Memory Conflicts Research Articles

Unraveling the time-of-day influences on motor consolidation through the motor-declarative memory conflict.

Competition between motor and declarative memory systems, both involved simultaneously in motor learning, has been shown to reduce motor consolidation. Here, we investigated this conflict during the learning of a sequential finger-tapping task (SFTT) scheduled for either the morning or the afternoon. Sixty participants, divided into four groups, trained on SFTT at either 10 a.m. or 3 p.m., and retested five hours later. To disrupt the conflict between the two memories, two groups underwent declarative learning immediately after SFTT training, involving word list training (G10DL and G3DL), while the two other groups (G10CTR and G3CTR) experienced no additional learning. The results revealed that after morning training without additional learning (C10CTR), skill consolidation deteriorated, while the addition of declarative learning (G10DL) significantly attenuated this decay, stabilizing consolidation. Afternoon training showed skill stabilization for both groups (G3CTR and G3DL). These results suggest that weaker consolidation after morning training may be due to an important competition between motor and declarative memories within the same motor task.

Змиёвская балка (Ростов-на-Дону): память о Холокосте в конкуренции жертв

The paper focuses on the memory conflicts surrounding Zmiyovskaya balka in Rostov-on-Don, which became the site of the most mass extermination of Jews on the territory of the RSFSR during the Nazi occupation. The local authorities resist attempts to designate Zmiyovskaya balka as a Holocaust memorial site. The reasons for this resistance lie in Soviet memory politics and contemporary historical policy. The Soviet narrative of the war, where Jews were not singled out as a separate category of victims or were portrayed as victims of lesser significance than Slavs, still influences the historical perceptions of citizens. Many are still unaware that the Nazis had a special policy towards Jews and are convinced that the invaders were exterminating all Soviet citizens on equal grounds. This influence of the Soviet narrative is fueled by modern memory politics. Although Russia, unlike the USSR, has long recognized the Holocaust, the idea of the exclusivity of the Soviet, Russian, or Slavic sacrifice in the WWII is as important to modern Russia as it was to the USSR. The status of the people that suffered the greatest losses in WWII is the symbolic capital that many Russians are used to consider their own. Therefore, the classical concept of the Holocaust, as an event unique not only in the history of WWII, but also in world history, hardly fits into the modern Russian narrative of the war. Attempts to designate the memorial on Zmiyovskaya balka as a Holocaust memorial are perceived by many officials and ordinary citizens as an attack on the status of the main victim of the war.

When Monument Battles Go Digital: Russian–Ukrainian Conflicts over Material Heritage on Telegram

In the context of increasing conflicts over material heritage around the world, this article examines the role digital media play in battles over monuments. The rise of digital media brought significant changes to the cultural dynamics of heritage conflicts, which have not been adequately addressed in existing literature. Bringing together work on monuments, (digital) memory conflicts, and digital activism, we identify three key dimensions of monument battles in which the impact of digital media is most clearly visible: (a) participation, democratization, and deterritorialization; (b) reframing and contestation; and (c) mobilization and the online-offline movement of heritage battles. We illustrate these arguments drawing on a critical discourse analysis of monument battles on the messaging application Telegram in the context of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, using a sample of 940 posts from both pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian channels. We demonstrate that despite potentially providing space for alternative memory interpretations, online memory contestations over heritage contributed to the construction of polarized and mutually exclusive worlds.

Peripheral (Non)Polishnesses. Museums, Creeping Conflicts, and Transformative Frictions

Whilst Poland appears today as a paradigmatic example of a homogeneous, exclusive national and cultural identity, reinforced by the hegemonic historical policy of a semi-authoritarian state, it is also challenged by Polish minority histories (civilian, multi-ethnic, non-Catholic, women). The main concern of the present article is the plural ‘Polishness’ that emerges from the constellation of these non-default histories. To examine the frictions of historical narratives in action, authors use spaces of historical museums as a field of observation, perceiving them as memory agents fostering not only confrontational but also negotiative memory politics. To identify situations in which tensions between the ‘central’ Polishness and its unorthodox variants are particularly evident, the paper takes a look at ‘non-central’ Polish territories i.e. ‘post-German’ areas, characterized by a complex heterogeneous past in which Germanness and Polishness, but also ‘Silesianness’ or ‘Borderlandness’ mutually clash and dialogue. Analysis of selected exhibitions’ construction reveals peculiarities of different local contexts in transitional spaces and strategies of resolving creeping conflicts between ‘the Polishness’ and plural, peripheral ‘Polishnesses’. As authors argue, these case studies – instead of a static model of open memory conflict and binaries – offer dynamic models of memory, and allow to introduce the concept of memory frictions.

Фарміраванне пантэона дзеячаў эпохі Вялікага Княства Літоўскага ў беларускай палітыцы памяці (1988–2023 гг.)

The article is devoted to the process of overcoming the depersonalization of Belarusian historiography, which took place until the mid-1980s. Its aim is to answer the question of how, in the context of the formation of the Belarusian-centric paradigm of history, «new» or newly discovered historical figures of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (GDL) were introduced into science, culture and collective memory. The text is divided into 5 parts. The first one shows the fact that the elimination of the GDL from the memory of Belarusians has formed a complex of historical inferiority. The second part describes the process of «settling» the history of Belarus in 1988–1995 by new heroes, until their fixation in the first encyclopaedic editions of the Republic of Belarus and history textbooks. The third part tells about the blow that in 1995–1996 the supporters of the re-Sovietisation of historical science inflicted on the Belarusian national pantheon and the leaders of its formation, the consequences of which were felt at the beginning of the 21st century. The fourth part is devoted to replenishment of the pantheon of GDL heroes by representatives of the aristocracy. The fifth part reveals the channels for transferring the names and deeds of the heroes of the Belarusian historical pantheon to the collective memory, which have been used since the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. The article justifies the fact of the popularity of biographical reconstruction in modern scientific and literary works. “Risk zones” and “memory conflicts” were presented in the promotion of the new pantheon – with former allies in the GDL, various Belarusian interpretive strategies and new attempts to revise the pantheon.

PEDRAS NO CAMINHO DO ESQUECIMENTO: MONUMENTOS, AÇÕES DESMONUMENTALIZADORAS E CONTRAMEMORIAIS NO ESPAÇO PÚBLICO

Based on the desmonumentalizing action directed at the statue honoring Borba Gato, which happened in São Paulo, Brazil, by mid-2021, this text highlights the reciprocal interactions between monuments (and other memorial objects), social agents and urban environments. Therefore, from examining conflicts of memory in public space, we reflect on which objects and discussions regarding memorial culture are brought into dialogue. For this discussion, we draw upon ethnographic data produced in Rio de Janeiro, in digital environments, and the analysis of press materials related to the addressed episodes. In addition to Borba Gato's statue, we investigate a set of objects, images, and events surrounding Marielle Franco and the anti-monument in honor of Carlos Marighella.

PEDRAS NO CAMINHO DO ESQUECIMENTO: MONUMENTOS, AÇÕES DESMONUMENTALIZADORAS E CONTRAMEMORIAIS NO ESPAÇO PÚBLICO

Based on the desmonumentalizing action directed at the statue honoring Borba Gato, which happened in São Paulo, Brazil, by mid-2021, this text highlights the reciprocal interactions between monuments (and other memorial objects), social agents and urban environments. Therefore, from examining conflicts of memory in public space, we reflect on which objects and discussions regarding memorial culture are brought into dialogue. For this discussion, we draw upon ethnographic data produced in Rio de Janeiro, in digital environments, and the analysis of press materials related to the addressed episodes. In addition to Borba Gato's statue, we investigate a set of objects, images, and events surrounding Marielle Franco and the anti-monument in honor of Carlos Marighella.

Institutional memory and legal conflict in the Old Borough of Durham, 1300–1450

AbstractHistorians have long used the archives of major institutions to shed light on medieval society, but in more recent decades the focus has turned towards the proliferation of legal documentation possessed by those lower down the social order and the increasing penetration of legal processes into their everyday lives. Yet, in recapturing this world, there is a danger that we take for granted the immense documentary power of a large institutional repository. This article follows several legal conflicts across the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries involving the monks of Durham Priory to demonstrate the extent of this archival culture, showing how they turned to their vast array of documentary evidence for information about those who had incurred their wrath. Using their archives, they traced the descent of holdings, the offices held by key individuals, and previous payments in account rolls, all in a bid to demonstrate their rights, the ‘abuses’ of officials, and to counter legal opposition. Not content, the monks then compiled this evidence into an alternative narrative of events that questioned previous legal proceedings and ceremonies, constructing an institutional memory that saw contradictory documentation as ‘entirely most falsely forged’.

Slavery, Collective Memory and the Urban Landscape: The Rise, Fall and Rise of Liverpool's Statue of William Huskisson

Abstract: In 1982, residents of Liverpool pulled a statue of William Huskisson from its plinth. Today, a plaque at the site states that the sculpture was removed by "activists offended at Huskisson's role in supporting slavery." Less than a mile away, however, one finds Huskisson's effigy, reerected, with no reference to slavery. This article traces the history of the rise, fall and rise of the Huskisson statue in order to examine how collective memory shapes the urban landscape and informs local communities' interaction with it. It also reflects on the nature of memory conflicts and the processing of unresolved events in the past.

Slavery, Collective Memory and the Urban Landscape: The Rise, Fall and Rise of Liverpool's Statue of William Huskisson

Abstract: In 1982, residents of Liverpool pulled a statue of William Huskisson from its plinth. Today, a plaque at the site states that the sculpture was removed by "activists offended at Huskisson's role in supporting slavery." Less than a mile away, however, one finds Huskisson's effigy, reerected, with no reference to slavery. This article traces the history of the rise, fall and rise of the Huskisson statue in order to examine how collective memory shapes the urban landscape and informs local communities' interaction with it. It also reflects on the nature of memory conflicts and the processing of unresolved events in the past.

Diaspora Memory Conflicts: Struggles over Genocide Commemoration, Recognition and Denial

This contribution analyses conflicts around genocide memory in the diaspora. It shows how Assyrian/Syriac initiatives to create memorials to the 1915 genocide has triggered reactions by Turkish diaspora groups and the Turkish government. The Rwandan government, in contrast, has mobilized its diaspora to fight denial of Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, while other diaspora activists draw attention to—and create commemorative practices around—other, silenced, mass-atrocities. The text discusses the opportunities for victimhood recognition and memorialization offered in the diaspora, and how genocide memory conflicts intertwine with foreign policy matters and national and local politics in the country of settlement.

Online event recognition over noisy data streams

Composite event recognition (CER) systems process streams of sensor data and infer composite events of interest by means of pattern matching. Data uncertainty is frequent in CER applications and results in erroneous detection. To support streaming applications, we present oPIECbd, an extension of oPIEC with a bounded memory, leveraging interval duration statistics to resolve memory conflicts. oPIECbd may achieve comparable predictive accuracy to batch reasoning, avoiding the prohibitive cost of such reasoning. Furthermore, the use of interval duration statistics allows oPIECbd to outperform significantly earlier versions of bounded oPIEC. The empirical evaluation demonstrates the efficacy of oPIECbd on a benchmark activity recognition dataset, as well as real data streams from the field of maritime situational awareness.

Long-term improvements in executive functions after frontal-midline theta neurofeedback in a (sub)clinical group.

Impairments in executive functions (EFs) are common across disorders and can greatly affect daily functioning. Frontal-midline (FM) theta neurofeedback (NF) has been shown effective in enhancing EFs in healthy adults, prompting interest in exploring its potential as an alternative treatment for EFs in (sub)clinical samples. This study aims to determine the effects of FM theta NF on EFs in a sample of 58 adults (aged 20-60 years) with pronounced subjective EF complaints in daily life. Using a pre/post/follow-up design with a sham NF group, the present study assessed upregulation of FM theta in an eight-session individualized FM theta NF training and its immediate and long-term transfer effects on objective and subjective measures of EFs. These included behavioral performance on EF tasks assessing working memory updating (N-back task), set-shifting (Switching task), conflict monitoring (Stroop task), and response inhibition (Stop-signal task), as well as FM theta power during these tasks, and subjective EFs in daily life (BRIEF-A). The results indicate that there are only differences in FM theta self-upregulation between the NF group and sham group when non-responders are excluded from the analysis. Regarding behavioral transfer effects, NF-specific improvements are found in working memory updating reaction time (RT) and conflict monitoring RT variability at 6-month follow-up, but not immediately after the NF training. The effects on FM theta power during the EF tasks and subjective changes in EFs in daily life were not specific to the NF training. As a next step, research should identify the best predictors to stratify NF training, as well as explore ways to improve NF responsiveness, for instance by increasing neuroplasticity.

Overcoming the Troubles in Westeros: changing perceptions of post-conflict Northern Ireland through the diegetic heritage of Game of Thrones

ABSTRACT The fantasy series Game of Thrones (GoT) has become a phenomenon that reaches far beyond the television screens. Through extensive on-location filming, the series has linked its diegetic world of Westeros to countless heritage sites across several countries, most prominently Northern Ireland. Through narrative and special effects, GoT has overcoded these landscapes with their on-screen identities leading not only to a surge in tourists who want to travel to fictional locations such as ‘Winterfell’ and ‘King’s Landing’, but also affecting previously established global perceptions and local identities. Previously associated with the heritage of the Northern Ireland conflict, the so-called Troubles, GoT enabled a reimagining of this landscape through popular culture. A multi-sited visual ethnography on the impact of the series on the heritage landscapes of its filming locations reveals that popular culture can create a new heritage – even entirely fictional and one of blood and death itself – that can significantly contribute to overcoming national trauma and memory conflict. This sentiment was especially emphasized by people growing up and living in Northern Ireland, who saw their home’s reputation significantly improved and their new role as ‘Game of Thrones Territory’ as a unifying narrative in an inherently dissonant heritage context.

Lazy Load Scheduling for Mixed-criticality Applications in Heterogeneous MPSoCs

Newly emerging multiprocessor system-on-a-chip (MPSoC) platforms provide hard processing cores with programmable logic (PL) for high-performance computing applications. In this article, we take a deep look into these commercially available heterogeneous platforms and show how to design mixed-criticality applications such that different processing components can be isolated to avoid contention on the shared resources such as last-level cache and main memory. Our approach involves software/hardware co-design to achieve isolation between the different criticality domains. At the hardware level, we use a scratchpad memory (SPM) with dedicated interfaces inside the PL to avoid conflicts in the main memory. At the software level, we employ a hypervisor to support cache-coloring such that conflicts at the shared L2 cache can be avoided. In order to move the tasks in/out of the SPM memory, we rely on a DMA engine and propose a new CPU-DMA co-scheduling policy, called Lazy Load , for which we also derive the response time analysis. The results of a case study on image processing demonstrate that the contention on the shared memory subsystem can be avoided when running with our proposed architecture. Moreover, comprehensive schedulability evaluations show that the newly proposed Lazy Load policy outperforms the existing CPU-DMA scheduling approaches and is effective in mitigating the main memory interference in our proposed architecture.

Rethinking Parallel Memory Access Pattern in Number Theoretic Transform Design

Number theoretic transform (NTT) is widely applied as a fundamental component of next-generation cryptosystems. This paper introduces a novel high-low interactive memory access pattern for an out-of-place NTT design, which can be configurable in degree of parallelism. To achieve high area efficiency, the memory component of the proposed pattern is flexibly selected referring to the design parameters. Then for the first time, we present a quantitative analysis about the relevance between the degree of parallelism and the number of computing cycles. More importantly, we put forward a universal method of avoiding the memory conflict and obtaining the minimal number of computing cycles in a configurable NTT design. Based on the above optimization techniques, we develop the first parameterized out-of-place NTT architecture. Experimental results on FPGA show that our design can achieve higher efficiency in LUTs and BRAMs compared with previous works.

Feminist and dissident counter-monumental interventions: Urban memory struggles between Santiago de Chile and Mexico City

This article presents the results of a study of two recent Latin American cases of counter-monumental interventions initiated by feminist and dissident actors: the intervention Amor y Furia in Santiago de Chile and the creation of La Glorieta de las Mujeres que Luchan in Mexico City. The analysis of the two cases is empirically based on a combination of social media publications and interviews with central actors conducted during fieldwork in both cities. The analysis demonstrates how the interventions made visible and enriched the conflicts of memory that stem from the traditional monumentalization of national histories, whilst fortifying feminist and dissident movements through an exposure of the continuity of their demands. Based on this combined analysis of the interventions’ aesthetic representations of patriarchal violence on a variety of temporal levels and their role in the reappropriation of public space, we argue that both interventions are in their own way expressions of what we have chosen to call ch’ixi memory activism; an affective, cathartic and aesthetically cacophonous practice through which long-lasting injustices are exposed in the public space.

Disentangling Some Conceptual Knots.

Disentangling Some Conceptual Knots.

Marginal(ized) plurality: An empirical conceptualization of Michael Rothberg’s “multidirectional memory” in German educational settings

In this article, we apply Michael Rothberg’s concept of “multidirectional memory” to an empirical setting, by analyzing qualitative interviews with 124 educators in the field of memory work, such as museum and memorial site employees, teachers, volunteers of non-governmental organizations, and civil society initiatives. We analyzed where they come across memory conflicts and commonality, and what the respective “enabling conditions” were, that is, the influencing factors that promoted or prevented developments toward multidirectionality in the sense of a “differentiated solidarity.” We found only a few examples of this kind of multidirectional memory in educational settings. It was fostered by four factors: personal autobiographical experiences, political positions, structural/institutional aspects, and certain pedagogical principles. By contrast, different forms of competitive memory were dominant: first, “Conflicting Memory” characterized by differing politics; second, “Divided Memory” characterized by a perception of resource competition; and third, “Fragmented Memory,” consisting of a form of sympathetic ignorance by which memories of other groups or events are tolerated, but not actively interlinked. Central topics that emerge within memory conflicts and entanglements are the history of National Socialism, World War II and the Shoah, the history of the state of Israel and the Israel-Palestinian conflict, the Armenian Genocide, the history of the Ottoman Empire and—to a lesser extent—the history of colonialism. We argue that much can be gained by applying Rothberg’s concept to contemporary empirical settings, both in order to understand its current implications but also to help flesh out its underlying theoretical notions. These are regarding possible “negative” forms of multidirectional memory, as well as the implications and ethics of historical comparisons.

Genealogical Imagination as an Area of Conflicted Memories: A Post-Sarmatic Case Study

In this article, I will discuss two levels of memory conflicts in family genealogies: internal – intimate and private, involving mainly taboos in genealogical practices, and external, which come from broader realms of memory, such as national myths and other collective patterns of imagining the past. The leading story in this article is a multidimensional genealogical narrative provided by an amateur genealogist Iwona Sudnik from Pęgowo near Wroclaw. Her genealogical imagination as a form of living “over [family] time” (Jackson 2021) is considered here as an area of accumulated memories that intermingle, complement, or compete with one another, providing background against which conflicts of memory can be studied in the course of in-depth ethnographic research.