Memory Literature Research Articles

Implicit Statistical Learning: A Tale of Two Literatures.

Implicit learning and statistical learning are two contemporary approaches to the long-standing question in psychology and cognitive science of how organisms pick up on patterned regularities in their environment. Although both approaches focus on the learner's ability to use distributional properties to discover patterns in the input, the relevant research has largely been published in separate literatures and with surprisingly little cross-pollination between them. This has resulted in apparently opposing perspectives on the computations involved in learning, pitting chunk-based learning against probabilistic learning. In this paper, I trace the nearly century-long historical pedigree of the two approaches to learning and argue for their integration under the heading of "implicit statistical learning." Building on basic insights from the memory literature, I sketch a framework for statistically based chunking that aims to provide a unified basis for understanding implicit statistical learning.

A Computational Model of Working Memory Integrating Time-Based Decay and Interference.

There is still a strong debate in the working memory literature about the cause of forgetting, with many articles providing evidence for the existence of temporal decay and as many publications providing evidence compatible with interference being the only mechanism involved in forgetting. In order to reconcile the two views, this article describes TBRS∗-I (for Time-Based Resource-Sharing∗-Interference), a computational model of working memory which incorporates an interference-based mechanism to the decay-based implementation TBRS∗ within the TBRS theoretical framework. At encoding, memoranda are associated to their context, namely their position in the list. Temporal decay decreases the strength of these associations, but a refreshing process may reactivate it during free time. Distractors may alter the distributed representation of memoranda but refreshing can restore them based on the long-term memory representations. Refreshing is therefore twofold: reactivation plus restoration, each one counteracting the detrimental time-based and interference-based decays, respectively. Two types of interference are implemented: interference by confusion which depends on the degree of overlap between memoranda and distractors and interference by superposition which depends on the similarity between them. TBRS∗-I was tested on six benchmark findings on retention-interval and distractor-processing effects by means of millions of simulations testing the effects of seven factors on memory performance: the number of memoranda, the duration of distractor attentional capture, the duration of free time, the number of distractors, the amount of overlap between memoranda and distractors, the similarity between memoranda and distractors and the homogeneity of distractors (all identical or all distinct). TBRS∗-I replicated classical effects and proved to be a suitable hybrid model integrating both interference and time-based decay. The article also discusses the compatibility of TBRS∗-I with a unitary or dual view of memory and the issue of integrating time and interference in a single model. Computer codes and data are available at https://osf.io/65sna/.

Współczesny polski reportaż literacki wobec problematyki oryginalności, niepowtarzalności, intertekstualności oraz pamięci

<p>Tematem tekstu jest problematyka przekraczania paradygmatu nowości, niepowtarzalności i oryginalności – a tym samym utrzymywanie swoistej pamięci literatury – we współczesnym polskim reportażu literackim. Niektórzy polscy reportażyści próbują świadomie zastosować poststrukturalistyczne metafory recyklingu, bricolage’u czy montażu w tekstach będących, na pierwszy rzut oka, gatunkowym zaprzeczeniem zarówno stosunkowo szeroko rozumianej intertekstualności, która leży u podstaw wspomnianych metafor, jak i pewnej, wynikającej z takiego podejścia do tekstu, „nieoryginalności”. W dzisiejszym reportażu ważną rolę odgrywają jednak także zabiegi intertekstualne polegające na świadomym tworzeniu relacji pomiędzy poszczególnymi tekstami literackimi (np. reportaże Pawła Smoleńskiego, Jacha Hugo-Badera, wcześniej Ryszarda Kapuścińskiego). To wszystko pomaga, przez odniesienia do starszych tekstów, utrzymywać pamięć literatury, ale także pamięć o ważnych dla opisywanego społeczeństwa wydarzeniach relacjonowanych przez reportażystów. Autorka podjęła próbę zbadania nie tylko relacji między światem i tekstem w wybranych reportażach literackich, ale także opisu relacji między jednym a drugim tekstem w szerszym kontekście (po)nowoczesnego podejścia do problematyki oryginalności oraz niepowtarzalności.</p>

The Memory about the Jewish Name in Thomas Hürlimanns Trilogy

As Assmann’s theory proves, the Literature plays an important role for the collective memories. It changes the discourse structure of society, by means of letting marginal, repressed or forgotten voice be read, heard and then finally have the chance to be reflected. This article aims to analyze the “family trilogy” of Hurlimann, one of the most significant Swiss authors, in order to figure out the collective and literary memories associated with Jews in Switzerland and its impact on the construction of the their identity.

Letter to His Father by Franz Kafka: Literary Reconstruction of a Traumatic Childhood?

Franz Kafka's Letter to His Father is one of the greatest examples in world literature of memory of a traumatic childhood. In it, the author takes a retrospective journey through his life, recollecting and analyzing the reasons for the estrangement and hostility between a father and a son. This essay considers Letter to His Father in the light of current knowledge about autobiographical memory. The essay first sets forth basic aspects of Kafka's life in order to place Letter to His Father in the context of Kafka's biography, and then presents Kafka's relevance to the literature and thought of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The essay then considers the different forms of childhood abuse and their consequences in light of evidence from neurodevelopmental psychology. We present evidence about the relationship between trauma and the construction of self-image. Furthermore, we discuss the subjectivity of Kafka's recollections from the perspective of recent advances in neurobiology. Memory is shown to be dynamic, selective, inherently malleable and dependent on perception, which is a subjective construction, in which the brain interprets and gives coherence to experienced stimuli. We consider the inaccuracy of memory, which is related to neuroplastic changes in the brain that take place over time: consolidation, reconsolidation and transformation. Finally, the relationship between literature and autobiography in the Kafkaesque universe is considered.

Redefining Black Consciousness and resistance: The intersection of Black Consciousness and Black feminist thought

abstractThis article explores Black womxn's self-representations of key experiences in the #RhodesMustFall (#RMF) movement, when the movement explicitly adopts Black feminist theory, such as intersectionality, as an approach for anti-racist resistance in South African higher education. The self-representations of being ‘womxn’ and being ‘Black’ are complemented by a new political consciousness in post-1994 South Africa (SA), which challenges the current dominant masculine ideas of liberation and solidarity. This study uses the #RMF movement as a case study in order to understand new developments in ideologies such as Black feminism and Black Consciousness which emerge from Black womxn's theorisations. These developments in theory emerge in Black womxn activists’ voices, literature and representations of memory; however, there remain patterns of history that repeat themselves in the politics of Black liberation.This article draws its analyses from a conversation of memory-work with four Black womxn activists from the #RMF movement, who experience violence based on their social position and immediate context – the university. Memory-work, as a feminist methodology, allows for individual and collective reflection and theorisations to lead to complex understandings of violence. Violence is understood spatially, linguistically, intellectually, spiritually, and politically and their resistance to that is intersectional and holistic. Through their representations of their experiences, the #RMF Black womxn activists theorise the ontology of Blackness with more nuance and more complex understandings of Black community or collective resistance and liberation. This article enables us to understand the dynamics of either Black feminist, womanist or African feminist discourse and anti-racist discourse in SA – particularly in spaces of activism, and further, how it challenges the purpose and role of a university.

A Diffusive-Particle Theory of Free Recall.

Diffusive models of free recall have been recently introduced in the memory literature, but their potential remains largely unexplored. In this paper, a diffusive model of short-term verbal memory is considered, in which the psychological state of the subject is encoded as the instantaneous position of a particle diffusing over a semantic graph. The model is particularly suitable for studying the dependence of free-recall observables on the semantic properties of the words to be recalled. Besides predicting some well-known experimental features (forward asymmetry, semantic clustering, word-length effect), a novel prediction is obtained on the relationship between the contiguity effect and the syllabic length of words; shorter words, by way of their wider semantic range, are predicted to be characterized by stronger forward contiguity. A fresh analysis of archival free-recall data allows to confirm this prediction.

All the Right Noises: Background Variability Helps Early Word Learning.

Variability is prevalent in early language acquisition, but, whether it supports or hinders learning is unclear; while target variability has been shown to facilitate word learning, variability in competitor items has been shown to make the task harder. Here, we tested whether background variability could boost learning in a referent selection task. Two groups of 2‐year‐old children saw arrays of one novel and two known objects on a screen, and they heard a novel or known label. Stimuli were identical across conditions, with the exception that in the constant color condition objects appeared on a uniform white background, and in the variable color condition backgrounds were different, uniform colors. At test, only children in the variable condition showed evidence of retaining label‐object associations. These data support findings from the adult memory literature, which suggest that variability supports learning by decontextualizing representations. We argue that these data are consistent with dynamic systems accounts of learning in which low‐level entropy adds sufficient noise to the developmental system to precipitate a change in behavior.

The Influence of task Demands, Verbal Ability and Executive Functions on Item and Source Memory in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is generally associated with difficulties in contextual source memory but not single item memory. There are surprising inconsistencies in the literature, however, that the current study seeks to address by examining item and source memory in age and ability matched groups of 22 ASD and 21 comparison adults. Results show that group differences in source memory are moderated by task demands but not by individual differences in verbal ability, executive function or item memory. By contrast, unexpected group differences in item memory could largely be explained by individual differences in source memory. These observations shed light on the factors underlying inconsistent findings in the memory literature in ASD, which has important implications for theory and practice.

Diário de Ilhéus: os textos literários da década de 30

No início do século passado os jornais eram os maiores divulgadores da Literatura no Brasil, uma vez que, os livros eram escassos, custavam muito caro e não chegavam às regiões periféricas do país. Assim, existe a necessidade de se preservar os jornais e periódicos do início do século XX, visto que esses nem sempre são preservados de forma adequada e conveniente. Uma exceção a essa realidade são os jornais dos grandes centros, como a Folha de São Paulo, que têm experiências bem sucedidas sobre a preservação das publicações literárias em suas edições antigas. Por outro lado, jornais como o Diário da Tarde de Ilhéus, que guardam em suas páginas um riquíssimo acervo histórico e literário, estão se deteriorando por falta de espaço e conservação adequada, mesmo sendo um acervo importante para a preservação da Memória Literária do Sul da Bahia.

Lack of spacing effects during piano learning.

Spacing effects during retention of verbal information are easily obtained, and the effect size is large. Relatively little evidence exists on whether motor skill retention benefits from distributed practice, with even less evidence on complex motor skills. We taught a 17-note musical sequence on a piano to individuals without prior formal training. There were five lags between learning episodes: 0-, 1-, 5-, 10-, and 15-min. After a 5-min retention interval, participants’ performance was measured using three criteria: accuracy of note playing, consistency in pressure applied to the keys, and consistency in timing. No spacing effect was found, suggesting that the effect may not always be demonstrable for complex motor skills or non-verbal abilities (timing and motor skills). Additionally, we taught short phrases from five songs, using the same set of lags and retention interval, and did not find any spacing effect for accuracy of song reproduction. Our findings indicate that although the spacing effect is one of the most robust phenomena in the memory literature (as demonstrated by verbal learning studies), the effect may vary when considered in the novel realm of complex motor skills such as piano performance.

Transactive Memory in Small, Intimate Groups: More Than the Sum of Their Parts

Thirty years after social psychologist, Daniel Wegner, pitched a new approach to the study of individual and group behavior, his theory of transactive memory has inspired rich literatures on the cognitive and social lives of small groups, especially in social and organizational domains. We revisit Wegner’s original conceptualization of transactive memory as a feature of long-standing intimate groups, such as romantic couples and other family and friendship groups. We sketch the spread and success of Wegner’s theory across social, organizational, cognitive, and educational domains, noting particular spaces where a renewed focus on intimate groups could add to our vision of transactive memory systems. We review recent interdisciplinary research on couples as socially distributed cognitive systems, which combines influential philosophical views of distributed cognition and the burgeoning experimental memory literature on collaborative recall. We then discuss two core conceptual and methodological challenges of Wegner’s theorizing revealed by intimate and other groups: navigating between memory units, or levels of analysis, and measuring genuine emergence in transactive memory systems. Finally, we suggest an interdisciplinary framework and recommendations for future research on transactive memory in small groups.

Neurocognitive mechanisms of real-world autobiographical memory retrieval: insights from studies using wearable camera technology.

In recent years, investigation into the cognitive and neural mechanisms of autobiographical memory has been aided by the use of experimental paradigms incorporating wearable camera technology. By effortlessly capturing first-person images of one's life events, these cameras provide a rich set of naturalistic stimuli that can later be used to trigger the recall of specific episodes. Here, we chronicle the development and progression of such studies in behavioral and neuroimaging examinations of both clinical and nonclinical adult populations. Experiments examining the effects of periodic review of first-person images of life events have documented enhancements of autobiographical memory retrieval. Such benefits are most pronounced in patients with memory impairments, but there is mounting evidence that cognitively healthy individuals may benefit as well. Findings from functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments using wearable camera stimuli as retrieval probes have produced results that, although largely consistent with the broader episodic memory literature, have significantly extended prior findings concerning the underlying mnemonic processes and the neural representation of autobiographical information. Taken together, wearable camera technology provides a unique opportunity for studies of autobiographical memory to more closely approximate real-world conditions, thus offering enhanced ecological validity and opening up new avenues for experimental work.

Una guerra como destino del exiliado: Londres bajo las bombas según Carles Pi i Sunyer (1888-1971)

aproximación a la literatura memorial en lengua catalana debida a los exiliados de la Guerra Civil española que se encontraron como destino con la Europa de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, en algunos casos como paso previo al exilio en tierras americanas o como definitivo. atención particularizada a los volúmenes debidos al político catalán Carles Pi i Sunyer: Aquell verd anglès, Vuit escrits d’exili (1939-1941) y Londres en guerra, 1939-1942. Impressions d’un exiliat.

Friends with benefits: A temporal comparison of electoral pact negotiations in the British context

Electoral pacts between British political parties have been mooted more often than folk memory or current academic literature would suggest. There has been little attempt to tackle them empirically, and comparative theory on pre-electoral coalitions is formative at best. This article uses a comparative framework to historically trace three cases where pre-electoral coalitions have been seriously discussed by British political parties – one that was eventually fully operational, and two that ultimately were not formed. It posits a strong role for party leaders and elite-level dynamics in explaining the success and failure of negotiations between parties, and finds them to be an enduring example of intra-party collective decision making. There also exists a clear divide between success and failure in negotiations dependent on whether pacts are perceived to be electorally expedient, or intrinsically damaging to short and long-term party goals. These are based on contrasting interpretive standpoints on the constraints of Westminster and voter perceptions of coalitions.

Medieval Dublin XII, XIII, XIV, ed. Seán Duffy

This beautifully produced series continues to showcase the considerable interest of Dublin throughout the Middle Ages (and beyond). The seemingly endless wealth of material available for its study, originally presented in papers delivered at the annual symposia organised by the Friends of Medieval Dublin or commissioned later, has been brought to publication year after year by Seán Duffy, backed by the Department of History of Trinity College Dublin and Dublin City Council. A paper in Medieval Dublin XII on the manuscripts in the library of Trinity College continues the series’ custom of drawing attention to available historical sources for the history of the city. Others examine the impact of the Hospitallers and Templars who held the manor of Clontarf after 1171 and the origins (from the county, not the town) of Dublin’s fourteenth-century sheriffs. The bulk of Medieval Dublin XII, however, continues the documentation of the physical character of the early medieval town that has been at the heart of the series since its inception in 1999. Here we have papers reporting on excavations within the Viking-Age settlement and its expanding (often industrial) suburbs over the centuries, especially extending to the west and south, plus an important consideration of how discoveries elsewhere in Ireland have affected interpretation of the first Scandinavian settlement on the site. Excavations at an early church site at Dundrum, now a suburb of the modern city, raise questions about its fate during the Viking takeover and its evolution over succeeding centuries. Investigations in the precinct of St Mary’s Abbey on the north bank of the Liffey demonstrate the physical legacy of that religious house, exemplifying the evidence so often provided in this series of the remarkable degree to which the past has left its mark on Dublin’s modern streetscape. That so much new physical evidence is available is largely thanks to the building boom in Ireland in the second half of the twentieth century. While allowing unprecedented access to Dublin’s archaeology, it has also contributed to the destruction of a great deal of the urban framework that had been built up over more than a millennium. The paper that closes Medieval Dublin XIII, an architect’s account of the plan commissioned (but not since implemented) in 2007 by Dublin City Council, raises the question of how to reclaim ‘the damaged memory’ of the town (p. 320) and build in the present in a way that does not forget the past. Medieval Dublin XIII also includes three important papers on the politics and material culture (especially coins) of the Viking-Age town and a report on excavations of a medieval priory and the early buildings of the institution that replaced it, Trinity College. Other articles follow the development of municipal government in Dublin from its Scandinavian origins to the end of the Middle Ages, chart the links between the city and Bristol, and document a medieval ‘Black Monday’ (in 1209). The early holdings of the diocese of Dublin and the early history of Ireland’s Dominicans are also examined. Discussions of the historical writing of James Yonge in the early fifteenth century and an eighteenth-century survey of the city by John Rocque continue the task of drawing attention to the wealth of sources for Dublin, to which a study of Elizabethan-era literary memories of the battle of Clontarf in 1014 (which preserve a different view from the one that became traditional) is a welcome addition. This theme of the recycling of traditions about Clontarf is reprised in its anniversary year in Medieval Dublin XIV, with discussion of a twelfth-century story about Hereward from Lincolnshire which likewise might reflect a Scandinavian perspective on the conflict. Several reports of archaeological investigations continue the process of considering the town’s material culture in the Viking Age and mapping the medieval suburbs, while others investigate the conversion of its Scandinavians to Christianity, the system of grange farms that supported Dublin’s Cistercian abbey (St Mary’s) and the early stages of St Patrick’s Cathedral. Dublin’s mayors take centre stage in three papers, a discussion of a dispute with the archbishop in 1266–7, an account of the mayor’s role in the coronation of Lambert Simnel, and a study of mayors, bailiffs and sheriffs from c.1200 to the present, listed in an appendix.

Emotional memory: No source memory without old-new recognition.

Findings reported in the memory literature suggest that the emotional components of an encoding episode can be dissociated from nonemotional memory. In particular, it has been found that the previous association with threatening events can be retrieved in aversive conditioning even in the absence of item identification. In the present study, we test whether emotional source memory can be independent of item recognition. Participants saw pictures of snakes paired with threatening and nonthreatening context information (poisonousness or nonpoisonousness). In the source memory test, participants were required to remember whether a snake was associated with poisonousness or nonpoisonousness. A simple extension of a well-established multinomial source monitoring model was used to measure source memory for unrecognized items. By using this model, it was possible to assess directly whether participants were able to associate a previously seen snake with poisonousness or nonpoisonousness even if the snake itself was not recognized as having been presented during the experiment. In 3 experiments, emotional source memory was only found for recognized items. While source memory for recognized items differed between emotional and nonemotional information, source memory for unrecognized items was equally absent for emotional and nonemotional information. We conclude that emotional context information is bound to item representations and cannot be retrieved in the absence of item recognition. (PsycINFO Database Record

Fingers of Memory: “The Bench of Desolation”

This article considers the roles played by memory in James’s late story “The Bench of Desolation” (1910). These include personal memories on James’s part (of being threatened with a potentially humiliating lawsuit), and literary memories, of others’ work and his own, principally Dickens’s Great Expectations and James’s recent The Wings of the Dove . Primarily, though, the discussion centers on how the story’s central character has been imprisoned for many years by an obsessive memory and the deeply mixed feelings that arise when he is suddenly and unexpectedly offered a release from it.

Revisiting Prussia's Wars against Napoleon: History, Culture and Memory by Karen Hagemann

Reviewed by: Revisiting Prussia's Wars against Napoleon: History, Culture and Memory by Karen Hagemann Amir Minsky Revisiting Prussia's Wars against Napoleon: History, Culture and Memory. By Karen Hagemann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. xiv + 483. Paper $34.99. ISBN 978-0521152303. Revisiting Prussia's Wars against Napoleon contributes to a growing literature reassessing the so-called "anti-Napoleonic Wars" of 1806–1807 and 1813–1815, by offering an interdisciplinary interpretation of the role of the campaigns in shaping Prussian (and more broadly German) history and collective memory during the long nineteenth century. Karen Hagemann combines military, political, and cultural history to describe the rise and consolidation of German nationhood in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, and the subsequent appropriation of their commemorative practices for shifting political and cultural climates. This identity politics was driven by a dual process: on the one hand the construction of collective memory as an amalgamation of communicative memory (generational, temporal) and cultural memory (national, institutional); and on the other the history of suppression of gender from that collective memory. While this marginalization was often ascribed to men's and women's divergent experiences of war situations in the public and private spheres, Hagemann demonstrates how the link between late Enlightenment anthropological perceptions about national descent, identity, and character, and assumptions about "natural" gender hierarchies was instrumental in the efforts to collectively forget or "redomesticate" women's wartime participation, which pushed postwar Prussian political culture toward a cult of martial masculinity. The struggle over definitions of gender identities and relations thus provides the prism through which Hagemann reexamines the wars' lasting significance and various legacies. This interpretative rationale undergirds the book's five parts: from the military and political history of the wars, their representation in a variety of media, commemorative practices, and circulation in the literary market, to their eventual deployment in both remembered and reconstructed German pasts. In contrast to Thomas Nipperdey's famous claim that "in the beginning was Napoleon" as the prime mover of modern German history (32), Hagemann's approach charts the internal experiences of military defeat, emotional crisis, and their catalyzing effect on Germany's subsequent transformation from Kulturnation to Staatsnation. That the campaigns of 1813–1815 came to be known as either "Wars of Liberation" or "Wars of Liberty"—in conservative or liberal interpretations, respectively—underscores their different legacies as either "wars of princes" launched against the external French threat or "people's wars" additionally encompassing internal emancipation struggles along class and gender lines. As Hagemann shows, such legacies were borne by a public sphere that enabled female authors to express themselves politically and wrest a modicum of control over the production of collective memory from professional historians. The book's in-depth analysis of a vast collection of newspapers, pamphlets, broadsheets, and poems, and [End Page 638] their uses of "national pathos formulas" (64) as emotional catalysts in support of the war effort, attests to such media's success in entrenching ideas about national unity, gender order, and cultural and historical identity for generating a new sense of "Germanness." Although this assessment of the spread of nationhood via print culture and an "invention of tradition" of shared cultural heritage is not necessarily new, Hagemann points out the conceptual malleability of gendered thinking in both exclusive and inclusive iterations of nationalism: while Francophobia, antisemitism, and German chauvinism were staples of both liberal and conservative national discourses, the virtuous bourgeois family model informed the paternalistic "Volk family" (60) ideology of the nation, espousing the Prussian monarch as father of his people, as well as the more radically democratic (and French-influenced) visions of fraternal civic patriotism. More broadly, the book raises important questions about the politics of national memory in modern German history. By focusing on autobiographical and memory literature that transmitted the experiences of violence, devastation, and death of combatants and civilians alike, Hagemann's book goes against the grain of the triumphalist war narratives of canonical Prussian and Wilhelmine historiography, which embraced the dominant monarchic-conservative version of German nationalism in the post-1848 era. Although the so-called "nationalist machinery" driving a cult of self-sacrifice and heroic death for the fatherland held...

Benefits and Costs of Context Reinstatement in Episodic Memory: An ERP Study

This study investigated context-dependent episodic memory retrieval. An influential idea in the memory literature is that performance benefits when the retrieval context overlaps with the original encoding context. However, such memory facilitation may not be driven by the encoding-retrieval overlap per se but by the presence of diagnostic features in the reinstated context that discriminate the target episode from competing episodes. To test this prediction, the encoding-retrieval overlap and the diagnostic value of the context were manipulated in a novel associative recognition memory task. Participants were asked to memorize word pairs presented together with diagnostic (unique) and nondiagnostic (shared) background scenes. At test, participants recognized the word pairs in the presence and absence of the previously encoded contexts. Behavioral data show facilitated memory performance in the presence of the original context but, importantly, only when the context was diagnostic of the target episode. The electrophysiological data reveal an early anterior ERP encoding-retrieval overlap effect that tracks the cost associated with having nondiagnostic contexts present at retrieval, that is, shared by multiple previous episodes, and a later posterior encoding-retrieval overlap effect that reflects facilitated access to the target episode during retrieval in diagnostic contexts. Taken together, our results underscore the importance of the diagnostic value of the context and suggest that context-dependent episodic memory effects are multiple determined.