmal chaos of association'
Introduction to Part III: 'The phantasmal chaos of association'
11 Fodor, connectionism, and cognitive discipline
12 Associationism and neo-associationism
13 Hartley's distributed model of memory
14 Attacks on neurophilosophy: Reid and Coleridge
Part IV Connectionism and the philosophy of memory
Introduction to Part IV: connectionism and the philosophy of memory
15 Representations, realism, and history
16 Attacks on traces
17 Order, confusion, remembering
References
Index
psychological research on collaborative recall and social memory to the philosophical
debate on extended and distributed cognition. We start by examining the case for
extended cognition based on the complementarity of inner and outer resources, by which
neural, bodily, social, and environmental resources with disparate but complementary
properties are integrated into hybrid cognitive systems, transforming or augmenting the
nature of remembering or decision-making. Adams and Aizawa, noting this distinctive
complementarity argument, say that they agree with it completely: but they describe it as
“a non-revolutionary approach” which leaves “the cognitive psychology of memory as
the study of processes that take place, essentially without exception, within nervous
systems.” In response, we carve out, on distinct conceptual and empirical grounds, a rich
middle ground between internalist forms of cognitivism and radical anti-cognitivism.
Drawing both on extended cognition literature and on Sterelny’s account of the
“scaffolded mind” (this issue), we develop a multidimensional framework for
understanding varying relations between agents and external resources, both technological
and social. On this basis we argue that, independent of any more “revolutionary”
metaphysical claims about the partial constitution of cognitive processes by external
resources, a thesis of scaffolded or distributed cognition can substantially influence or
transform explanatory practice in cognitive science. Critics also cite various empirical
results as evidence against the idea that remembering can extend beyond skull and skin.
We respond with a more principled, representative survey of the scientific psychology of
memory, focussing in particular on robust recent empirical traditions for the study of
collaborative recall and transactive social memory. We describe our own empirical
research on socially distributed remembering, aimed at identifying conditions for
mnemonic emergence in collaborative groups. Philosophical debates about extended,
embedded, and distributed cognition can thus make richer, mutually beneficial contact
with independentlymotivated research programs in the cognitive psychology of memory.
this framework will require a more dramatic integration of levels, fields, and methods than has yet been achieved. The challenge arises from the fact that memory often takes us out of the current situation: in remembering episodes or experiences in my personal
past, for example, I am mentally transported away from the social and physical setting in which I am currently embedded. Our ability
to make psychological contact with events and experiences in the past was one motivation, in classical cognitive science and cognitive psychology, for postulating inner mental representations to hold information across the temporal gap. Theorists of situated cognition thus have to show how such an apparently representation-hungry and decoupled high-level cognitive process may nonetheless be fruitfully understood as embodied, contextualized, and distributed.
nature of the sense of agency in complex natural settings, or the effect of skill on the sense of agency. Working from 2 case studies of mountain bike riding, we argue that the sense of agency in high-skill individuals incorporates awareness of multiple causal influences on action outcomes. This allows fine-grained differentiation of the contributions of self and external factors to action outcomes. We further argue that the sense of agency incorporates prospective awareness of actions that are possible in a situation and awareness of the limits of control. These forms of sense of agency enable highly
flexible, context-sensitive strategic control, and are likely to contribute to high interindividual variability in responses to complex tasks.
with which they are faced during performance. To further explore this apparent paradox and the way in which it is negotiated by expert musicians, this article profiles theories presented by Roger Chaffin, Hubert Dreyfus and Tony and Helga Noice. For Chaffin, expert skill in music performance relies solely upon overarching mental representations, while, for Dreyfus, such representations are needed only by novices, while experts rely on a more embodied form of coping. Between Chaffin and Dreyfus sit the Noices, who argue that both overarching cognitive structures and embodied processes underlie expert skill. We then present the Applying Intelligence to the Reflexes (AIR) approach — a differently nuanced model of expert skill aligned with the integrative spirit of the Noices’ research. The AIR approach suggests that musicians negotiate the apparent paradox of expert skill via a mindedness that allows flexibility of attention during music performance. We offer data from recent doctoral research conducted by the first author of this article to demonstrate at a practical level the usefulness of the AIR approach when attempting to understand the complexities of expert skill in music performance.
cognition. We then examine research that has taken the perspective of the music performer into account in its examination of music performance.
individuals. We review evidence from a maturing program of empirical research in which we adopted the lens of distributed cognition to gain new insights into the ways that remembering might be shared in groups. Across four studies, we examined shared remembering in intimate couples. We studied their collaboration on more simple memory tasks as well as their conversations about shared past experiences. We also asked
them about their everyday memory compensation strategies in order to investigate the complex ways that couples may coordinate their material and interpersonal resources. We discuss our research in terms of the costs and benefits of shared remembering, features of the group and features of the remembering task that influence the outcomes of shared remembering, the cognitive and interpersonal functions of shared
remembering, and the interaction between social and material resources. More broadly, this interdisciplinary research program suggests the potential for empirical psychology research to contribute to ongoing interdisciplinary discussions of distributed cognition.
an external or ‘observer’ perspective. By relating the issue of perspective in dreams to established research traditions in the study of memory and imagery, and noting the flexibility of perspective in dreams, we identify new lines of enquiry. In other dreams, the dreamer does not appear to figure at all, and the first person perspective on dream events is occupied by someone else, some other person or character. We call these puzzling cases ‘vicarious dreams’ and assess some potential ways to make sense of them. Questions about self-representation and perspectives in dreams are intriguing in their own right and pose empirical and conceptual problems about the nature of self-representation with
implications beyond the case of dreaming.
responsible for the occurrence of these data; but one can equally clearly point to cases where this impairment is present but delusion is not. So the impairment is not sufficient for delusion to occur: a second cognitive impairment, one that affects the
ability to evaluate beliefs, must also be present. Third (and this is the main thrust of our paper), we consider in detail what the nature of the inference is that leads from the abnormal data to the belief. This is not deductive inference and it is not inference by enumerative induction; it is abductive inference. We offer a Bayesian account of abductive inference and apply it to the explanation of delusional belief.
Despite the new mobilities of early modern English society, significant practices of personal and shared remembering continued to be anchored in experienced place. Even as technologies and strategies for dealing with past and future altered, memory was still richly scaffolded by landscapes, artifacts, architecture, and institutions which all themselves bore the traces of individual and cultural intervention. This essay builds on recent social histories of early modern landscape and memory, to explore the nature of embodied place memory. It also aims at an updated assessment of the historical utility of the idea of distributed cognitive ecologies.
in experiment, natural philosophy, and early modern technology. The chapter concludes with an explicit statement of the ways in which our recommended cognitive approach can encourage and promote effective historical work on material culture. We provide extensive references throughout, hoping to encourage historians actively to engage with and participate in these challenging crossdisciplinary conversations.
and reasoning. We make this argument by means of two distinct case histories: a reading of the site-specific audio walk of Canadian artist Janet Cardiff; and an extended discussion of a famously anachronistic moment in William Shakespeare’s King Lear. These readings reveal the inherent poly-temporalities of human mental and social life.
To refigure anachronism as the mixing or effective confusion of times, rather than error or ignorance, an appropriately dynamic cognitive theory needs to be integrated into our historical and literary critical practices. The blending or interanimation of temporalities is intrinsic to human memory, in all its embodied, social, and affective complexity. Yet our critical instincts, in early modern studies as elsewhere in literary theory, dismiss invocations of mind and cognition as ahistorical. Whether projecting an originary interiority behind the text, or gesturing towards a transhistorical human nature, psychological criticism is often rejected as both universalizing and essentialist. But it is an over-reaction to such individualism to allow the mind to go missing entirely. In a more productive anachronism, we locate the polytemporality of experience in the richly situated nature of cognitive ecologies, context-sensitive systems or assemblages of material, cultural, and bodily resources. Remembering and skilful activity, on this view, involve the coordination of disparate internal and external resources, all with their own histories and dynamics, altering at distinctive or competing timescales. This allows us to put the mind back into time and history. We exemplify our claim that plural or anachronistic temporality is built in to memory and action by analysing both contemporary and historical artwork and performance, with a focus on the early modern English theatre, a new enterprise distributed across a loosely affiliated world of actors, spaces, material texts and objects, and audiences. We examine the polytemporality of the theatre in the specific case of the Fool’s prophecy in the Folio text of King Lear, and in the embodied skill of the player, probably Robert Armin, and the connections between his performances and those of the most famous of Elizabethan clowns, Richard Tarlton. This kind of cognitive history escapes both individualism and universalism, suggesting new ways to conceptualize relations between agents and technologies.
particularly challenging given the practical dimensions and implications of theories of mind. Because theories of human nature and debates about body and mind do ‘touch us’ so ‘nearly’,
they attract and can thus reveal, in specific historical contexts, interconnected discourses or associations which may be quite unlike our own. This chapter retains a focus, however, on the history of theories of mind: we address an array of distinctive positi
ons inmetaphysics and psychology which emerged in wider British debate, each with potential religious, moral, and political implications. We proceed by selectively surveying the conceptual inheritance and challenges for British philosophers in the early seventeenth century with regard to both the soul and the humoral temperament of body and mind. We look at some of the eclectic systems developed by British philosophers of the soul in the mid-century period, and at different ways new ideas in both medicine and metaphysics were integrated.
directly, without effortful search. We investigated whether direct and generative retrieval differed in the characteristics of memories recalled, or only in terms of retrieval latency.
Participants recalled autobiographical memories in response to cue words. For each memory, they reported whether it was retrieved directly or generatively, rated its visuo-spatial
perspective, and judged its accompanying recollective experience. Our results indicated that direct retrieval was commonly reported and was faster than generative retrieval, replicating recent findings. The characteristics of directly retrieved memories differed from generatively retrieved memories: directly retrieved memories had higher field perspective ratings and lower observer perspective ratings. However, retrieval mode did not influence recollective experience. We discuss our findings in terms of cue generation and content construction, and the implication for reconstructive models of autobiographical memory.
and prefactual planned events similarly to their original versions. In conclusion, our findings indicate that humans construct diverse forms of autobiographical events with similar underlying features, but with some differences in the phenomenology of retrospection and prospection, as reality constrains the way we perceive the past, but not so much the future.
and future thinking and on how past and future thinking processes interact.
turn taking and consensus. First, 135 individuals learned a word list and recalled it alone (Recall 1). Then, 45 participants in three-member groups took turns to recall, 45 participants in three-member groups reached a consensus, and 45 participants recalled alone but were analysed as three-member nominal groups (Recall 2). Finally, all participants recalled alone (Recall 3). Both turn-taking and consensus groups demonstrated the usual pattern of costs during collaboration and benefits after collaboration in terms of recall completeness. However, consensus groups, and not turn-taking groups, demonstrated clear benefits in terms of recall accuracy, both during and after collaboration. Consensus groups engaged in beneficial group source-monitoring processes. Our findings challenge assumptions about the negative consequences of social remembering."
items, facilitates later recall of the practised items, but inhibits later recall of the non-practised related items. This robust effect has recently been extended to ‘‘socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting’’ (SSRIF; Cuc, Koppel, & Hirst, 2007). People who merely listen to a speaker retrieving some, but not other, items*even people participating as speakers or listeners in conversations*show the same facilitation and inhibition. We replicated and extended the SS-RIF effect with a structured story (Experiment 1) and in a free-flowing conversation about the story (Experiment 2). Specifically, we explored (1) the degree to which participants subsequently form a coherent ‘‘collective memory’’ of the story and (2) whether schema consistency of the target information influences both WI-RIF and SS-RIF. In both experiments, speakers and listeners showed RIF (that is, WI-RIF and SS-RIF, respectively), irrespective of the schema consistency of the story material. On final recall, speakers and listeners described similar renderings of the story. We discuss these findings in terms of the role of ‘‘silences’’ in the formation of collective memories.
distributed cognition from the 1990s. Offering a big-picture overview of the uses of the notion of scaffolding, it suggests three ways to taxonomise forms of scaffolding, and addresses the possible criticism that the metaphor of scaffolding retains an overly individualist vision of cognition. The chapter is aimed at a broad interdisciplinary audience interested in processes of learning, teaching, and apprenticeship as they apply to the study of memory.
general relations between language and memory, and for investigating the promise and
the difficulty of interdisciplinary research in the cognitive sciences of memory. An otherwise
promising social-interactionist view of autobiographical memory development relies in part
on an overly linguistic conception of mental representation. This paper applies an alternative,
‘supra-communicative’ view of the relation between language and thought, along the lines
developed by Andy Clark, to this developmental framework. A pluralist approach to current
theories of autobiographical memory development is sketched: shared early narratives about
the past function in part to stabilize and structure the child’s own autobiographical memory
system.
The volume provides a rounded, accessible collection of work on the nature and significance of materiality in early modern Europe – a term that embraces a vast range of objects as well as addressing a wide variety of human interactions with their physical environments. This stimulating view of materiality is distinctive in asking questions about the whole material world as a context for lived experience, and the book considers material interactions at all social levels.
There are 27 chapters by leading experts as well as 13 feature object studies to highlight specific items that have survived from this period (defined broadly as c.1500–c.1800). These contributions explore the things people acquired, owned, treasured, displayed and discarded, the spaces in which people used and thought about things, the social relationships which cluster around goods – between producers, vendors and consumers of various kinds – and the way knowledge travels around those circuits of connection. The content also engages with wider issues such as the relationship between public and private life, the changing connections between the sacred and the profane, or the effects of gender and social status upon lived experience.
Constructed as an accessible, wide-ranging guide to research practice, the book describes and represents the methods which have been developed within various disciplines for analysing pre-modern material culture. It comprises four sections which open up the approaches of various disciplines to non-specialists: ‘Definitions, disciplines, new directions’, ‘Contexts and categories’, ‘Object studies’ and ‘Material culture in action’.
This volume addresses the need for sustained, coherent comment on the state, breadth and potential of this lively new field, including the work of historians, art historians, museum curators, archaeologists, social scientists and literary scholars. It consolidates and communicates recent developments and considers how we might take forward a multi-disciplinary research agenda for the study of material culture in periods before the mass production of goods.
philosophy. The essays, written by some of the world's leading scholars, cover topics as diverse as optics, cosmology and medicine, and will be of vital interest to all historians of philosophy
or science.
This book places Descartes' scientific projects, rather than his metaphysics or epistemology, at the centre of his philosophical concerns. Descartes' picture of the natural world admits of
surprising complexity, with both his cosmology and his physiology modelled on the dynamics of fluids. Rejecting the tired caricature by which Descartes' dualism left nature and the human
body as barren, inert matter to be dominated by active ghostly soul, the authors in contrast focus on the details of the links Descartes sought to forge between physics, medicine, and
ethics. Among the topics covered are mechanics and meteorology, optics and experimental method, anatomy and embryology, and theories of imagination, perception, and the passions.
Varieties of Situated Cognition in Animals', 2018), we highlight some relevant history of the situated cognition movement and then identify several issues with which we think further progress can be made. In particular, we address and clarify the relationship between situated cognition and antirepresentational approaches. We then highlight the heterogeneous nature of the concept of morphological computation by describing a less common way the term is used in robotics. Finally, we discuss some residual concerns about the mutual manipulability criterion and propose a potential solution.
organization in cultural evolution to include cognition. By showing how recent work on emergent group-level cognition can be incorporated within Smaldino’s framework, we extend that framework’s scope to encompass collaborative memory, decision making, and intelligent action. We argue that beneficial effects arise only in certain forms of cognitive interdependence, in surprisingly fragile conditions.
ables within his control. In order to achieve this, JK must engage in ongoing monitoring of his performance, whereby the spotlight of his attention pans across a vast array of disparate performance
processes (and levels within these processes) in order to ascertain how he can most effectively meet the specific demands of a given performance situation. It is hoped that future research compiling data from numerous interviews and sources as well as using different research methodologies will further unlock the potential that the AIR approach holds for understanding expert performance."
joint action tasks. Recent theory suggests that action prediction relies on an emulator system that permits observers to use
information about their own motor dynamics to predict the actions of other agents. If this is the case, then predictions for self-generated actions should be more accurate than predictions for other-generated actions. We tested this hypothesis by employing a self/other synchronization paradigm where prediction accuracy for recording of self-generated movements was compared with prediction accuracy for other-generated movements. As expected, predictions were more accurate when the observer’s movement dynamics matched the movement dynamics of the recording. This is consistent with that idea that the observer’s movement dynamics influence the predictions they generate.
onto the observer action system so that predictions can be
generated using that same predictive mechanisms that underlie
action control. This suggests that action prediction may be
more accurate when there is a more direct mapping between
the stimulus and the observer. We tested this hypothesis by
comparing prediction accuracy for two stimulus types. A mannequin stimulus which contained information about the effectors used to produce the action and a point stimulus, which
contained identical dynamic information but no effector information. Prediction was more accurate for the mannequin stimulus. However, this effect was dependent on the observer having previous experience performing the observed action. This
suggests that experienced and naıve observers might generate
predictions in qualitatively difference ways, which may relate
to the presence of an internal representation of the action laid
down through action performance.
moral and social ideals, Sutton argues, contemporary theorists impose strictures on accounts of memory because of preconceived ideas of the role of memory in systematic reasoning and possession of knowledge of the past.
For most of the book Sutton, in fact, successfully steers his way between these twin perils. His discussion of historical materials is for the most part judicious and sensitive to context. He manages to expand upon what may seem a narrow and technical issue to show how discourse about memory was implicated in and contributed to cultural concerns with the nature of agency, control, and identity. "Notions about selves," Sutton maintains, "in relation to natural and social worlds are always implicated in theorising about memories" (p. 13). While localist models of memory were supportive of a strong executive self presiding over a stable and credible stock of recollections, more dynamic theories of how memories were created and sustained carried disturbing intimations. If memories were--quite literally--fluid, then error, illusion,
and even fantasy might hold sway; the integrity of the self could dissolve amid the swirling of the spirits.
... Sutton concentrates on treatments of animal spirits in English natural philosophy. He argues that a special concern with memory was part of a more general preoccupation with order in the aftermath of the civil war and the heady days of the Commonwealth. In this context there was a felt need for discipline and stability within the body as well as within society. Theories that undermined these values were deemed immoral as well as erroneous.
Rather than developing these themes, Sutton asks "what use is all this history?" (p. 149). His answer is that a historical perspective can illuminate the issues involved in the choice between distributed and local theories of memory, even though the distinction would not have been intelligible to the historical actors themselves. Such an approach is somewhat frustrating to the historian; others must judge its philosophical utility. Nonetheless, this book does suggest a range of avenues for further research: the discussion of John Locke's theory of personal identity is especially stimulating.
of neurophilosophy that has long remained underexposed.
After a general overview of ideas about distributed memory, the lecture addresses four features of memory: the distinctive kinds of memory, the constructive nature of remembering, the development of memory, and the functions of remembering. It then develops one particular version of the idea of distributed cognition, underlining the complementarity between integrated but disparate neural, bodily, social, and material resources. Putting these two independent sets of ideas together, three layers or forms of distributed ecologies of memory are described: first and in most detail, the case of socially distributed remembering; then the idea of the cognitive life of things; and finally the internalization of cognitive and cultural artifacts. The lecture concludes with a brief discussion of the place of history in this interdisciplinary framework for studying cognitive ecologies of remembering.
Web: http://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/cognitivefutures/CFP.html
Panel Participants:
Stephen Turner (University of South Florida)
Jacob Mackey (Queens College, CUNY)
Georg Theiner & Nikolaus Fogle (Villanova University)
Evelyn B. Tribble (Otago University) & John Sutton (Macquarie University)
“On the whole, what is familiar is precisely not understood because it is familiar” (Hegel, Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit)