MEMORY THROUGH THE AGES

Prescientific approachesAncient gods for memory

Greek and Roman philosophy

• Plato (427-347 BC)– Innate concepts and memories– Metaphoric mechanisms for

• Encoding (a scribe; misencoding)• Storage (wax tablet; distortable)• Retrieval (aviary; retrieval failure)

• Aristotle (384-322 BC)– Retention versus “recollection”– Laws of association in recall

• Contiguity, similarity, contrast

Aristotle’s On Memory and Reminiscence

• Memory vs. recollection– Memory is necessary, not sufficient for

recollection– Recollection a form of inference

(attribution?) placing ourselves in a certain time and space

– Some phrases sound like implicit/explicit, some availability/accessibility

• Recollection and association– Retrieval as “movement” between related

memories– Associative “laws” (contiguity, similarity)– Automatic cuing vs. effortful search

• Interesting comments about:– Rehearsal and practice– Concrete vs. abstract “codes”– Role of the “substrate” (hard/soft walls)– Recollection may be in error– Arousal hurts memory– Dwarfs have lousy memory

Prescientific approaches(cont’d)

• Cicero (106-43 BC)– Practical aspects of memory– “method of loci” for

remembering order

• Augustine (354-430 AD)– Sensory vs. ‘intellectual”

memories– Active nature of

remembering– Potential for “false

memories”– Importance of emotion in

memory

The Renaissance:Empirical observation

• Juan Luis Vives (1492-1540)– Spanish humanist/empiricist– “Three Books on the Soul of Life” (1538)– Importance of rehearsal for retention– Utility of “memory exercise” and practice– Three sources of forgetting

• “image’ is erased or destroyed• Smeared or fragmented• Or “escapes our search”

• Francis Bacon (1561-1626)– British philosopher/humanist– Describes the “inductive method”– Basic skills of memory, fancy, reason– Mnemonic strategies

• Visual imagery• Study prior to sleeping• Varied encoding• Selective memory search

(“prenotion”)

British Empricism and Continental Nativism

• Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)– Memory as “decaying sensations”– Knowledge results from experience– Founds British empiricist tradition

(Locke, Hume, Hartley, Mill)

• Rene Descartes (1596-1650)– Mental laws vs. physical (dualism)– Importance of innate concepts and

processes