(PDF) Remembering (Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition)

(PDF) Remembering (Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition)
About
Press
Papers
We're Hiring!
Outline
Title
Abstract
The Plural Subject of Memories
Conclusion
References
All Topics
Psychology
Cognitive Psychology
Remembering (Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition)
John Sutton
2009, The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition
visibility
description
19 pages
Sign up for access to the world's latest research
check
Get notified about relevant papers
check
Save papers to use in your research
check
Join the discussion with peers
check
Track your impact
Abstract
The case of remembering poses a particular challenge to theories of situated cognition, and its successful treatment within
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.
Related papers
Embodied Remembering (Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition) [Sutton & Williamson]
John Sutton
The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition, 2014
Introduction: the diversity of embodied remembering Experiences of embodied remembering are familiar and diverse. We settle bodily into familiar chairs or find our way easily round familiar rooms. We inhabit our own kitchens or cars or workspaces effectively and comfortably, and feel disrupted when our habitual and accustomed objects or technologies change or break or are not available. Hearing a particular song can viscerally bring back either one conversation long ago, or just the urge to dance. Some people explicitly use their bodies to record, store, or cue memories. Others can move skilfully, without stopping to think, in complex and changing environments thanks to the cumulative expertise accrued in their history of fighting fires, or dancing, or playing hockey. The forms of memory involved in these cases may be distinct, operating at different timescales and levels, and by way of different mechanisms and media, but they often cooperate in the many contexts of our practices of remembering.
Download free PDF
View PDF
chevron_right
Philosophical Antecedents of Situated Cognition
Shaun Gallagher
In this chapter I plan to situate the concept of situated cognition within the framework of antecedent philosophical work. My intention, however, is not to provide a simple historical guide but to suggest that there are still some untapped resources in these past philosophers that may serve to enrich current accounts of situated cognition.
Download free PDF
View PDF
chevron_right
How situated is cognition
Bob Wielinga
Proceedings of the Twelveth IJCAI, 1991
This paper discusses the recent views on knowledge, representations, and memory as presented by different researchers under the flag of 'situated cognition*. The situated view implies a radical shift of paradigm. We argue that there are no strong reasons to leave the traditional paradigm of cognitive science and AI. Four main issues are addressed; the role of computational models in theories of cognition, theories on knowledge and memory, the frame of reference problem and implications for learning and instruction. The main conclusion of the paper is that 'situationism' is throwing out the baby with the bath water. Consolidated achievements of Cognitive Science and AI still stand, even if the architectures that are assumed to underly traditional models of cognition can be challenged.
Download free PDF
View PDF
chevron_right
Contextualizing Human Memory
Charles B. Stone
While research methodologies across the social sciences may differ, those social scientists interested in remembering in the "real world" agree that such remembrances occur in particular contexts and that these contexts have profound influences on how the past is remembered. Moreover, if human cognitive activity is the result of contextualized interactions with culturally and historically organized material and social environments (Huchins, 2010), then an explicit description of these contexts is essential toward understanding when and how individuals and groups remember the past at any particular moment (see, for example, the work by the psychologist, Endel Tulving on the encoding specificity principle, Tulving and Thomson, 1973; see also ).
Download free PDF
View PDF
chevron_right
Gallagher, S. 2009. Philosophical antecedents to situated cognition
Shaun Gallagher
2009
In this chapter I plan to situate the concept of situated cognition within the framework of antecedent philosophical work. My intention, however, is not to provide a simple historical guide but to suggest that there are still some untapped resources in these past philosophers that may serve to enrich current accounts of situated cognition. I will include embodied cognition as part of the concept of situated cognition.
Download free PDF
View PDF
chevron_right
Situated Cognition in Theoretical and Practical Context
Brent G Wilson
Page 76. 3 Situated Cognition in Theoretical and Practical Context Brent G. Wilson University of Colorado at Denver Karen Madsen Myers University of Colorado at Denver INTRODUCTION The discipline of instructional design ...
Download free PDF
View PDF
chevron_right
Embodiment and Place in Autobiographical Remembering.docx
Paula Reavey
The relationship between place and remembering has been a longstanding matter of phenomenological concern. The role of the ‘lived body’ in mediating acts of remembering in context is clearly crucial. In this paper we contribute to an ‘expanded view of memory’ by describing how remembering difficult or problematic events ― ‘vital memories’ ― draws upon inter-subjective and inter-objective relations. We discuss two conceptual tools that provide an analytic framework ― the concept of ‘life space’ drawn from Kurt Lewin (1936) and the idea of the ‘setting specificity’ of remembering. From this perspective we can see that the ‘lived body’ does not constitute a singular unity but rather a ‘plurality’ of potential bodies that have ‘operative solidarity’ (cf. Simondon, 2009) with the material relations in which they are constituted. Drawing on the work of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, we argue that ‘body memories’ need to be analysed from within the embodied material-relational perspective wherein they are afforded.
Download free PDF
View PDF
chevron_right
Socially Situated Cognition: Recasting Social Cognition as an Emergent Phenomenon
tomas palma
The SAGE Handbook of Social Cognition
Download free PDF
View PDF
chevron_right
Embodiment and place in autobiographical remembering: a relational-material approach
Paula Reavey
2018
The relationship between place and remembering has been a longstanding matter of phenomenological concern. The role of the ‘lived body’ in mediating acts of remembering in context is clearly crucial. In this paper we contribute to an ‘expanded view of memory’ by describing how remembering difficult or problematic events ― ‘vital memories’ ― draws upon inter-subjective and inter-objective relations. We discuss two conceptual tools that provide an analytic framework ― the concept of ‘life space’ drawn from Kurt Lewin (1936) and the idea of the ‘setting specificity’ of remembering. From this perspective we can see that the ‘lived body’ does not constitute a singular unity but rather a ‘plurality’ of potential bodies that have ‘operative solidarity’ (cf. Simondon, 2009) with the material relations in which they are constituted. Drawing on the work of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, we argue that ‘body memories’ need to be analysed from within the embodied material-relational perspective whe...
Download free PDF
View PDF
chevron_right
Philosophical antecendents to situated cognition
Shaun Gallagher
2009
In this chapter I plan to situate the concept of situated cognition within the framework of antecedent philosophical work. My intention, however, is not to provide a simple historical guide but to suggest that there are still some untapped resources in these past philosophers that may serve to enrich current accounts of situated cognition. I will include embodied cognition as part of the concept of situated cognition. One often encounters these terms used togetherembodied cognition and situated cognitionand it is clear that situated cognition cannot be disembodied, although some authors emphasize one over the other or provide principled distinctions between them.1 Philosophical thought experiments notwithstanding, however, the often-encountered brain in a vat is, to say the least, in a very odd and artificial situation. Given what seems to be an essential connection between embodiment and situation, I will take the more inclusive and holistic route and view them accordingly.
Download free PDF
View PDF
chevron_right
P1: SQE
CUUS366-13 cuus366/Robbins ISBN: 978 0 521 84832 9 Top: 0.5in Gutter: 0.875in July 8, 2008 15:24

CHAPTER 13

Remembering

John Sutton

1. Introduction: The Interdisciplinary Critics of classical cognitive science often
Framework painted mainstream theories of memory as
rigidly mechanistic and individualist, offer-
The case of remembering poses a partic- ing disparate phenomenological, Wittgen-
ular challenge to theories of situated cog- steinian, or direct realist alternatives (Ben-
nition, and its successful treatment within Zeev, 1986; Bursen, 1978; Casey, 1987; Krell,
this framework will require a more dramatic 1990; Malcolm, 1977; Sanders, 1985; Stern,
integration of levels, fields, and methods 1991; ter Hark, 1995; Turvey & Shaw,
than has yet been achieved. The challenge 1979; Wilcox & Katz, 1981). Although the
arises from the fact that memory often takes more recent work on memory in situ-
us out of the current situation: in remember- ated cognition and related (dynamical, dis-
ing episodes or experiences in my personal tributed, enactive, and embodied) traditions
past, for example, I am mentally transported described in this chapter has drawn sub-
away from the social and physical setting in stantially on these positive alternatives, the
which I am currently embedded. Our ability oppositional nature of the earlier debates
to make psychological contact with events has dissipated somewhat. Indeed the mod-
and experiences in the past was one motiva- ern history of memory research across the
tion, in classical cognitive science and cogni- disciplines undermines that easy stereo-
tive psychology, for postulating inner mental type of the cognitive sciences as mono-
representations to hold information across lithically logicist and internalist. Not only
the temporal gap. Theorists of situated cog- had key precursors of situated cognition
nition thus have to show how such an appar- long been points of reference in particu-
ently representation-hungry and decoupled lar subdomains of memory theory, such as
high-level cognitive process may nonethe- the developmental psychology of autobi-
less be fruitfully understood as embodied, ographical memory (Vygotsky, 1930/1978);
contextualized, and distributed (cf. Clark, through independent internal movements
2005a). within computational, cognitive, and social

217

P1: SQE
CUUS366-13 cuus366/Robbins ISBN: 978 0 521 84832 9 Top: 0.5in Gutter: 0.875in July 8, 2008 15:24

218 JOHN SUTTON

psychology alike over twenty-five years or tutional, and so on – shape, constrain, and
more, situated or ecological approaches to enable practices and activities of remem-
memory have come themselves to occupy bering. The case of memory should ide-
the mainstream.1 Although their integra- ally fit David Kirsh’s (2006) description of
tion with traditional laboratory methods the general study of distributed cognition
did not always come easily, the pluralism as “the study of the variety and subtlety
of contemporary memory studies is rea- of coordination . . . how the elements and
sonably happy; ambitious recent syntheses components in a distributed system – peo-
deliberately triangulate robust data and con- ple, tools, forms, equipment, maps and less
straints from distinct sources, incorporating obvious resources – can be coordinated well
as appropriate evidence from phenomenol- enough to allow the system to accomplish
ogy; from neuroimaging and neuropsychol- its tasks” (p. 258; cf. Wilson & Clark, this
ogy; and from cognitive, affective, develop- volume).2
mental, social, and personality psychology
all at once (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000;
Siegel, 2001; Welzer & Markowitsch, 2005). 2. Remembering as Constructive
The sciences of memory have occasion- Activity and Interpersonal Skill
ally seemed somewhat isolated from broader
shifts in cognitive science. But their more Remembering is an activity that takes place
direct integration with the ideas discussed in and over time. Neither the form of that
throughout this volume is now leading activity nor the detailed nature of what is
both to reevaluations of the relevance of remembered is straightforwardly or mono-
other harbingers of the modern construc- causally determined by any internally stored
tivist psychological and social sciences of information. Inner memory traces – what-
memory, such as Bartlett (1932) and Halb- ever they may be – are merely potential
wachs (1925/1992, 1950/1980), and to explic- contributors to recollection, conspiring with
itly situated or distributed theories that see current cues in rich contexts (Schacter, 1996,
the vehicles of representation in memory, pp. 56–71; Tulving, 1983, pp. 12–14). But a
as well as the processes of remembering, as focus on this occurrent activity, which is
potentially spreading across world and body always situated in a range of contexts, does
as well as the brain (Clancey, 1997, 1999; not on its own ground a situated approach
Donald, 1991; Rowlands, 1999; Sutton, 2003, to memory. Individualists, too, can acknowl-
2004; Tribble, 2005; Wilson, 2004, 2005). This edge the existence of a range of contexts; so
chapter offers a synoptic overview of sit- talk of (for example) the external or cultural
uated work on memory and remembering, or social context of remembering is not suf-
skating fast and light over vast and dis- ficient to give us a substantial situated view.
parate literatures to sketch a positive syn- Remembering itself, after all, might still be
thesis of the field. It covers, in turn, rel- firmly contained within the bounds of the
evant movements in cognitive psychology skull. On stronger situated theories, presum-
(section 2), developmental psychology (sec- ably, our understanding of the memory to
tion 3), the social sciences and social phi- which modifiers like extended or distributed
losophy (section 4), and distributed cogni- are applied should itself be significantly
tion (section 5). Conceptual tools from all revised (Wertsch, 1999). This means, fur-
of these fields are required to address the ther, that no neat division of labor between
challenge of situating memory. The aim is an the cognitive and the social sciences of mem-
account of memory in general, or of the vari- ory can be maintained, because the domain
eties and forms of memory in general, which is not neatly sliced into distinct psychologi-
can then be applied to diverse case stud- cal and public aspects that may or may not
ies across the disciplines to suggest just how interact (Sutton, 2004).
in practice various coordinated contexts – In “A Theory of Remembering,” the cen-
neural, bodily, affective, technological, insti- tral chapter of his great work Remembering:

P1: SQE
CUUS366-13 cuus366/Robbins ISBN: 978 0 521 84832 9 Top: 0.5in Gutter: 0.875in July 8, 2008 15:24

REMEMBERING 219

A Study in Experimental and Social Psychol- are independent from one another, stored
ogy, Bartlett (1932) wrote: at separate locations in some memory sys-
tem. It is this localist picture of memory
Suppose I am making a stroke in a quick
storage, which allows for no integration of
game, such as tennis or cricket. . . . When
I make the stroke I do not, as a matter
enduring data with ongoing processing, that
of fact, produce something absolutely new, makes it difficult to update relevant back-
and I never merely repeat something old. ground knowledge without explicit search
The stroke is literally manufactured out of (Copeland, 1993). This is why alternative
the living visual and postural “schemata” models of memory were at the forefront
of the moment and their interrelations. I of the revival of connectionism in the 1980s
may say, I may think that I reproduce and have continued to play a central role
exactly a series of text-book movements, in attempts to align neural network mod-
but demonstrably I do not; just as, under eling with neuropsychology (Churchland &
other circumstances, I may say and think Sejnowski, 1992; Gluck & Myers, 2000).
that I reproduce exactly some isolated event
Occurrent remembering in connection-
which I want to remember, and again
demonstrably I do not. (pp. 201–202)
ist cognitive science is the temporary reac-
tivation of a particular pattern or vector
For Bartlett, explicit remembering is a skill, across the units of a network. This recon-
with just the same peculiar features – com- struction is possible because of the conspir-
bining the familiar and the unique – as com- ing influences of current input and the his-
plex embodied skills. There are a range of tory of the network, as sedimented in the
intriguing and relevant questions, which I connection weights between units. So mem-
cannot address here, about skill and habit, ory traces are not stored separately between
two key varieties of what psychologists experience and remembering but are piled
label “procedural memory,” and about how together or “superposed” in the same set
these forms of remembering relate to more of weights. In fully distributed represen-
explicit and consciously accessible mem- tation, the same resources or vehicles are
ory (Sheets-Johnstone, 2003); but in this thus used to carry many different contents
chapter, I describe situated accounts of the (Clark, 1989; van Gelder, 1991). As McClel-
declarative forms of memory, with a focus land and Rumelhart (1986) put it:
on personal or recollective or autobiographi-
cal memory, which is both theoretically and We see the traces laid down by the pro-
cessing of each input as contributing to the
personally important because of its emo-
composite, superimposed memory represen-
tional and moral significance and its role
tation. Each time a stimulus is processed,
in temporally extended agency.3 As back- it gives rise to a slightly different mem-
ground to the general consensus in situated ory trace – either because the item itself
cognitive psychology on constructivism, the is different or because it occurs in a dif-
most celebrated of Bartlett’s theses, we ferent context that conditions its represen-
examine the related ideas of remembering tation – the traces are not kept separate.
as skilled activity, and of the dynamic nature Each trace contributes to the composite, but
of the enduring states that ground that the characteristics of particular experiences
activity. tend nevertheless to be preserved, at least
until they are overridden by canceling char-
acteristics of other traces. Also, the traces
2.1. Representations and Storage of one stimulus pattern can coexist with
the traces of other stimuli, within the same
Situated approaches to memory not only composite memory trace. (p. 193)
depart from the internalism or methodolog-
ical solipsism of the way internal repre- Connectionist remembering is thus an
sentations were evoked in classical cogni- inferential process, constructive not repro-
tive science but also, in general, reject the ductive. Information survives only in dis-
distinct idea that individual representations positional form: “the data persist only

P1: SQE
CUUS366-13 cuus366/Robbins ISBN: 978 0 521 84832 9 Top: 0.5in Gutter: 0.875in July 8, 2008 15:24

220 JOHN SUTTON

implicitly by virtue of the effect they have context. As the developmental psychologist
on what the system knows” (Elman, 1993, Susan Engel (1999) argues, often “one creates
p. 89). In this dynamic vision of repre- the memory at the moment one needs it,
sentations, connectionism is clearly heir to rather than pulling out an intact item, image,
Bartlett’s (1932) vision: or story” (p. 6). So memory’s temporal
cross-referencing does not run only between
Though we may still talk of traces, there present recall and past experience, because
is no reason in the world for regarding remembering also has a raft of distinctive
these as made complete at one moment, forward-looking or anticipatory features and
stored up somewhere, and then re-excited
functions.
at some much later moment. The traces
that our evidence allows us to speak of are
interest-determined, interest-carried traces. 2.2. Constructivism and Relational
They live with our interests and with them Remembering
they change. (pp. 211–212)
A situated approach to memory, then, is one
Neither this point that traces are plastic that treats this multifarious range of mate-
and malleable nor the more general con- rials as potentially integral, complementary
structivist movement in the cognitive psy- aspects of a cognitive system and its pro-
chology of memory directly entails a sit- cesses of remembering. Such an approach
uated approach. But there is one natural can thus fruitfully draw on the resources of
link (Clark, 1997): stability over time in con- personality and social psychology, as well as
nectionist representational systems is main- on cognitive psychology. Attention to social
tained not through permanent storage, but scaffolding and to technological mediations
through context-dependent reconstruction. of memory is entirely compatible with an
Sometimes, then, remembering requires the interest in individual differences in memory.
interaction or coupling of complementary Just because remembering is selective in this
biological and external resources into tem- way, peculiarities of affective style or self-
porarily extended cognitive systems. On this conception directly shape the way mem-
view, brains like ours need media, objects, ory narratives condense, summarize, and
and other people to function fully as minds. edit past experiences for present purposes
Seeing the brain as a leaky associative engine (McIlwain, 2006). Bartlett had explicitly
(Clark, 1993), its contents flickering and argued that temperament, history, belief,
unstable rather than mirroring the world in and expectation should be incorporated
full, forces attention to the diverse formats within theories of memory when he adapted
of external representations in the technolog- the term schema to refer to “an active orga-
ical and social wild. If biological “engrams” nization of past reactions, or of past expe-
are typically integrative and active in the riences” that act together “as constituents
way connectionism suggests, perhaps it is of living, momentary settings” (1932, p. 201;
natural for creatures like us in using them to also pp. 308–314).4 His interest was in the
hook up with more enduring and transmissi- pervasive effects of preexisting beliefs and
ble “exograms,” in Merlin Donald’s coinage attitudes, or of an idiosyncratic personal his-
(1991, pp. 308–333). We compile memories tory acting as a mass in filtering recall. But
(whether in thought or in public expression) the constructivist consensus in the modern
on the fly, working them up or improvising subdisciplines of psychology, which devel-
them out of whatever materials we have: oped independently of connectionist com-
the vivid sensory detail that comes to mind putational modeling, has in some respects
in episodic fragments and the resources pro- remained narrower in focus. Research on
vided by external symbol systems, as well as suggestibility and the effects of misinfor-
the multiple influences of knowledge about mation on memory, developed initially in
the self and the world; of goals, motivations, the context of eyewitness testimony, was
and moods; and of the current interpersonal dramatically extended in the 1990s to the

P1: SQE
CUUS366-13 cuus366/Robbins ISBN: 978 0 521 84832 9 Top: 0.5in Gutter: 0.875in July 8, 2008 15:24

REMEMBERING 221

heart of personal memory (Hyman & Lof- may be incorporated into many people’s
tus, 1998; Loftus, 2003; Roediger, 1996) – personal memories of childhood experi-
“a variety of conditions exist,” wrote Daniel ences, Strange, Gerrie, and Garry (2005) dis-
Schacter (1995), “in which subjectively com- cuss further similar experiments in which
pelling memories are grossly inaccurate” subjects exposed to false information about
(p. 22). Mainstream psychology of autobi- their past were encouraged to discuss their
ographical memory has continued to treat memories with a sibling. Acknowledging
the ongoing, interpersonally anchored revi- that in real settings, “when confronted with a
sion and remolding of the remembered past difficult to remember narrative about [their]
as the ordinary means by which narratives childhood, people are likely to rely on oth-
of the self develop (Conway, Singer, & ers to verify their memories” (p. 241), these
Tagini, 2004; Ross, 1989); these views are researchers found that after discussion with
thus entirely compatible with situated cog- a sibling the proportion of false memories
nition. But much work on ‘false memory’ dropped dramatically.
has focused on more malign forms of influ- Of course, such negotiations about the
ence, on specific distortions or misleading past do not always bring either agreement
additions inserted into the individual’s mind or truth; but the forthcoming examina-
by some external source. tion of the development of autobiographi-
This strand of constructivist memory the- cal memory will suggest that we also learn
ory tends thus to remain individualistic in to deal with disagreement about the past
orientation (cf. Campbell, 2004; Haaken, most directly and effectively through early
1998). First, construction tends to be simply memory-sharing practices. And in adult life,
equated with distortion, thus neglecting the as Sue Campbell (2006) argues, our attempts
adaptability of memory’s intrinsic dynamics, to be faithful to the past are often sup-
by which the very mechanisms that underlie ported and positively guided by listeners
generalization can in certain circumstances or by joint participants in shared mem-
lead us astray (McClelland, 1995; Schacter, ory activities. Both ordinary memory nar-
1999). Second, influence is characterized as ratives and more public testimonial expres-
essentially or primarily negative, the relent- sions of memory can be co-constructed
less intrusion of the social into malleable without other people’s role bringing cor-
individual memory. Questions about truth ruption. Campbell argues, in particular, that
in memory do take on a new urgency within locating appropriate emotion in remember-
a constructivist framework, but the point ing activities can be a significant compo-
need not be either that reliability is impos- nent of recollective accuracy, where accu-
sible or that interpersonal memory dynam- racy in understood in a context-dependent
ics must bring error and confusion. Truth way; representational success in memory is
and related values like accuracy and fidelity rarely a simple matter of matching an iso-
in memory need be neither simple nor sin- lated present item to a single past event (cf.
gular. In legal contexts, for example, con- Schechtman, 1994). Remembered events,
cerns about contamination and conformity after all, especially ones that matter, are
in witnesses’ memories may be appropri- themselves complex and structured. We
ate. But elsewhere, ordinary and successful often find ourselves striving for the needed
remembering may be relational (Campbell, affective shifts in relation to particular mem-
2003), depending directly on the support and ories through renegotiating in company
involvement of other people and on our abil- the meanings of the personal past. These
ities to create more or less enduring mem- commonplace ways of sharing memories,
ory systems that transcend the capacities of in co-constructing, jointly reevaluating, or
the brain alone. One example comes from just actively listening, bring obligations and
false memory research itself; after show- accountability with them; and when the
ing that misleading visual or verbal infor- negotiations concern experiences that were
mation, when presented in certain ways, themselves shared, the epistemic, affective,

P1: SQE
CUUS366-13 cuus366/Robbins ISBN: 978 0 521 84832 9 Top: 0.5in Gutter: 0.875in July 8, 2008 15:24

222 JOHN SUTTON

and mnemonic interdependence is magni- determine how social and cognitive sources
fied further. are combined in varying ways” (p. 487).
So, one respect in which a thoroughly Robust experimental data in this tradi-
situated approach to memory can push tion addresses the shaping of the child’s
the existing ecological focus on real-life or developing memory by parental and cul-
everyday memory phenomena further is in tural styles or models for the recounting
presenting constructive processes in remem- of past events. In general, for example, the
bering – and, more generally, memory’s spontaneous later memory activity of chil-
openness to various forms of influence – as dren whose parents talk about the past more
more mundane or natural than inevitably elaborate and rich, or more emotional, is
dangerous. In the remaining sections, I try itself more elaborative or emotional (Reese,
to merge these ideas about interpersonal Haden, & Fivush, 1993); and in general, both
memory dynamics with the postconnection- mothers and fathers talk more richly and
ist picture of human beings as essentially more emotionally about the past with girls
incomplete machines, apt to incorporate than with boys (Fivush, 1994). A range of
what has – in the course of evolutionary, cul- cultural differences track these interactions,
tural, and developmental history – become so that, for example, Caucasian American
apt for incorporation (cf. Clark, 2006). children’s spontaneous memories highlight
the self more, in general, than do those
of Korean children (Mullen & Yi, 1995; cf.
3. Remembering as Social Interaction Leichtman, Wang, & Pillemer, 2003).
and Joint Attention to the Past Some presentations of these results sug-
gest that parental influence – in particular
Children start talking about the past pretty maternal reminiscence style – is the pri-
much as soon as they start talking, but their mary driving force behind the emergence
initial references are fleeting and fragmen- of autobiographical memory; the structure
tary, and the capacity to refer to specific and content of the child’s early thought
events in the personal past develops only and talk about the past is provided to a
gradually. A situated approach to the devel- large degree by adults, whose communica-
opment of autobiographical memory needs tive actions construct the scaffolding for
to characterize the explanatory target richly, such early memories. The idea that the
and then seek to extend dynamical models direction of influence is from social and nar-
from more basic domains to capture these rative context to autobiographical memory
high-level cognitive phenomena. The child’s is perhaps encouraged by some uses of the
emerging ability to think about experiences Vygotskian scaffolding metaphor.
at particular past times is more than the But it seems likely that elaborative
capacity to understand sequences of events parental talk, commonly defined as adding
or intervals between events and more than details or richness about a particular aspect
general knowledge of how things usually go. of a past event, is not as vital as the related
A sociocultural developmental theory must but distinct feature of contingency in con-
address multiply interactive developmental versation; a contingent utterance is related
systems spanning the child’s brain and local in content to the conversational partner’s
narrative environment. Nelson and Fivush prior utterance, whereas some elaborations
(2004), building on a twenty-year tradition may not be relevant to the specific conver-
of social interactionist work, characterize sational context and thus not genuinely dia-
the emergence of autobiographical memory logical (Petra, Benga, & Tincas, 2005). Here,
as “the outcome of a social cultural cogni- a better metaphor is that of a spiral process,
tive system, wherein different components in which the child’s changing competence in
are being opened to experiences over time, dialogue about the past itself in turn directly
wherein experiences vary over time and influences the parent’s reminiscence style,
context, and wherein individual histories encouraging the dynamic co-construction of

P1: SQE
CUUS366-13 cuus366/Robbins ISBN: 978 0 521 84832 9 Top: 0.5in Gutter: 0.875in July 8, 2008 15:24

REMEMBERING 223

richer narratives (Haden, Haine, & Fivush the world and the self are causally con-
1997). On a thoroughly situated perspec- nected over time. Their idea is that the
tive, we should reconstruct the difference memory sharing in which parents and chil-
between scaffolding and spiral models not dren engage can best be understood as a
as a theoretical choice with only one right peculiar form of joint attention, directed –
answer but as an empirical spectrum of unlike other forms of joint attention – at
possibilities. This requires a developmen- the past. To grasp “the causal significance
tal systems framework in which the relative of the order in which sequences of events
influence of multiple concurrent processes unfold,” the child needs to understand that
can vary across cases (cf. Griffiths & Stotz, “later events in the sequence can obliterate
2000; Smith & Thelen, 2003). So, recent pre- or change the effect of earlier ones,” so that
sentations of the social-interactionist the- the state of the world and of the child’s cur-
ory address not only the roles of language rent feelings depends on this independently
and the local narrative environment but also ordered history (Hoerl & McCormack, 2005,
the neural and psychological development pp. 267–270).
of other memory systems, the development Using a delayed video-feedback tech-
of a self-schema and of theory of mind, the nique in which children are shown two
emergence of a concept of the past, and the games in different orders, Povinelli, Landry,
role of affective factors such as motivation Theall, Clark, and Castille (1999) demon-
and attachment security (Nelson & Fivush, strated that three-year-olds could not use
2004; Reese, 2002). Autobiographical mem- information about which of two events hap-
ory development can thus be highly buffered pened more recently to update their model
in that different factors play different roles of the world as a series of causally related
at different stages for different children. events unfolds, but that with clear instruc-
For example, children with weaker linguis- tions, five-year-olds could do so. Building
tic skills but stronger early self-recognition on these methods in ingenious experiments
skills, Elaine Reese (2002) has shown, “enter that examine not only temporal updating
the system through a less verbal and more but also the ability to make temporal-causal
autonomous route” (p. 252) than children inferences, McCormack and Hoerl (2005)
who engage in highly elaborative conversa- have shown that children under age five
tions about the past. And when dealing with and some five-year-olds who can success-
such highly history-dependent developmen- fully engage in simple updating of their
tal processes, in which social and neural knowledge base when they observe or infer
influences are “bidirectionally and funda- the world being modified have serious dif-
mentally interactive at all levels of organi- ficulty in making these more sophisticated
zation” (Bjorklund, 2004, p. 344), we would temporal-causal inferences in which they
also expect the degree of significant individ- must grasp the objective sequence of events.
ual variability that requires substantial longi- They suggest that this kind of temporal-
tudinal study (Harley & Reese, 1999; Reese, causal reasoning is just what conversations
2002). about past events elicit or jointly generate,
In an exemplary cross-disciplinary collab- as parent and child together construct a tem-
oration, philosopher Christoph Hoerl and porally structured narrative that explains the
psychologist Teresa McCormack have inves- influence of the past on the present. In joint
tigated more precisely the role of the joint reminiscence, a parent is often not merely
reminiscing activities studied in this social- modeling these narrative abilities but also
interactionist tradition. Building on John directly exerting an influence on the child
Campbell’s (1997) point that mature auto- by encouraging the child to see that things
biographical memory requires us to coor- are not now as they once were. The context
dinate and align egocentric and objective is very often directly affective; the sore fin-
conceptions of time, Hoerl and McCormack ger that caused the child’s past sadness and
suggest that children need to grasp that both pain is no longer sore, because since then

P1: SQE
CUUS366-13 cuus366/Robbins ISBN: 978 0 521 84832 9 Top: 0.5in Gutter: 0.875in July 8, 2008 15:24

224 JOHN SUTTON

Daddy came and made it better (Hoerl & Elam, 1996; Kansteiner, 2002; Klein, 2000).
McCormack, 2005, p. 275, quoting Fivush, This situation exemplifies the ongoing and
1994, p. 149). The shared outlook on the damaging lack of contact between the cog-
past that emerges is thus also evaluative, nitive and the social sciences; in this case it
and in turn grounds other ongoing collabo- is partly because the only English transla-
rative activities; children then come to value tion of Halbwachs’s 1925 book simply omits
memories of particular past events for them- most of the relevant material (the first four
selves, “because the sharing of such memo- chapters, which cover 145 pages in the sec-
ries is a way of establishing, maintaining, or ond French edition of 1952, are condensed
negotiating a distinctively social relationship into 13 pages in the 1992 translation), and
with others” (Hoerl & McCormack, 2005, partly because relevant ideas in situated or
p. 283). distributed cognition remain inaccessible to
So, this may be how the local narrative those social theorists who are keen to forge
practices studied by the social interaction- links with psychology (Bloch, 1998; Middle-
ists, with all their cultural idiosyncrasies, ton & Brown, 2005; Olick, 1999; Winter &
themselves put the child in touch with an Sivan, 1999). The time is ripe for integra-
objective conception of time and causation. tive work to close these gaps (Nelson, 2003;
The practical engagement involved in jointly Rubin, 1995; Sutton, 2004; Wertsch, 2002;
attending to past events and sharing mem- Wilson, 2005).
ories helps the child understand that there Halbwachs argues that what individuals
can be different perspectives on the same retain of the past, if considered outside of
once-occupied time; and thus such shared, their ordinary social context as (for exam-
co-constructed narratives shape the child’s ple) in dreaming, is often incomplete or
initial grasp of the causal connectedness of shrouded, based only on “the disordered
self and world. The acquisition of compe- play of corporal modifications” (1992, pp. 41–
tence in these shared narratives is, inextri- 42; 1980, pp. 71–76). My memory traces
cably, cognitive and social development at are not “fully formed in the unconscious
once. mind like so many printed pages of books
that could be opened, even though they
no longer are,” a view Halbwachs attributes
4. Shared Remembering both to Freud and to his own teacher Berg-
son (1980, p. 75). In remembering and recon-
4.1. Halbwachs on Collective Memory
structing the past, we normally draw not just
Maurice Halbwachs is not often explicitly on such episodic fragments as we hold on
recognized as a forerunner of situated cog- our own but also on the vast and uneven
nition, but in fact his conceptual contribu- resources of our multiple social groups,
tions are as relevant as those of Bartlett or material symbols, and social practices with
Vygotsky. In The Social Frameworks of Mem- which we have surrounded ourselves. This
ory (1925) and the posthumous The Collective is so not only when actually remembering
Memory (1950/1980), Halbwachs developed in company but also by way of the virtual
striking views about shared remembering groups we turn toward affectively when we
and applied them in studies of family mem- revivify experiences; ways of thinking and
ory, religious memory, memory and place, feeling that did not originate with me stay
and musicians’ memory. Halbwachs’s influ- with me as the influences of various groups
ence has been felt much less in the psychol- and continue to animate the explicit memo-
ogy of memory than in history and the social ries I draw from my world (1980, p. 24; on the
sciences (Hutton, 1994; Misztal, 2003; Olick necessity of an affective community, see also
& Robbins, 1998), where many have criti- pp. 30–33). I do have my own unique mem-
cized the vagueness of invocations of collec- ories, as a result of my idiosyncratic history,
tive memory and social memory in contem- but this is just a contingent fact about the
porary social theory (Berliner, 2005; Gedi & complexity of the particular intersection of

P1: SQE
CUUS366-13 cuus366/Robbins ISBN: 978 0 521 84832 9 Top: 0.5in Gutter: 0.875in July 8, 2008 15:24

REMEMBERING 225

social groups and influences at which they required, though, to ground the stronger
lie (1980, pp. 44–49). idea we found in Halbwachs that a group
Robert Wilson (2005), arguing that itself can remember is some alternative way
Halbwachs anticipates “something like an of characterizing the kind of more or less
extended mind view of memory” (pp. 229– transient, socially extended cognitive sys-
231), suggests that slightly different theses tems that can have distributed memories or
are defended at different points in Halb- intentions or beliefs, or can engage in gen-
wachs’s works. On the one hand, “it is in- uinely joint action. This demand might be
dividuals as group members who remem- met by applying to memory the notions of
ber” (Halbwachs, 1980, p. 48), but memory mutual knowledge and of the plural subject
is always and constitutively socially mani- developed in the field of social ontology, as
fested. On the other hand, “it is only natu- a way of taking ordinary “We remember”
ral that we consider the group in itself as statements seriously.
having the capacity to remember” (Halb- Some people who happen to have shared
wachs, 1992, p. 54). Wilson sees some tension experiences clearly do not have a shared or
between these claims, characterizing the lat- collective memory; even if each of them sep-
ter as an application to memory of a more arately retains information about the same
general thesis about group-level cognition, event, and even though their distinct mem-
which is also found in ideas about superor- ories could in principle be aggregated, the
ganisms and swarm intelligence in biology social dimension of memory in this case is
(Wilson, 2004, pp. 265–307). But Halbwachs in an obvious sense accidental or superfi-
himself saw the two claims as not just com- cial. In contrast, think of the way certain
patible but complementary: “One may say ordinary small groups – friends, partners, or
that the individual remembers by placing a family, for example – may continue to
himself in the perspective of the group, but revisit their shared experiences, when the
one may also affirm that the memory of the events they remember together may have
group realizes and manifests itself in individ- a distinct interpersonal and affective signif-
ual memories” (1992, p. 40). Neither individ- icance alongside their personal significance.
ual nor shared memory has ontological pri- Perhaps they reevaluate parts of their lives,
ority. Methodologically, as David Velleman in part, on the basis of – or just by way of –
(1997) argues for the case of shared inten- retelling and reinterpreting some of these
tion, before we rule out the possibility of earlier shared experiences. Occasionally, in
shared cognitive states on the ground that a long-standing close network, significant
there are no group minds to have them, we renegotiation of relationships and plans may
should first offer independent characteriza- be partly enacted through this ongoing joint
tions of the cognitive states in question and reinterpretation of the still-live shared past.
investigate whether they can be held in com- Clearly, there are many intermediate cases;
mon (cf. Clark, Austen, 1994; Gilbert, 1989, but it is only in the latter kind of case that
pp. 432–434). the commonplace notion of a group being
partly held together by, or identified with,
some of its memories has a grip.
4.2. The Plural Subject of Memories
The sharing of memories in this stronger
Indeed it is far from clear that propo- sense is a pervasive social phenomenon, built
nents of socially situated cognition in gen- in to the interpersonal fabric of human
eral need the idea of collective minds; life in significant ways. How should it
mind is a much trickier concept than be understood? The plural-subject analysis
(for example) memory, intention, belief, or developed in other contexts by Margaret
action, and is much less entrenched in ordi- Gilbert (1989, 2003, 2004) may capture fea-
nary usage and perhaps far more cultur- tures of this kind of shared remembering
ally and historically variable (MacDonald, that cannot be accounted for so easily in
2003; Wierzbicka, 1992). What is arguably alternative theoretical models. For example,

P1: SQE
CUUS366-13 cuus366/Robbins ISBN: 978 0 521 84832 9 Top: 0.5in Gutter: 0.875in July 8, 2008 15:24

226 JOHN SUTTON

collective-memory phenomena could be and regret might be partly illuminated by
treated as the aggregate of many indi- such an analysis of shared memory, as there
vidual memories. This kind of summative is plausibly some link between responsibility
approach is exemplified, in the social sci- and memory (on the ethics of memory, see,
ences of memory, by survey-based studies e.g., Margalit, 2002).
of what and how the members of groups
or generations remember about some set of
4.3. Collaborative Recall
events. Schwartz and Schuman (2005), for
example, react against models that exclude To this kind of conceptual analysis of shared
the individual by surveying what many memory phenomena, we can add the exper-
individual Americans of different genera- imental dimension provided by psychologi-
tions remember about Abraham Lincoln. cal studies of collaborative recall. Some of
Whether examining memories of historical this work shares the individualistic orienta-
and public events or of more personal expe- tion of false memory research as mentioned
riences, this collected memory approach – previously, focusing for example on mem-
to use Olick’s (1999) useful label – does ory contagion and memory conformity in
not directly address the active interper- groups (Gabbert, Memon, & Allan, 2003;
sonal dynamics of memory sharing; it might Roediger, Bergman, & Meade, 2001); but the
be merely accidental that the aggregated methods developed in these paradigms do
individual memories converge to whatever not inevitably rely on the assumption that
extent they do. external influence necessarily distorts indi-
So, a fuller account of genuinely shared vidual memory. Studies of transactive mem-
memory must allow for it to be common ory, for example, treat the emergent and
knowledge among the members of the group often implicit structures of memory orga-
that they all share the memories in question. nization in small groups, families, or cou-
In the strongest cases, this common knowl- ples as key components of shared exper-
edge must not itself be accidental but must tise in successfully negotiating a complex
result from and involve the members’ open shared environment (Moreland, Argote, &
expressions of willingness to remember Krishnan, 1996; Wegner, Erber, & Raymond,
jointly and to remain jointly ready and com- 1991). And in collaborative recall paradigms,
mitted to the shared remembering. By thus groups working together typically remem-
pooling their wills, the members of a group ber more than individuals recalling alone
become for these purposes a plural subject, but less than the nominal pooled sum of
the subject of the “we remember” thoughts the individual memories (Basden, Basden, &
and claims. This kind of analysis, here very Henry, 2000; Weldon & Bellinger, 1997). The
roughly adapted from Gilbert’s (1989, pp. causes of this collaborative inhibition effect,
154–167, 288–314) treatments of shared action in which individuals’ retrieval strategies are
and collective belief, could potentially cover somehow disrupted in the collaborative pro-
both occurrent joint activities of remem- cess, are far from clear, and little work in
bering and the standing shared memories the area has dealt with emotional or autobi-
to which groups retain a joint commitment ographical memories (Yaron-Antar & Nach-
over time. It should also begin to explain son, 2006). Further investigations of the cog-
the characteristic structure of obligations, nitive, social, and motivational parameters
commitments, and expectations that partic- of group influence are needed, as of the
ipation in a community of memory brings. impact of subtle differences in the mech-
This, of course, is compatible with the anisms of collaboration and in the specific
fact that there is always room for disagree- nature and history of the groups in question.
ment and renegotiation over the details and In one suggestive line of research, William
meaning of shared memories. And, fur- Hirst and his colleagues (Hirst & Manier,
ther, the problematic but pervasive notions 1996; Hirst, Manier, & Apetroaia, 1997; Hirst,
of collective and shared responsibility Manier, & Cuc, 2003) examine the way in

P1: SQE
CUUS366-13 cuus366/Robbins ISBN: 978 0 521 84832 9 Top: 0.5in Gutter: 0.875in July 8, 2008 15:24

REMEMBERING 227

which specific group dynamics and pro- ory as specific auditory reminiscences and
cesses can influence individual members’ that our untrained natural memory for
subsequent enduring memories. In the basic sounds is sufficient to explain the expert’s
design, each individual first gives his or competence. But because musicians have
her memories of an event that the whole wholly assimilated the conventional system
group has seen or lived through. After var- of musical notation, they do not need to
ious delays, the group as a whole is then conserve all relevant combinations distinctly
asked to recall what happened; after a fur- in their brains. External representations can
ther manipulable delay, each member again then be used to preserve the complex com-
offers his or her own memory. Hirst is par- binations: “the score in this case functions
ticularly interested in cases in which a dom- exactly as a material substitute for the
inant individual or narrator – such as one brain” (1980, p. 162). In the long process of
parent in a family group – has a dispropor- acquiring musical skills, musicians not only
tionate influence on the content (or emo- have learned how to read these external
tional tone, or narrative structure) of both symbols but also have artificially remolded
the group’s consensual account (where one their onboard representational apparatus,
emerges) and members’ subsequent individ- and they come to rely on these new mecha-
ual recollections. Memory contents migrate nisms in their musical habits and thinking
in the process of shared remembering, so whether or not they are actually using a
that sometimes each member’s later recall score.
incorporates, without his or her awareness, In our terms, Halbwachs is arguing that
elements that were only offered by the dom- onboard biological memory is transformed
inant narrator in the group phase. Basic rather than simply augmented. He imag-
cognitive-affective processes and subtle sit- ines an alien neurophysiologist ignorant of
uational factors operate together both in human musical culture and notation. The
the group’s production of a shared or social alien might, Halbwachs suggests, come to
memory and in the effect of collaboration understand the basic representational work-
on subsequent individual memories. ings of the human auditory system as it
responds to natural sound. But it could not
make sense of the traces connected to musi-
5. Distributed Cognition and cal characters. These culturally laden traces
Exograms “reveal the action exerted on the human
brain by . . . a system or colony of other
Most socially distributed transactive mem- human brains” (1980, p. 163), and the musi-
ory systems are not, in fact, exclusively social cal system with which they operate is shared
in that the spread of resources drawn on across the entire musical world of a culture.
in complex activities of remembering may So, for Halbwachs, in these entirely typical
include material, symbolic, technological, respects, the human brain “cannot be con-
and cultural artifacts and objects as well as sidered in isolation” (p. 164); or, as we might
other people. It is not enough to see exter- put it, the musical mind extends beyond the
nal resources or representational systems as brain. The external symbol system of musi-
merely adding supplementary storage capac- cal notation has been annexed, exploited,
ity; again, the most trenchant individualist and assimilated “deep into our mental pro-
could accept this. files” (Clark, 2003, p. 198; Wilson & Clark,
Again, we can draw on Halbwachs’s this volume).6
direct anticipation of distributed cognition.
In The Collective Memory of Musicians,5
5.1. The Cognitive Life of Things
Halbwachs asks how classical musicians reli-
ably remember how to play such an en- So, where classical cognitivists projected
ormous array of pieces of music. He denies stability in information storage onto our
both that musical sounds are fixed in mem- internal psychological economy, situated

P1: SQE
CUUS366-13 cuus366/Robbins ISBN: 978 0 521 84832 9 Top: 0.5in Gutter: 0.875in July 8, 2008 15:24

228 JOHN SUTTON

approaches to memory see it as an emer- (Knappett, 2005; Renfrew & Scarre, 1999),
gent product of organisms’ meeting, within and sociologists of science (Bowker, 2005)
specific cognitive niches, with external sym- offer rich studies of cases in which external
bol systems and other resources. As Clark resources are less passive and medium- inde-
(1997) puts it in his account of Hutchins’s pendent than on Donald’s basic scheme. So,
case study of expert navigation, “the compu- as Clark (2002) writes, the urgent task for
tational power and expertise is spread across a science of biotechnological memory sys-
a heterogeneous assembly of brains, bod- tems is to understand “the range and variety
ies, artifacts, and other external structures” of types of cognitive scaffolding,” by con-
(p. 77; Hutchins, 1995, 2006). The point is structing “a taxonomy of different types of
not that the external resources do the cog- external prop, and . . . of how they help (and
nitive work on their own; it is no argument hinder) human performance” (p. 29; see also
against a situated approach to emotion, for Susi, 2005).
example, to complain that “the black tie I In addition to this direct mediation
wear at the funeral isn’t doing my grieving of memory by the use of cognitive arti-
for me” (Harris, 2004, p. 729). Neither, after facts, however, humans also characteristi-
all, do brains tend to perform their cognitive cally learn, in some circumstances, to drop
functions in isolation. the real external object and thereby cre-
Studies of such cases as the sketch ate an inner surrogate for it. The requisite
pads without which artists cannot itera- auxiliary stimuli are “emancipated from pri-
tively reimagine and successfully create an mary external forms” when we internally
abstract artwork (van Leeuwen, Verstij- reconstruct the familiar active operations
nen, & Hekkert, 1999) can be character- and means of recall (Vygotsky, 1930/1978,
ized as investigations of ‘the cognitive life of p. 45; cf. pp. 52–57). So, not all cognitive
things’ (Sutton, 2002, extending Appadurai, technologies must in fact be outside the
1986). In his initial discussion of the changes skin. Among the many resources we use
to human memory that resulted from the to think about the past are a range of
spread of external representations, Merlin internalized representations, symbol sys-
Donald (1991, pp. 315–316) focused on typ- tems, and habits of thought, which we learn
ical differences between engrams and exo- (historically and developmentally) to man-
grams; the latter, in general, last longer, have age with both idiosyncratic and culturally
greater capacity, are more easily transmissi- specified strategies. We are not untouched
ble across media and context, and can be by our ongoing interaction with different
retrieved and manipulated by a wider vari- media and symbolic technologies; even lan-
ety of means. Hooking up with such sys- guage, as used cognitively, provides us with
tems of exograms in more or less transient more memorable, context-resistant mental
networks for particular purposes, we can – objects to carry around with us and take as
collectively and individually – dramatically objects of thought in their own right (Clark,
transform our cognitive profile and hold 1997, p. 210; 2006). Lasting changes in our
information more securely over time than minds result from internalizing the mediat-
our fragile biological memory allows.7 But, ing function of artifacts. For instance, we
of course, not all external representations become capable of self-scaffolding, engag-
need be permanent or endlessly reformat- ing in various forms of virtuoso artificial
table. Some of the liveliest recent applica- self-manipulation by way of words, tags,
tions of situated cognition to the case of and maxims that can freeze, counteract,
memory show that systems of exograms are recalibrate, or buffer us against our ordi-
not necessarily meant to be permanent or nary cognitive-affective flow (Clark, 2005b;
limitlessly transmissible, or turn out to be Hutchins, 2005).
less stable in practice than in intention. Art So, it is one natural tendency of social-
historians and theorists (Forty, 1999; Klein, ized brains like ours to co-opt cultural and
1997; Kwint, 1999), cognitive archaeologists moral, as well as linguistic, inner prostheses,

P1: SQE
CUUS366-13 cuus366/Robbins ISBN: 978 0 521 84832 9 Top: 0.5in Gutter: 0.875in July 8, 2008 15:24

REMEMBERING 229

altering our own cognitive machinery by of particular past experiences. I offered an
exploiting and importing whatever tools and integrative picture of shared memory and
labels we can. Questions about the loca- social memory, triangulating a rereading of
tion of memory processes may no longer Halbwachs with a new social ontology of
seem so important; rather, we are studying memory and a sketch of ongoing experi-
the transformation and propagation of rep- mental investigations of collaborative recall.
resentational states “across a set of malleable And finally I rehearsed some central ideas in
media,” whether inside or outside the skin the situated and distributed cognition move-
(Hutchins, 1995, p. 312; Latour, 1996, 1999). ments about the role of material and tech-
We can acknowledge that embodied organ- nological artifacts in complex cognitive and
isms bring something specific to the inter- mnemonic practices.
face, underpinning their enduring individual The last point here about the internaliza-
histories and idiosyncratic styles of planning tion of memory prostheses is crucial for the
and remembering, without assuming dis- overall response to the challenge. The world
tinct inner and outer realms of engrams and may be ‘an outside memory’ in the context
exograms, the natural and the artificial, each of visual processing, in that the detail of the
with its own inevitable proprietary charac- visual scene is all out there and potentially
teristics (Sutton, in press). available to the viewer (Myin & O’Regan,
this volume), but it would seem that the
present world cannot function as an out-
6. Conclusion side memory in support of memory itself,
because the detail of the past simply is not
The challenge set by the nature of human always recoverable from the current situa-
memory to theories of situated cognition, as tion. Even when there are interpersonal or
I mentioned at the outset of this chapter, material supports to remembering, they still
is to see how social or material resources need the embodied remembering agent to
outside the brain could possibly be an inte- bring considerable history to bear in the
gral or constitutive feature of memory states memory process; and often, in any case,
or processes, when the events or episodes there simply are not any relevant external
remembered are long gone. We now have triggers or cues in the present environment.
the elements of a response in place – as on But our assessment of the role of situa-
many issues in inchoate research programs tions in driving and shaping memory need
these are not so much arguments as sets not be restricted to the role of contex-
of attitudes or possible ways of approach- tual features that happen to be outside the
ing difficult topics. We retain the invoca- skin: that might be a relatively superficial
tion of representations while departing from characteristic. In even the most abstruse
classical cognitivism in two ways: by treat- and detached activities of autobiographical
ing inner representations and traces as often remembering, our memory processes still
incomplete, partial, and context-sensitive, lean and operate on the internal wing of
to be reconstructed rather than reproduced, the vast, extended system of cultural and
and by widening the representational realm personal habits, hints, and patterns through
outside the organismic boundary (Wilson, which the inner representational regime has
2004). This leads to the expectation that been sculpted and disciplined (cf. Clark,
mnemonic stability is often supported by 2005b, p. 264). Again, adding a genuinely
heterogeneous external resources as well diachronic dimension to our picture of the
as, and in complementary interaction with, neuroscience and psychology of memory
neural resources. I examined the social means that we do not have to see the tem-
nature of human memory in its develop- porarily isolated brain as fundamentally or
ment, suggesting that joint attention to the intrinsically alone, having to revert to some
past is integral to the cognitive shift by purely biological starting state whenever the
which children come to grasp the specificity trappings of culture are not around. For,

P1: SQE
CUUS366-13 cuus366/Robbins ISBN: 978 0 521 84832 9 Top: 0.5in Gutter: 0.875in July 8, 2008 15:24

230 JOHN SUTTON

again, in our unusual case, the biological 4 There is ongoing controversy – both concep-
brain is itself incomplete and always already tual and empirical – over Bartlett’s account
permeated by structures and history that of schemas and conventionalization (Brewer,
take it out of itself. 2000; Roediger et al., 2000); but the recent
history of the schema concept is an intrigu-
ing illustration of the potential links between
cognitive-connectionist computational theo-
Acknowledgments
ries of memory and more obviously situated
approaches (Rumelhart, Smolensky, McClel-
My warm thanks to the editors for their patience land, & Hinton, 1986, Strauss & Quinn,
and support. I am also grateful for help with 1997).
this material to Amanda Barnier, Pascal Boyer, 5 First published as a separate case study in
Andy Clark, Ed Cooke, Christoph Hoerl, Doris 1939, translated in 1980, pp. 158–186.
McIlwain, Monte Pemberton, Lyn Tribble, and 6 For an intriguing historical study in dis-
Rob Wilson. tributed cognition, see Tribble (2005), which
in impressive detail applies Hutchins’s frame-
work in Cognition in the Wild to a histori-
Notes cal puzzle about how Shakespearean actors
remembered a staggering number of plays
1 In 1978, for example, Ulric Neisser could without fixed scripts or extended rehearsal
fairly lament, “If X is an interesting or socially periods.
significant aspect of memory, then psycholo- 7 Even such comparatively simple operations
gists have hardly ever studied X” (1978/2000, as tying a knot or marking a stick as a
p. 4). But by the time of the second edition reminder change the psychological structure
of Memory Observed: Remembering in Natu- of the memory process. They extend the
ral Contexts, Neisser and Hyman could afford operation of memory beyond the biologi-
understatement in noting that the study of cal dimensions of the human nervous sys-
everyday or real-world memory “has now tem and permit it to incorporate artificial, or
become an influential and widely accepted self-generated, stimuli, which we call “signs”
research tradition” (2000, p. xiii; see also (Vygotsky, 1930/1978, p. 39).
Neisser, 1997).
2 Situated approaches are potentially relevant
to a number of further topics in the inter-
disciplinary study of memory, which I do not References
discuss in this chapter. As well as issues about
memory systems, amnesia, and localization, I Appadurai, A. (1986). Introduction: Commodi-
should particularly mention questions about ties and the politics of value. In A. Appadu-
reduction and interlevel relations in the sci- rai (Ed.), The social life of things: Commodities
ences of memory, with which the integra- in cultural perspective (pp. 3–63). Cambridge:
tive version of a situated approach to mem- Cambridge University Press.
ory which I sketch here needs to engage (see, Bartlett, F. C. (1932). Remembering: A study in
e.g., Craver, 2002). experimental and social psychology. Cambridge:
3 However, one plausible lesson of the con- Cambridge University Press.
structivist research in cognitive psychology Basden, B. H., Basden, D. R., & Henry, S. (2000).
described in this section is that the processes Costs and benefits of collaborative remember-
and contents of personal memory are thor- ing. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 14, 497–507.
oughly entangled with factual or semantic Ben-Zeev, A. (1986). Two approaches to mem-
memory, the other central form of declarative ory. Philosophical Investigations, 9, 288–301.
memory. Indeed, some situated approaches Berliner, D. (2005). The abuses of memory:
threaten the idea of firm conceptual and psy- Reflections on the memory boom in anthro-
chological distinctions between these auto- pology. Anthropology Quarterly, 78, 197–211.
biographical and semantic memory systems, Bjorklund, D. F. (2004). Introduction: Special
and between memory and other psychologi- issue on memory development in the new mil-
cal capacities (Toth & Hunt, 1999). lennium. Developmental Review, 24, 343–346.

P1: SQE
CUUS366-13 cuus366/Robbins ISBN: 978 0 521 84832 9 Top: 0.5in Gutter: 0.875in July 8, 2008 15:24

REMEMBERING 231

Bloch, M. (1998). How we think they think: Anthro- Clark, A. (2003). Natural-born cyborgs: Minds,
pological approaches to cognition, memory, and technologies, and the future of human intelli-
literacy. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. gence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bowker, G. C. (2005). Memory practices in the Clark, A. (2005a). Beyond the flesh: Some lessons
sciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. from a mole cricket. Artificial Life, 11, 233–244.
Brewer, W. F. (2000). Bartlett’s concept of the Clark, A. (2005b). Word, niche and super-niche:
schema and its impact on theories of knowl- How language makes minds matter more.
edge representation in contemporary cogni- Theoria, 20, 255–268.
tive psychology. In A. Saito (Ed.), Bartlett, cul- Clark, A. (2006). Material symbols. Philosophical
ture, and cognition (pp. 69–89). London: Psy- Psychology, 19(3), 291–307.
chology Press. Conway, M. A., & Pleydell-Pearce, C. W. (2000).
Bursen, H. A. (1978). Dismantling the memory The construction of autobiographical memo-
machine. Dordrecht, Netherlands: D. Reidel. ries in the self memory system. Psychological
Campbell, J. (1997). The structure of time in Review, 107, 261–288.
autobiographical memory. European Journal Conway, M. A., Singer, J. A., & Tagini, A. (2004).
of Philosophy, 5, 105–118. The self and autobiographical memory: corre-
Campbell, S. (2003). Relational remembering: spondence and coherence. Social Cognition, 22,
Rethinking the memory wars. Lanham, MD: 491–529.
Rowman & Littlefield. Copeland, J. (1993). Artificial intelligence: A philo-
Campbell, S. (2004). Models of memory and sophical introduction. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
memory activities. In P. DesAutels & M. Craver, C. F. (2002). Interlevel experiments and
U. Walker (Eds.), Moral psychology: Feminist multilevel mechanisms in the neuroscience of
ethics and political theory (pp. 119–137). Lan- memory. Philosophy of Science, 69(Suppl. 3),
ham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. S83–S97.
Campbell, S. (2006). Our faithfulness to the past: Donald, M. (1991). Origins of the modern mind:
Reconstructing memory value. Philosophical Three stages in the evolution of culture and cog-
Psychology, 19(3), 361–380. nition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Casey, E. S. (1987). Remembering: A phenomeno- Press.
logical study. Bloomington: Indiana University Elman, J. L. (1993). Learning and development in
Press. neural networks: The importance of starting
Churchland, P. S., & Sejnowski, T. (1992). The small. Cognition, 48, 71–99.
computational brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Engel, S. (1999). Context is everything: The nature
Press. of memory. New York: W. H. Freeman.
Clancey, W. J. (1997). Situated cognition: On Fivush, R. (1994). Constructing narrative, emo-
human knowledge and computer represen- tion, and self in parent-child conversations
tations. Cambridge: Cambridge University about the past. In U. Neisser & R. Fivush
Press. (Eds.), The remembering self (pp. 136–157).
Clancey, W. J. (1999). Conceptual coordination: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
How the mind orders experience in time. Hills- Forty, A. (1999). Introduction. In A. Forty & S.
dale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Kuchler (Eds.), The art of forgetting (pp. 1–18).
Clark, A. (1989). Microcognition: Philosophy, cog- Oxford, UK: Berg.
nitive science and parallel distributed processing. Gabbert, F., Memon, A., & Allan, K. (2003).
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Memory conformity: Can eyewitnesses influ-
Clark, A. (1993). Associative engines: Connec- ence each other’s memories for an event?
tionism, concepts and representational change. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 17, 533–544.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gedi, N., & Elam, Y. (1996). Collective memory:
Clark, A. (1994). Beliefs and desires incorporated. What is it? History and Memory, 8, 30–50.
Journal of Philosophy, 91, 404–425. Gilbert, M. (1989). On social facts. London: Rout-
Clark, A. (1997). Being there: Putting brain, body, ledge.
and world together again. Cambridge, MA: Gilbert, M. (2003). The structure of the social
MIT Press. atom: Joint commitment as the foundation of
Clark, A. (2002). Towards a science of the bio- human social behavior. In F. F. Schmitt (Ed.),
technological mind. International Journal of Socializing metaphysics (pp. 39–64). Lanham,
Cognition and Technology, 1, 21–33. MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

P1: SQE
CUUS366-13 cuus366/Robbins ISBN: 978 0 521 84832 9 Top: 0.5in Gutter: 0.875in July 8, 2008 15:24

232 JOHN SUTTON

Gilbert, M. (2004). Collective epistemology. Epis- Hutchins, E. (2005). Material anchors for con-
teme, 1, 95–107. ceptual blends. Journal of Pragmatics, 37, 1555–
Gluck, M., & Myers, C. (2000). Gateway to mem- 1577.
ory: An introduction to neural network modeling Hutchins, E. (2006, April). The cognitive life
of the hippocampus and learning. Cambridge, of things. The Cognitive Life of Things:
MA: MIT Press. Recasting the Boundaries of Mind symposium
Griffiths, P. E., & Stotz, K. (2000). How the mind conducted at the meeting of the McDonald
grows: A developmental perspective on the Institute for Archaeological Research, Cam-
biology of cognition. Synthese, 122, 29–51. bridge, UK. Accessed on 20 May 2008 from
Haaken, J. (1998). Pillar of salt: Gender, memory, http://liris.cnrs.fr/enaction/docs/documents
and the perils of looking back. New Brunswick, 2006/ImaginingCogLifeThings.pdf
NJ: Rutgers University Press. Hutton, P. (1994). Sigmund Freud and Maurice
Haden, C. A., Haine, R. A., & Fivush, R. (1997). Halbwachs: The problem of memory in his-
Developing narrative structure in parent-child torical psychology. The History Teacher, 27,
reminiscing across the preschool years. Devel- 145–158.
opmental Psychology, 33, 295–307. Hyman, I. E., & Loftus, E. F. (1998). Errors in
Halbwachs, M. (1992). The social frameworks autobiographical memory. Clinical Psychology
of memory. In L. A. Coser (Ed.), On collec- Review, 18, 933–947.
tive memory (pp. 35–189). Chicago: University Kansteiner, W. (2002). Finding meaning in mem-
of Chicago Press. (Original work published ory: A methodological critique of collective
1925) memory studies. History and Theory, 41, 179–
Halbwachs, M. (1980). The collective memory. (F. 197.
J. Ditter & V. Y. Ditter, Trans.). New York: Kirsh, D. (2006). Distributed cognition: A
Harper and Row. (Original work published methodological note. Pragmatics and Cogni-
1950) tion, 14(2), 249–262.
Harley, K., & Reese, E. (1999). Origins of autobio- Klein, K. L. (2000). On the emergence of mem-
graphical memory. Developmental Psychology, ory in historical discourse. Representations, 69,
35, 1338–1348. 127–150.
Harris, R. 2004. Integrationism, language, mind Klein, N. M. (1997). The history of forgetting. Lon-
and world. Language Sciences, 26, 727– don: Verso Books.
739. Knappett, C. (2005). Thinking through mate-
Hirst, W., & Manier, D. (1996). Remembering rial culture: An interdisciplinary perspec-
as communication: A family recounts its past. tive. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
In D. C. Rubin (Ed.), Remembering our past Press.
(pp. 271–290). Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- Krell, D. F. (1990). Of memory, reminiscence, and
sity Press. writing: On the verge. Bloomington: Indiana
Hirst, W., Manier, D., & Apetroaia, I. (1997). University Press.
The social construction of the remembered Kwint, M. (1999). Introduction: The physical
self: Family recounting. In J. Snodgrass & R. past. In M. Kwint, C. Breward, & J. Aynsley
Thompson (Eds.), The self across psychology (Eds.), Material memories (pp. 1–16). Oxford,
(pp. 163–188). New York: New York Academy UK: Berg.
of Sciences. Latour, B. (1996). Cogito ergo sumus! Or, psy-
Hirst, W., Manier, D., & Cuc, A. (2003). The con- chology swept inside out by the fresh air of the
struction of a collective memory. In B. Koki- upper deck: Review of Hutchins 1995. Mind,
nov & W. Hirst (Eds.), Constructive memory culture, and activity, 3, 54–63.
(pp. 111–116). Sofia: New Bulgarian University. Latour, B. (1999). A collective of humans and
Hoerl, C., & McCormack, T. (2005). Joint rem- nonhumans. In Pandora’s hope: Essays on the
iniscing as joint attention to the past. In N. reality of science studies (pp. 174–215). Cam-
Eilan, C. Hoerl, T. McCormack, & J. Roessler bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
(Eds.), Joint attention, communication, and Leichtman, M., Wang, Q., & Pillemer, D.
other minds: Issues in philosophy and psychol- (2003). Cultural variations in interdependence
ogy (pp. 260–286). Oxford: Oxford University and autobiographical memory: Lessons from
Press. Korea, China, India, and the United States. In
Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the wild. Cam- R. Fivush & C. Haden (Eds.), Autobiographical
bridge, MA: MIT Press. memory and the construction of a narrative self:

P1: SQE
CUUS366-13 cuus366/Robbins ISBN: 978 0 521 84832 9 Top: 0.5in Gutter: 0.875in July 8, 2008 15:24

REMEMBERING 233

developmental and cultural perspectives (pp.73– New York: Worth. (Original work published
98). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. 1978)
Loftus, E. F. (2003). Our changeable memo- Neisser, U., & Hyman, I. E., Jr. (2000). Preface
ries: Legal and practical implications. Nature to the second edition. In Memory observed:
Reviews Neuroscience, 4, 231–234. remembering in natural contexts (2nd ed., pp.
MacDonald, P. S. (2003). History of the concept of xiii–xiv). New York: Worth.
mind. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Nelson, K. (2003). Self and social functions: Indi-
Malcolm, N. (1977). Memory and mind. Ithaca, vidual autobiographical memory and collec-
NY: Cornell University Press. tive narrative. Memory, 11, 125–136.
Margalit, A. (2002). The ethics of memory. Cam- Nelson, K., & Fivush, R. (2004). The emergence
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press. of autobiographical memory: A social cultural
McClelland, J. L. (1995). Constructive memory developmental theory. Psychological Review,
and memory distortions: A parallel distributed 111, 486–511.
processing approach. In D. L. Schacter (Ed.), Olick, J. K. (1999). Collective memory: The two
Memory distortion: How minds, brains, and cultures. Sociological Theory, 17, 333–348.
societies reconstruct the past (pp. 69–90). Cam- Olick, J. K., & Robbins, J. (1998). Social mem-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ory studies: From “collective memory” to the
McClelland, J. L., & Rumelhart, D. E. (1986). historical sociology of mnemonic practices.
A distributed model of human learning and Annual Review of Sociology, 24, 105–140.
memory. In J. L. McClelland & D. E. Rumel- Petra, L., Benga, O., & Tincas, I. (2005).
hart (Eds.), Parallel distributed processing: A dynamic approach to the co-construction
Explorations in the microstructure of cognition of autobiographical memory: Insights from
(Vol. 2, pp. 170–215). Cambridge, MA: MIT dyadic conversations about the past. In Pro-
Press. ceedings of the 27th Annual Conference of
McCormack, T., & Hoerl, C. (2005). Children’s the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1732–1738).
reasoning about the causal significance of the Wheat Ridge, CO: Cognitive Science Society.
temporal order of events. Developmental Psy- Povinelli, D. J., Landry, A. M., Theall, L. A.,
chology, 41, 54–63. Clark, B. R., & Castille, C. M. (1999). Devel-
McIlwain, D. (2006). Already filtered: Affec- opment of young children’s understanding
tive immersion and personality differences in that the recent past is causally bound to the
accessing present and past. Philosophical Psy- present. Developmental Psychology, 35, 1426–
chology, 19(3), 381–389. 1439.
Middleton, D., & Brown, S. D. (2005). The social Reese, E. (2002). A model of the origins of auto-
psychology of experience: Studies in remembering biographical memory. In J. W. Fagen & H.
and forgetting. London: Sage. Hayne (Eds.), Progress in infancy research (Vol.
Misztal, B. (2003). Theories of social remembering. 2, pp. 215–260). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erl-
Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press. baum.
Moreland, R. L., Argote, L., & Krishnan, R. Reese, E., Haden, C. A., & Fivush, R. (1993).
(1996). Socially shared cognition at work: Mother-child conversations about the past:
Transactive memory and group performance. Relationships of style and memory over time.
In J. L. Nye & A. M. Brower (Eds.), What’s Cognitive Development, 8, 403–430.
social about social cognition? Research on Renfrew, C., & Scarre, C. (Eds.). (1999). Cogni-
socially shared cognition in small groups (pp. tion and material culture: The archaeology of
57–84). London: Sage. symbolic storage. Cambridge, UK: MacDonald
Mullen, M. K., & Yi, S. (1995). The cultural con- Institute for Archaeological Research.
text of talk about the past: Implications for Roediger, H. L. (1996). Memory illusions. Journal
the development of autobiographical mem- of Memory and Language, 35, 76–100.
ory. Cognitive Development, 10, 407–419. Roediger, H. L., Bergman, E. T., & Meade, M.
Neisser, U. (1997). The ecological study of mem- L. (2000). Repeated reproduction from mem-
ory. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal ory. In A. Saito (Ed.), Bartlett, culture, and
Society B: Biological Sciences, 352, 1697–1701. cognition (pp. 115–134). London: Psychology
Neisser, U. (2000). Memory: What are the impor- Press.
tant questions? Reprinted in U. Neisser & I. E. Roediger, H. L., Meade, M. L., & Bergman, E. T.
Hyman Jr. (Eds.), Memory observed: Remem- (2001). Social contagion of memory. Psycho-
bering in natural Contexts (2nd ed., pp. 3–18). nomic Bulletin & Review, 8, 365–371.

P1: SQE
CUUS366-13 cuus366/Robbins ISBN: 978 0 521 84832 9 Top: 0.5in Gutter: 0.875in July 8, 2008 15:24

234 JOHN SUTTON

Ross, M. (1989). The relation of implicit theo- tions. In Proceedings of the 27th Annual Confer-
ries to the construction of personal histories. ence of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2110–
Psychological Review, 96, 341–357. 2115) Wheat Ridge, CO: Cognitive Science
Rowlands, M. (1999). The body in mind: Under- Society.
standing cognitive processes. Cambridge: Cam- Sutton, J. (2002). Porous memory and the cogni-
bridge University Press. tive life of things. In D. Tofts, A. Jonson, & A.
Rubin, D. C. (1995). Memory in oral traditions: Cavallaro (Eds.), Prefiguring cyberculture: An
The cognitive psychology of epic, ballads, and intellectual history (pp. 130–141). Cambridge,
counting-out rhymes. Oxford: Oxford Univer- MA & Sydney: MIT Press/Power Publications.
sity Press. Sutton, J. (2003). Memory. In E. N. Zalta
Rumelhart, D. E., Smolensky, P., McClelland, (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of phi-
J. L., & Hinton, G. E. (1986). Schemata and losophy. Accessed on 20 May 2008 from
sequential thought processes in PDP models. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2003/
In J. L. McClelland & D. E. Rumelhart (Eds.), entries/memory/
Parallel distributed processing (Vol. 2, pp. 7– Sutton, J. (2004). Representation, reduction, and
57). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. interdisciplinarity in the sciences of mem-
Sanders, J. T. (1985). Experience, memory, and ory. In H. Clapin, P. Staines, & P. Slezak
intelligence. Monist, 68, 507–521. (Eds.), Representation in mind: New approaches
Schacter, D. L. (1995). Memory distortion: His- to mental representation (pp. 187–216). Amster-
tory and current status. In D. L. Schacter dam: Elsevier.
(Ed.), Memory distortion: How minds, brains, Sutton, J. (in press). Exograms and interdisci-
and societies reconstruct the past (pp. 1–43). plinarity: History, the extended mind, and the
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. civilizing process. In R. Menary (Ed.), The
Schacter, D. L. (1996). Searching for memory: The extended mind. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.
brain, the mind, and the past. New York: Basic ter Hark, M. (1995). Electric brain fields and
Books. memory traces: Wittgenstein and Gestalt psy-
Schacter, D. L. (1999). The seven sins of memory. chology. Philosophical Investigations, 18, 113–
American Psychologist, 54, 182–203. 138.
Schechtman, M. (1994). The truth about mem- Toth, J. P., & Hunt, R. R. (1999). Not one ver-
ory. Philosophical Psychology, 7, 3–18. sus many; but zero versus any: Structure and
Schwartz, B., & Schuman, H. (2005). History, function in the context of the multiple mem-
commemoration and belief: Abraham Lin- ory systems debate. In J. K. Foster & M. Jeli-
coln in American memory, 1945–2001. Amer- cic (Eds.), Memory: Systems, process, or func-
ican Sociological Review, 70, 183–203. tion? (pp. 232–272). Oxford: Oxford University
Sheets-Johnstone, M. (2003). Kinesthetic mem- Press.
ory. Theoria et Historia Scientiarum, 7, 69–92. Tribble, E. (2005). Distributing cognition in
Siegel, D. J. (2001). Memory: An overview, with the globe. Shakespeare Quarterly, 56, 135–
emphasis on developmental, interpersonal, 155.
and neurobiological aspects. Journal of the Tulving, E. (1983). Elements of episodic memory.
American Academy of Child and Adolescent Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Psychiatry, 40, 997–1011. Turvey, M. T., & Shaw, R. (1979). The pri-
Smith, L. B., & Thelen, E. (2003). Development macy of perceiving: An ecological reformula-
as a dynamic system. Trends in Cognitive Sci- tion of perception for understanding memory.
ences, 7, 343–348. In L.-G. Nilsson (Ed.), Perspectives on memory
Stern, D. G. (1991). Models of memory: Wittgen- research (pp. 167–222). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence
stein and cognitive science. Philosophical Psy- Erlbaum.
chology, 4, 203–218. van Gelder, T. (1991). What is the “D” in “PDP”?
Strange, D., Gerrie, M. P., & Garry, M. (2005). A survey of the concept of distribution. In W.
A few seemingly harmless routes to a false Ramsey, S. P. Stich, & D. E. Rumelhart (Eds.),
memory. Cognitive Processing, 6, 237–242. Philosophy and connectionist theory (pp. 33–59).
Strauss, C., & Quinn, N. (1997). A cognitive theory Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
of cultural meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge van Leeuwen, C., Verstijnen, I., & Hekkert,
University Press. P. (1999). Common unconscious dynamics
Susi, T. (2005). In search of the holy grail: Under- underlie uncommon conscious effects: A
standing artefact mediation in social interac- case study in the interaction of perception

P1: SQE
CUUS366-13 cuus366/Robbins ISBN: 978 0 521 84832 9 Top: 0.5in Gutter: 0.875in July 8, 2008 15:24

REMEMBERING 235

and creation. In J. Jordan (Ed.), Modeling to cognitive science (pp. 518–525). Oxford, UK:
consciousness across the disciplines (pp. 179– Blackwell.
218). Lanham, MD: University Press of Wertsch, J. V. (2002). Voices of collective remem-
America. bering. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Velleman, D. (1997). How to share an intention. Press.
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 57, Wierzbicka, A. (1992). Semantics, culture, and cog-
29–50. nition: Universal human concepts in culture-
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The devel- specific configurations. Oxford: Oxford Univer-
opment of higher psychological processes. Cam- sity Press.
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Orig- Wilcox, S., & Katz, S. (1981). A direct realist alter-
inal work published 1930) native to the traditional conception of mem-
Wegner, D. M., Erber, R., & Raymond, P. (1991). ory. Behaviorism, 9, 227–239.
Transactive memory in close relationships. Wilson, R. A. (2004). Boundaries of the mind.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
923–929. Wilson, R. A. (2005). Collective memory, group
Weldon, M. S., & Bellinger, K. D. (1997). Col- minds, and the extended mind thesis. Cogni-
lective memory: Collaborative and individual tive Processing, 6, 227–236.
processes in remembering. Journal of Exper- Winter, J., & Sivan, E. (1999). Setting the frame-
imental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and work. In J. Winter & E. Sivan (Eds.), War and
Cognition, 23, 1160–1175. remembrance in the twentieth century (pp. 6–
Welzer, H., & Markowitsch, H. J. (2005). 39). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Towards a bio-psycho-social model of auto- Yaron-Antar, A., & Nachson, I. (2006). Col-
biographical memory. Memory, 13, 63–78. laborative remembering of emotional events:
Wertsch, J. V. (1999). Mediated action. In W. The case of Rabin’s assassination. Memory, 14,
Bechtel & G. Graham (Eds.), A companion 46–56.
References (137)
Appadurai, A. (1986). Introduction: Commodi- ties and the politics of value. In A. Appadu- rai (Ed.), The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective (pp. 3-63). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bartlett, F. C. (1932). Remembering: A study in experimental and social psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Basden, B. H., Basden, D. R., & Henry, S. (2000). Costs and benefits of collaborative remember- ing. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 14, 497-507.
Ben-Zeev, A. (1986). Two approaches to mem- ory. Philosophical Investigations, 9, 288-301.
Berliner, D. (2005). The abuses of memory: Reflections on the memory boom in anthro- pology. Anthropology Quarterly, 78, 197-211.
Bjorklund, D. F. (2004). Introduction: Special issue on memory development in the new mil- lennium. Developmental Review, 24, 343-346.
Bloch, M. (1998). How we think they think: Anthro- pological approaches to cognition, memory, and literacy. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Bowker, G. C. (2005). Memory practices in the sciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Brewer, W. F. (2000). Bartlett's concept of the schema and its impact on theories of knowl- edge representation in contemporary cogni- tive psychology. In A. Saito (Ed.), Bartlett, cul- ture, and cognition (pp. 69-89). London: Psy- chology Press.
Bursen, H. A. (1978). Dismantling the memory machine. Dordrecht, Netherlands: D. Reidel.
Campbell, J. (1997). The structure of time in autobiographical memory. European Journal of Philosophy, 5, 105-118.
Campbell, S. (2003). Relational remembering: Rethinking the memory wars. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Campbell, S. (2004). Models of memory and memory activities. In P. DesAutels & M. U. Walker (Eds.), Moral psychology: Feminist ethics and political theory (pp. 119-137). Lan- ham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Campbell, S. (2006). Our faithfulness to the past: Reconstructing memory value. Philosophical Psychology, 19(3), 361-380.
Casey, E. S. (1987). Remembering: A phenomeno- logical study. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Churchland, P. S., & Sejnowski, T. (1992). The computational brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Clancey, W. J. (1997). Situated cognition: On human knowledge and computer represen- tations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Clancey, W. J. (1999). Conceptual coordination: How the mind orders experience in time. Hills- dale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Clark, A. (1989). Microcognition: Philosophy, cog- nitive science and parallel distributed processing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Clark, A. (1993). Associative engines: Connec- tionism, concepts and representational change. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Clark, A. (1994). Beliefs and desires incorporated. Journal of Philosophy, 91, 404-425.
Clark, A. (1997). Being there: Putting brain, body, and world together again. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Clark, A. (2002). Towards a science of the bio- technological mind. International Journal of Cognition and Technology, 1, 21-33.
Clark, A. (2003). Natural-born cyborgs: Minds, technologies, and the future of human intelli- gence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Clark, A. (2005a). Beyond the flesh: Some lessons from a mole cricket. Artificial Life, 11, 233-244.
Clark, A. (2005b). Word, niche and super-niche: How language makes minds matter more. Theoria, 20, 255-268.
Clark, A. (2006). Material symbols. Philosophical Psychology, 19(3), 291-307.
Conway, M. A., & Pleydell-Pearce, C. W. (2000). The construction of autobiographical memo- ries in the self memory system. Psychological Review, 107, 261-288.
Conway, M. A., Singer, J. A., & Tagini, A. (2004). The self and autobiographical memory: corre- spondence and coherence. Social Cognition, 22, 491-529.
Copeland, J. (1993). Artificial intelligence: A philo- sophical introduction. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Craver, C. F. (2002). Interlevel experiments and multilevel mechanisms in the neuroscience of memory. Philosophy of Science, 69(Suppl. 3), S83-S97.
Donald, M. (1991). Origins of the modern mind: Three stages in the evolution of culture and cog- nition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Elman, J. L. (1993). Learning and development in neural networks: The importance of starting small. Cognition, 48, 71-99.
Engel, S. (1999). Context is everything: The nature of memory. New York: W. H. Freeman.
Fivush, R. (1994). Constructing narrative, emo- tion, and self in parent-child conversations about the past. In U. Neisser & R. Fivush (Eds.), The remembering self (pp. 136-157). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Forty, A. (1999). Introduction. In A. Forty & S. Kuchler (Eds.), The art of forgetting (pp. 1-18). Oxford, UK: Berg.
Gabbert, F., Memon, A., & Allan, K. (2003). Memory conformity: Can eyewitnesses influ- ence each other's memories for an event? Applied Cognitive Psychology, 17, 533-544.
Gedi, N., & Elam, Y. (1996). Collective memory: What is it? History and Memory, 8, 30-50.
Gilbert, M. (1989). On social facts. London: Rout- ledge.
Gilbert, M. (2003). The structure of the social atom: Joint commitment as the foundation of human social behavior. In F. F. Schmitt (Ed.), Socializing metaphysics (pp. 39-64). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. P1: SQE CUUS366-13 cuus366/Robbins ISBN: 978 0 521 84832 9 Top: 0.5in Gutter: 0.875in July 8, 2008 15:24
232 JOHN SUTTON
Gilbert, M. (2004). Collective epistemology. Epis- teme, 1, 95-107.
Gluck, M., & Myers, C. (2000). Gateway to mem- ory: An introduction to neural network modeling of the hippocampus and learning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Griffiths, P. E., & Stotz, K. (2000). How the mind grows: A developmental perspective on the biology of cognition. Synthese, 122, 29-51.
Haaken, J. (1998). Pillar of salt: Gender, memory, and the perils of looking back. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Haden, C. A., Haine, R. A., & Fivush, R. (1997). Developing narrative structure in parent-child reminiscing across the preschool years. Devel- opmental Psychology, 33, 295-307.
Halbwachs, M. (1992). The social frameworks of memory. In L. A. Coser (Ed.), On collec- tive memory (pp. 35-189). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1925)
Halbwachs, M. (1980). The collective memory. (F. J. Ditter & V. Y. Ditter, Trans.). New York: Harper and Row. (Original work published 1950)
Harley, K., & Reese, E. (1999). Origins of autobio- graphical memory. Developmental Psychology, 35, 1338-1348.
Harris, R. 2004. Integrationism, language, mind and world. Language Sciences, 26, 727- 739.
Hirst, W., & Manier, D. (1996). Remembering as communication: A family recounts its past. In D. C. Rubin (Ed.), Remembering our past (pp. 271-290). Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sity Press.
Hirst, W., Manier, D., & Apetroaia, I. (1997). The social construction of the remembered self: Family recounting. In J. Snodgrass & R. Thompson (Eds.), The self across psychology (pp. 163-188). New York: New York Academy of Sciences.
Hirst, W., Manier, D., & Cuc, A. (2003). The con- struction of a collective memory. In B. Koki- nov & W. Hirst (Eds.), Constructive memory (pp. 111-116). Sofia: New Bulgarian University.
Hoerl, C., & McCormack, T. (2005). Joint rem- iniscing as joint attention to the past. In N. Eilan, C. Hoerl, T. McCormack, & J. Roessler (Eds.), Joint attention, communication, and other minds: Issues in philosophy and psychol- ogy (pp. 260-286). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the wild. Cam- bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hutchins, E. (2005). Material anchors for con- ceptual blends. Journal of Pragmatics, 37, 1555- 1577.
Hutchins, E. (2006, April). The cognitive life of things. The Cognitive Life of Things: Recasting the Boundaries of Mind symposium conducted at the meeting of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cam- bridge, UK. Accessed on 20 May 2008 from http://liris.cnrs.fr/enaction/docs/documents 2006/ImaginingCogLifeThings.pdf
Hutton, P. (1994). Sigmund Freud and Maurice Halbwachs: The problem of memory in his- torical psychology. The History Teacher, 27, 145-158.
Hyman, I. E., & Loftus, E. F. (1998). Errors in autobiographical memory. Clinical Psychology Review, 18, 933-947.
Kansteiner, W. (2002). Finding meaning in mem- ory: A methodological critique of collective memory studies. History and Theory, 41, 179- 197.
Kirsh, D. (2006). Distributed cognition: A methodological note. Pragmatics and Cogni- tion, 14(2), 249-262.
Klein, K. L. (2000). On the emergence of mem- ory in historical discourse. Representations, 69, 127-150.
Klein, N. M. (1997). The history of forgetting. Lon- don: Verso Books.
Knappett, C. (2005). Thinking through mate- rial culture: An interdisciplinary perspec- tive. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Krell, D. F. (1990). Of memory, reminiscence, and writing: On the verge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Kwint, M. (1999). Introduction: The physical past. In M. Kwint, C. Breward, & J. Aynsley (Eds.), Material memories (pp. 1-16). Oxford, UK: Berg.
Latour, B. (1996). Cogito ergo sumus! Or, psy- chology swept inside out by the fresh air of the upper deck: Review of Hutchins 1995. Mind, culture, and activity, 3, 54-63.
Latour, B. (1999). A collective of humans and nonhumans. In Pandora's hope: Essays on the reality of science studies (pp. 174-215). Cam- bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Leichtman, M., Wang, Q., & Pillemer, D. (2003). Cultural variations in interdependence and autobiographical memory: Lessons from Korea, China, India, and the United States. In R. Fivush & C. Haden (Eds.), Autobiographical memory and the construction of a narrative self: developmental and cultural perspectives (pp.73-
Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Loftus, E. F. (2003). Our changeable memo- ries: Legal and practical implications. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 4, 231-234.
MacDonald, P. S. (2003). History of the concept of mind. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.
Malcolm, N. (1977). Memory and mind. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Margalit, A. (2002). The ethics of memory. Cam- bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
McClelland, J. L. (1995). Constructive memory and memory distortions: A parallel distributed processing approach. In D. L. Schacter (Ed.), Memory distortion: How minds, brains, and societies reconstruct the past (pp. 69-90). Cam- bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
McClelland, J. L., & Rumelhart, D. E. (1986). A distributed model of human learning and memory. In J. L. McClelland & D. E. Rumel- hart (Eds.), Parallel distributed processing: Explorations in the microstructure of cognition (Vol. 2, pp. 170-215). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
McCormack, T., & Hoerl, C. (2005). Children's reasoning about the causal significance of the temporal order of events. Developmental Psy- chology, 41, 54-63.
McIlwain, D. (2006). Already filtered: Affec- tive immersion and personality differences in accessing present and past. Philosophical Psy- chology, 19(3), 381-389.
Middleton, D., & Brown, S. D. (2005). The social psychology of experience: Studies in remembering and forgetting. London: Sage.
Misztal, B. (2003). Theories of social remembering. Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press.
Moreland, R. L., Argote, L., & Krishnan, R. (1996). Socially shared cognition at work: Transactive memory and group performance. In J. L. Nye & A. M. Brower (Eds.), What's social about social cognition? Research on socially shared cognition in small groups (pp. 57-84). London: Sage.
Mullen, M. K., & Yi, S. (1995). The cultural con- text of talk about the past: Implications for the development of autobiographical mem- ory. Cognitive Development, 10, 407-419.
Neisser, U. (1997). The ecological study of mem- ory. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 352, 1697-1701.
Neisser, U. (2000). Memory: What are the impor- tant questions? Reprinted in U. Neisser & I. E. Hyman Jr. (Eds.), Memory observed: Remem- bering in natural Contexts (2nd ed., pp. 3-18). New York: Worth. (Original work published 1978)
Neisser, U., & Hyman, I. E., Jr. (2000). Preface to the second edition. In Memory observed: remembering in natural contexts (2nd ed., pp. xiii-xiv). New York: Worth.
Nelson, K. (2003). Self and social functions: Indi- vidual autobiographical memory and collec- tive narrative. Memory, 11, 125-136.
Nelson, K., & Fivush, R. (2004). The emergence of autobiographical memory: A social cultural developmental theory. Psychological Review, 111, 486-511.
Olick, J. K. (1999). Collective memory: The two cultures. Sociological Theory, 17, 333-348.
Olick, J. K., & Robbins, J. (1998). Social mem- ory studies: From "collective memory" to the historical sociology of mnemonic practices. Annual Review of Sociology, 24, 105-140.
Petra, L., Benga, O., & Tincas, I. (2005). A dynamic approach to the co-construction of autobiographical memory: Insights from dyadic conversations about the past. In Pro- ceedings of the 27th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1732-1738). Wheat Ridge, CO: Cognitive Science Society. Povinelli, D. J., Landry, A. M., Theall, L. A., Clark, B. R., & Castille, C. M. (1999). Devel- opment of young children's understanding that the recent past is causally bound to the present. Developmental Psychology, 35, 1426- 1439.
Reese, E. (2002). A model of the origins of auto- biographical memory. In J. W. Fagen & H. Hayne (Eds.), Progress in infancy research (Vol. 2, pp. 215-260). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erl- baum.
Reese, E., Haden, C. A., & Fivush, R. (1993). Mother-child conversations about the past: Relationships of style and memory over time. Cognitive Development, 8, 403-430.
Renfrew, C., & Scarre, C. (Eds.). (1999). Cogni- tion and material culture: The archaeology of symbolic storage. Cambridge, UK: MacDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
Roediger, H. L. (1996). Memory illusions. Journal of Memory and Language, 35, 76-100.
Roediger, H. L., Bergman, E. T., & Meade, M. L. (2000). Repeated reproduction from mem- ory. In A. Saito (Ed.), Bartlett, culture, and cognition (pp. 115-134). London: Psychology Press.
Roediger, H. L., Meade, M. L., & Bergman, E. T. (2001). Social contagion of memory. Psycho- nomic Bulletin & Review, 8, 365-371.
Ross, M. (1989). The relation of implicit theo- ries to the construction of personal histories. Psychological Review, 96, 341-357.
Rowlands, M. (1999). The body in mind: Under- standing cognitive processes. Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press.
Rubin, D. C. (1995). Memory in oral traditions: The cognitive psychology of epic, ballads, and counting-out rhymes. Oxford: Oxford Univer- sity Press.
Rumelhart, D. E., Smolensky, P., McClelland, J. L., & Hinton, G. E. (1986). Schemata and sequential thought processes in PDP models. In J. L. McClelland & D. E. Rumelhart (Eds.), Parallel distributed processing (Vol. 2, pp. 7- 57). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Sanders, J. T. (1985). Experience, memory, and intelligence. Monist, 68, 507-521.
Schacter, D. L. (1995). Memory distortion: His- tory and current status. In D. L. Schacter (Ed.), Memory distortion: How minds, brains, and societies reconstruct the past (pp. 1-43). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Schacter, D. L. (1996). Searching for memory: The brain, the mind, and the past. New York: Basic Books.
Schacter, D. L. (1999). The seven sins of memory. American Psychologist, 54, 182-203.
Schechtman, M. (1994). The truth about mem- ory. Philosophical Psychology, 7, 3-18.
Schwartz, B., & Schuman, H. (2005). History, commemoration and belief: Abraham Lin- coln in American memory, 1945-2001. Amer- ican Sociological Review, 70, 183-203.
Sheets-Johnstone, M. (2003). Kinesthetic mem- ory. Theoria et Historia Scientiarum, 7, 69-92.
Siegel, D. J. (2001). Memory: An overview, with emphasis on developmental, interpersonal, and neurobiological aspects. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 40, 997-1011.
Smith, L. B., & Thelen, E. (2003). Development as a dynamic system. Trends in Cognitive Sci- ences, 7, 343-348.
Stern, D. G. (1991). Models of memory: Wittgen- stein and cognitive science. Philosophical Psy- chology, 4, 203-218.
Strange, D., Gerrie, M. P., & Garry, M. (2005). A few seemingly harmless routes to a false memory. Cognitive Processing, 6, 237-242.
Strauss, C., & Quinn, N. (1997). A cognitive theory of cultural meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Susi, T. (2005). In search of the holy grail: Under- standing artefact mediation in social interac- tions. In Proceedings of the 27th Annual Confer- ence of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2110- 2115) Wheat Ridge, CO: Cognitive Science Society.
Sutton, J. (2002). Porous memory and the cogni- tive life of things. In D. Tofts, A. Jonson, & A. Cavallaro (Eds.), Prefiguring cyberculture: An intellectual history (pp. 130-141). Cambridge, MA & Sydney: MIT Press/Power Publications.
Sutton, J. (2003). Memory. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of phi- losophy. Accessed on 20 May 2008 from http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2003/ entries/memory/
Sutton, J. (2004). Representation, reduction, and interdisciplinarity in the sciences of mem- ory. In H. Clapin, P. Staines, & P. Slezak (Eds.), Representation in mind: New approaches to mental representation (pp. 187-216). Amster- dam: Elsevier.
Sutton, J. (in press). Exograms and interdisci- plinarity: History, the extended mind, and the civilizing process. In R. Menary (Ed.), The extended mind. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.
ter Hark, M. (1995). Electric brain fields and memory traces: Wittgenstein and Gestalt psy- chology. Philosophical Investigations, 18, 113- 138.
Toth, J. P., & Hunt, R. R. (1999). Not one ver- sus many; but zero versus any: Structure and function in the context of the multiple mem- ory systems debate. In J. K. Foster & M. Jeli- cic (Eds.), Memory: Systems, process, or func- tion? (pp. 232-272). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tribble, E. (2005). Distributing cognition in the globe. Shakespeare Quarterly, 56, 135- 155.
Tulving, E. (1983). Elements of episodic memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Turvey, M. T., & Shaw, R. (1979). The pri- macy of perceiving: An ecological reformula- tion of perception for understanding memory. In L.-G. Nilsson (Ed.), Perspectives on memory research (pp. 167-222). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
van Gelder, T. (1991). What is the "D" in "PDP"? A survey of the concept of distribution. In W. Ramsey, S. P. Stich, & D. E. Rumelhart (Eds.), Philosophy and connectionist theory (pp. 33-59). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
van Leeuwen, C., Verstijnen, I., & Hekkert, P. (1999). Common unconscious dynamics underlie uncommon conscious effects: A case study in the interaction of perception and creation. In J. Jordan (Ed.), Modeling consciousness across the disciplines (pp. 179- 218). Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
Velleman, D. (1997). How to share an intention. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 57, 29-50.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The devel- opment of higher psychological processes. Cam- bridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (Orig- inal work published 1930)
Wegner, D. M., Erber, R., & Raymond, P. (1991). Transactive memory in close relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61, 923-929.
Weldon, M. S., & Bellinger, K. D. (1997). Col- lective memory: Collaborative and individual processes in remembering. Journal of Exper- imental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 23, 1160-1175.
Welzer, H., & Markowitsch, H. J. (2005). Towards a bio-psycho-social model of auto- biographical memory. Memory, 13, 63-78.
Wertsch, J. V. (1999). Mediated action. In W. Bechtel & G. Graham (Eds.), A companion to cognitive science (pp. 518-525). Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Wertsch, J. V. (2002). Voices of collective remem- bering. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wierzbicka, A. (1992). Semantics, culture, and cog- nition: Universal human concepts in culture- specific configurations. Oxford: Oxford Univer- sity Press.
Wilcox, S., & Katz, S. (1981). A direct realist alter- native to the traditional conception of mem- ory. Behaviorism, 9, 227-239.
Wilson, R. A. (2004). Boundaries of the mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wilson, R. A. (2005). Collective memory, group minds, and the extended mind thesis. Cogni- tive Processing, 6, 227-236.
Winter, J., & Sivan, E. (1999). Setting the frame- work. In J. Winter & E. Sivan (Eds.), War and remembrance in the twentieth century (pp. 6- 39). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Yaron-Antar, A., & Nachson, I. (2006). Col- laborative remembering of emotional events: The case of Rabin's assassination. Memory, 14, 46-56.
John Sutton
Macquarie University, Faculty Member
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 (
[email protected]
) if you have suggestions or queries.
Papers
192
Followers
142,434
View all papers from
John Sutton
arrow_forward
Related papers
The Temporality of Situated Cognition
Kai Vogeley
Frontiers in Psychology, 2020
Situated cognition embeds perceptions, thoughts, and behavior within the contextual framework of so-called "4E cognition" understanding cognition to be embodied, enactive, extended, and embedded. Whereas this definition is primarily based on the spatial properties of a situation, it neglects a fundamental constituent: the cognitive situation as enduring. On a subpersonal level, situated cognition requires the integration of information processing within a minimal temporal extension generating the basic building blocks of perception and action ("microlayer" of time). On a personal level, lived situations and experienced narratives leading to our biography can be defined by their broader temporal horizons ("macrolayer" of time). The macrolayer of time is based on and emerges from information processing on the microlayer of time. Whereas the constraints on the microlayer are primarily defined by the integrity of neurobiological processes within an individual cognitive system, the temporal horizons and subsequently the situational context on the macrolayer are defined by the complex affordances of a situation on a personal or interpersonal level. On both time layers, cognition can be defined as a continuous dynamic process, reflecting the transition from one situated state to another. Taken together, the events forming the delimiting horizons of these situations correspond to the temporal structure of the cognitive process along which it continuously proceeds. The dynamic driving and enabling this transition from state to state is synonymous with the inherent flow of time. Just as the layers of time, flow and structure, are inseparably connected. The integration of temporal flow and temporal structure into the continuous dynamic process constitutes the enduring situatedness of cognition. By providing everyday examples and examples from psychopathology, we highlight the benefits of understanding cognitive processes as part of enduring situations.
Download free PDF
View PDF
chevron_right
Are there any situated cognition concepts of memory functioning as investigative kinds in the sciences of memory?
Ruth Hibbert
This thesis will address the question of whether there are any situated cognition concepts of memory functioning as investigative kinds in the sciences of memory.
Download free PDF
View PDF
chevron_right
From Mind to Context, from Accuracy to Meaning. Exploring the Grammar of Remembering as a Socially Situated Act
Ignacio de Brescó de Luna
Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 2016
This paper begins by addressing the so-called memory crisis, a crisis which, since the 90s, has problematized the traditional manner in which memory is studied and understood. Special attention is paid to the changing role attributed to accuracy and meaning when remembering the past. In light of this crisis, I comment on Smorti and Fioretti's paper (2015), focusing on the point that they make regarding how autobiographical narratives affect and change autobiographical memories. Complementing that view, according to which memories are transformed when they are externalized through a communicative act by means of narratives, this paper focuses on a more narrative and situated approach to memory, shifting from mind to social settings, from accuracy to meaning. Building on that approach, I briefly discuss the notion of event as a narrative construction. Finally, drawing on Burke's pentad model (1969), I put forward a framework for studying remembering as a situated activity. The pentad of elements are addressed as follows: 1) Agency, or the mediational means for the construction of past events; 2) Act, or remembering as a reconstructive activity; 3) Scene, or the social dynamics of remembering; 4) Agent, or subjective positionings when reconstructing the past; and 5) Purpose, or uses of the past in relation to the future.
Download free PDF
View PDF
chevron_right
Situated cognition
Miriam Solomon
Philosophy of Psychology and Cognitive Science ( …, 2007
Download free PDF
View PDF
chevron_right
A short primer on situated cognition
Philip Robbins
The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition, 2009
Download free PDF
View PDF
chevron_right
DYNAMICALLY REMEMBERED PRESENT VIRTUAL MEMORY AS A BASIS FOR THE STORIES WE LIVE
Cornel du Toit
Download free PDF
View PDF
chevron_right
Situated spatial cognition
Barbara Tversky
What does it mean to say that cognition is situated? Like many interesting questions, this one has many answers, probably at least one for every paper in these volumes (for an early one, see Varela, . Cognition is inescapably affected by the immediate who, what, where, when, and perhaps why. Walking past a gift store is a reminder to buy a birthday present; leftovers in the fridge inspire a new recipe; fingers are handy for counting. The world serves not just our own minds but also our communications with the other minds: a glance at the door tells a partner it is time to leave; the salt and pepper shakers on a dinner table act as props in a dramatic 1 retelling; here, that, and this way can be understood efficiently but only in context. This kind of cognition can be called "on-line" situated cognition.
Download free PDF
View PDF
chevron_right
Situated authenticity in episodic memory
Roy Dings
Synthese, 2023
A recalled memory is deemed authentic when it accurately represents how one experienced the original event. However, given the convincing research in cognitive science on the constructive nature of memory, this inevitably leads to the question of the 'bounds of authenticity'. That is, how similar does a memory have to be to the original experience to still count as authentic? In this paper we propose a novel account of 'Situated Authenticity' which highlights that the norms of authenticity are contextdependent. In particular, we show that each of the three core functions of episodic memory (self, social and directive) is correlated with patterned changes in levels of conceptualization (e.g., concrete construal versus abstract construal of the event). We support this theoretical account with existing empirical data. We conclude the paper by showing how our account of Situated Authenticity supplements ongoing discussions on memory contextualism, and providing an outline of how our account, which is currently elaborated targeting a phenomenological level, may also be elaborated on a processing level using the concept of representational format.
Download free PDF
View PDF
chevron_right
Obstacles to Understanding Cognition As Situated
David Kirshner
Educational Researcher, 1998
Download free PDF
View PDF
chevron_right
General Situated Cognition
Orlin Vakarelov
2011
The dissertation is based on four papers that together offer a theory of General Situated Cognition. The project has two overarching goals: (1) to unify existing foundational approaches to cognition by investigating cognition within the framework of the philosophy of information; (2) to characterize the function of cognition and suggest a general (meta-)framework for cognitive architecture. Two of the papers, "Pre-cognitive Semantic Information" and "The Information Medium", deal primarily with the concept of information. They offer a pragmatic and structural account of information, as well as a novel and more general theory of meaning appropriate for simple, non-linguistic organisms -the interface theory of meaning.
Download free PDF
View PDF
chevron_right
Related topics
Cognitive Science
Developmental Psychology
Philosophy
Philosophy of Mind
Memory (Cognitive Psychology)
Material Culture Studies
History and Memory
Mental Representation
Distributed Cognition
Embodied Cognition
Extended Mind
Memory Studies
Social and Collective Memory
Cultural Memory
Social Ontology
Philosophy of Cognitive Science
False Memory
Social Memory
Temporal Cognition
Autobiographical Memory
Group Cognition
Merlin Donald
Edwin Hutchins
Plural Subjects
Explore
Papers
Topics
Features
Mentions
Analytics
PDF Packages
Advanced Search
Search Alerts
Journals
Academia.edu Journals
My submissions
Reviewer Hub
Why publish with us
Testimonials
Company
About
Careers
Press
Content Policy
580 California St., Suite 400
San Francisco, CA, 94104