Genuine Memories Research Articles

Reading Heupers: The Witchcraft Texts. An Analysis of Eight Years of Oral Interviews

Engelbert Heupers’s ‘folktales’, collected in the 1960s, form the second largest collection in the Netherlands. Although they relate to ‘superstition’, they should be regarded as fragments of oral history, albeit on legendary subjects, rather than legends, or even memorates. They were told as genuine memories. Especially the witchcraft texts, analysed here, referred to past events and some were corroborated by newspaper reports. Heupers’s work suffered from his supervisor’s lack of knowledge of or interest in legends. The reminiscences were influenced by press reports on witchcraft which persuaded some people to remain silent or only divulge commonplace information about the subject. There was a striking difference between Roman Catholic and Reformed Protestant interviewees. Local witchcraft texts need to be understood as a patchwork of stories which sometimes enabled the identification of a witch and a reconstruction of historical events.

Memories people no longer believe in can still affect them in helpful and harmful ways

People can come to “remember” experiences they never had, and these false memories—much like memories for real experiences—can serve a variety of helpful and harmful functions. Sometimes, though, people realize one of their memories is false, and retract their belief in it. These “retracted memories” continue to have many of the same phenomenological characteristics as their believed memories. But can they also continue to serve functions? Across four experiments, we asked subjects to rate the extent to which their retracted memories serve helpful and harmful functions and compared these functions with those served by “genuine” autobiographical memories. People rated their retracted memories as serving both helpful and harmful functions, much like their genuine memories. In addition, we found only weak relationships between people’s belief in their memories and the extent to which those memories served perceived functions. These results suggest memories can serve functions even in the absence of belief and highlight the potential for false memories to affect people’s thinking and behavior even after people have retracted them.

Memory Disjunctivism: a Causal Theory

Relationalists about episodic memory must endorse a disjunctivist theory of memory-experience according to which cases of genuine memory and cases of total confabulation involve distinct kinds of mental event with different natures. This paper is concerned with a pair of arguments against this view, which are analogues of the ‘causal argument’ and the ‘screening off argument’ that have been pressed in recent literature against relationalist (and hence disjunctivist) theories of perception. The central claim to be advanced is that to deal with these two arguments, memory disjunctivists both can and should draw on resources that are standardly appealed to by rival common factor theories of episodic memory, and, in particular, to the idea that genuine memories and merely apparent ones are to be distinguished, at least in part, in terms of the distinctive ways in which they are caused. On the proposed view, there are substantive causal constraints associated both with cases of genuine memory and with cases of mere confabulation. The resulting theory thus tells us something important about the nature both of genuine memories and of mere confabulations, namely, that such experiences must be caused in certain distinctive ways and cannot occur except as the result of a distinctive sort of causal process. In addition, the theory enables the disjunctivist to offer a unified response to an important pair of arguments against her view.

A Hamiltonian Driven Quantum-Like Model for Overdistribution in Episodic Memory Recollection

While people famously forget genuine memories over time, they also tend to mistakenly over-recall equivalent memories concerning a given event. The memory phenomenon is known by the name of \emph{episodic overdistribution} and occurs both in memories of disjunctions and partitions of mutually exclusive events and has been tested, modeled and documented in the literature. The total classical probability of recalling exclusive sub-events most often exceeds the probability of recalling the composed event, i.e. a \emph{subadditive} total. We present a Hamiltonian driven propagation for the Quantum Episodic Memory model developed by Brainerd (et al., 2015) for the episodic memory overdistribution in the experimental immediate \emph{item false memory} paradigm (Brainerd and Reyna, 2008, 2010, 2015). Following the Hamiltonian method of Busemeyer and Bruza (2012) our model adds time-evolution of the perceived memory state through the stages of the experimental process based on psychologically interpretable parameters -- $\gamma_c$ for \emph{recollection capability} of cues, $\kappa_p$ for bias or description-dependence by probes and $\beta$ for the average gist component in the memory state at start. With seven parameters the Hamiltonian model shows good accuracy of predictions both in the EOD-disjunction and in the EOD-subadditivity paradigm. We noticed either an outspoken preponderance of the gist over verbatim trace, or the opposite, in the initial memory state when $\beta$ is real. Only for complex $\beta$ a mix of both traces is present in the initial state for the EOD-subadditivity paradigm.

The Material Culture of the Bible: An Introduction

The Material of the Bible: An Introduction, by Ferdinand E. Deist. Edited by Robert P. Carroll. The Biblical Seminar 70. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000. Pp. 348. $29.95 paper. Ferdinand Deist, who was Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University of Stellenbosh in South Africa, died unexpectedly in July of 1997, leaving the manuscript of the book, which lacked a conclusion. Robert Carroll edited the manuscript and wrote the Foreword, but he also died unexpectedly in May of 2000. Philip R. Davies of the University of Sheffield brought the book to completion in May of 2000, chiefly editing ch. 7. Deist sought to establish a cultural framework within which to discuss texts. Another goal was to wed interpretive methods in research to anthropological constructions of His hope was that the contribution of anthropology to exegesis might thus be interpreted and evaluated (p. 21). Deist sought to accomplish this by formalizing scholars' cultural awareness of the Israelites. His method was to analyze references to material in the light of an anthropological theory of culture. His method was emphatically not to analyze archaeological reports to deduce the material of ancient Israel and from that to infer the political organization, economics, and religion of the Israelites. Deist's explicitly stated first principle is that, since language is part of a culture, it is impossible for outsiders to grasp speech forms and content without a systematic knowledge of the or cultures in question. Thus the interpreter of the Bible in whole or in part simply cannot do without knowledge of the material of the Bible or without a cultural framework in which to understand utterances. Deist organized the work in nine chapters. Chapter 1, Culture and Interpretation, engages in the debate on anthropological meanings of in general and of biblical culture in particular. Deist reminds the reader that in effect one constructs the of the Israelites as he or she studies it. On the other hand one may not simply fantasize about it either, but construct as best one can from the text. The first issue one must deal with is whether the text reflects the of an author projected back on earlier eras. Deist posits six reasons why the hypothesis of the Persian fiction fails to account for the narratives, and therefore why one may expect to find genuine memories from the twelfth to the eighth centuries B.C.E. embedded in the narratives. The remaining chapters can be summarized briefly. In ch. 2 Deist outlines five theories of culture, namely, the increasingly popular anthropological views: evolutionary (explaining change), structuralist (focused on languages and meaning), structural-- functionalist (stressing coherence), configurationalist (semantics and values), and ethnohistorical (folklore) approaches. Deist opts for a combination of configurationalist and evolutionary approaches to construct a of ancient Israel. Chapter 3, a brief essay on culture, language, and meaning contains Deist's theory of the relation of meanings to culture. Here he discusses linguistic meanings in terms of the cultures of the authors, the structures of the Hebrew language, and inferred customs and values of those authors. Chapter 4, Environment and Meaning, examines how Israel resorted to elements from the natural environment to construct the images, metaphors, and similes so dear to the exegete's heart. Likewise ch. 5 on economy and meaning does the same for the socioeconomic world of the writers. Chapter 6, devoted to technology and meaning, places at least six types of technology in the foreground of the interpretation of language elements drawn from technology. Chapter 7, on social organization and meaning, briefly surveys and develops Israel's cultural descriptions in the Bible and sketches how this affects language about God. …

Some Speculation on the Future of the Body and Soul

Some Speculation on the Future of the Body and Soul

MEMORY CONJUNCTION ERRORS IN YOUNGER AND OLDER ADULTS: EVENT-RELATED POTENTIAL AND NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL DATA

In a study/recognition paradigm, new words at test were recombinations of studied syllables (e.g. BARLEY from BARTER and VALLEY), shared one syllable with studied words, or were completely new. False alarm rates followed the gradient of similarity with studied items. Event-related potentials to the three classes of false alarms were indistinguishable. False alarms elicited different brain activity than did hits, arguing against the idea that conjunction errors occur during encoding and are later retrieved liked genuine memories. In Experiment 2, with healthy older adults, neuropsychological tests sensitive to frontal lobe function predicted false alarm rate, but not hit rate. Performance on standardised memory scales sensitive to medial temporal/diencephalic function influenced the pattern of false alarm rates across the three classes of new words. The experiments suggest that false alarms to conjunction lures are not similar to true recollections, but are products of faulty monitoring at retrieval.

Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse

In recent years a polarized debate, often polemical and vitriolic, has seized the attention of psychotherapists and the lay public. Some authorities have ascribed a crucial importance to the influence of repressed or dissociated memories of childhood trauma in the etiology of adult psychopathology and distress, while others have attempted to cast doubt on the possibility that true childhood trauma can be banished from memory or later recovered, either spontaneously or in the course of therapy. ... Freyd's betrayal theory is capable of generating numerous testable hypotheses... One the one hand, voices have been raised to claim that memories of childhood traumatization should be assumed to be accurate unless proven otherwise, while on the other hand, there has been a clamor that recovered memories are almost if not always inaccurate, necessitating that psychotherapists consider such claims unlikely a priori. Furthermore, many researchers and some clinicians who claim that genuine memories are

Creating new memories that are quickly accessed and confidently held.

In two experiments involving a total of 542 subjects, a series of slides depicting a burglary was shown. After the initial event, subjects were exposed to one or more narratives about the event that contained some misinformation or neutral information about four critical details. Finally, subjects were tested on their memories of what they saw, and their reaction times and confidence levels were measured. When subjects took a standard test in which the misinformation item was a possible response option, they responded very quickly and confidently when making this incorrect choice. Misled subjects responded as quickly and confidently to these "unreal" memories as they did to their genuine memories. It does not seem, then, that the misinformation effect arises from a large proportion of subjects who must resolve a conflict between two memories when they are tested, a conflict that would be expected to take time. When subjects took a modified test in which the misinformation item was not a possible response, misled subjects were as accurate as were controls, but they responded more slowly, regardless of whether they ultimately chose the right or wrong option. These findings indicate that misinformation does introduce some form of interference not detected by a simple test of accuracy.