Social memory strategies

KNEW 2013Fredrik Stjernberg

fredrik.stjernberg@liu.seLinköping University

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Outline

• ”Social memory strategy”– other views of memory– internal/external

• Examples from theatre• Examples from old subjects with memory impairment• Not experts!• Memory as activity• Other questions, future research• Conclusions

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Take-home message:

• Inner-outer distinction for cognition/memory less useful – hard to draw a line, and too many overlapping cases

• We structure the activities and surroundings – and they structure us (important from an evolutionary perspective)

• Memory best seen as a process, an activity, not contents

• Therefore the classical vehicle-content picture of cognition isn’t very suitable

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Common picture of memory:

• Internal memoryvs

• External memory

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Internal memory

• Often seen as ”real memory” (what you really know)

• Assumes that we have an internal deposit of memory material, accessible to the subject

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External memory

• Seen as extensions of the internal content. (sometimes seen as ”cheating”)

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Wrong distinction

• Memory should not be seen as a ”content”, being put either inside or outside the speaker. Memory is better seen as a special kind of activity.

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Looking for a clear distinction between internal and external memories not fruitful.Not a “natural kind”. There are counterexamples and tricky cases, no matter which way we want to draw a distinction. But this is not a problem. Looking for a sharp internal-external distinction for memory will not be useful for scientific purposes. The real work for memory studies lies elsewhere.

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Mind as activity

Tribble and Sutton 2011, p. 94:”Mind” is skilful activity rather than a stock of

knowledge: the analysis of mind must therefore be fundamentally historical in character, because changing cultural artifacts, norms, and institutions are not external but partly consitute it.

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• The real task is to examine how memory works in aiding us to handle the world

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Distributed remembering

• This is accomplished through organizing the world in various ways, and making opportunistic use of the ways the world already is organized – letting the world organize us

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Social memory strategies

• A ”social memory strategy” is an activity where the surroundings are organized in such a way as to enable cognitive work, or simply coping

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”Social”?

• Does it have to be social, involving other subjects?

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”Social”?

• Does it have to be social, involving other subjects?Yes, or at least involving the subject’s physical

surroundings.

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”Memory”?

• Is it really fair to call this memory?

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”Memory”?

• Is it really fair to call this memory?There may be some occasional overuse of the term,

but in general it is justified – especially if we start thinking of memory as an activity, rather than as a bunch of contents

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”Strategy”?

• Is it really sufficiently deliberate to be called a strategy?

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”Strategy”?

• Is it really sufficiently deliberate to be called a strategy?As in for instance evolutionary game theory, there is

no need to insist that a strategy would have to be consciously executed

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So talk of a ”social memory strategy” is not like talk of the Holy Roman Empire!

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Causally enabling or contentful?

• Some think that external memory props just are causally useful – jogging our memory into getting things right, and that they are not integral parts of the content. But this distinction doesn’t really work.

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From inner to outer

• Mnemonics• Hand• Stuff in the immediate surroundings• Other speakers• Internet

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Mnemonics:

• ”My very educated mother just served us nine pizzas” or ”… served us nachos” (nine or eight planets)

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• Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November. All the rest have thirty-one, Excepting February alone, And that has twenty-eight days clear, And twenty-nine in each leap year…

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• ”Pie. I wish I could remember! Pi”• 3. 1 4 1 5 9 2

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• Rhymes, blank verse, melodies – the content is partly outsourced to some kind of scaffolding

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Hands

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Right-hand rule

• Using your right-hand: Curl your fingers into a half-circle around the wire, they point in the direction of the magnetic field, B Point your thumb in the direction of the conventional current.

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Outer stuff

• A path through the woods – makes it possible to navigate the woods without thinking too much about the ”correct way” (Is this even to be counted as something cognitive? Yes.)

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Familiar examples

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Coffee cups

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More coffee cups

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Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre

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Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre

• How could the actors remember all their lines?– One actor had to know many parts– Large amount of stuff to master– Virtually no rehearsals– Very little time to learn new material

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Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, contd.

• Plots • Parts• Physical layout of the stage – two doors,

probably used very consistently: one for entering, one for exiting

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Shakespeare’s stage

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Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, contd.

”To look on earth no more” ”To look on death no more” (Richard III)

”But as ill luck would have it””But as the devil would have it” (Henry IV)

Such differences not noted by audience

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Old people, with memory losses

• These cases are interesting because they are not studies of trained experts in a limited area, but rather something where we all are experts to some degree: managing our daily business

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A puzzle:

• Old people often show decline in memory in laboratory settings, but manage very well in their familiar environment – just as well as much younger people

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Old people, contd.

”Memory? No, I don’t have that!”One of the informants in the ethnographic study

by Kristiansson.

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Old people, with memory losses, contd.

• Some complex strategies were found, some others were more a matter of luck, or just holding on to something without much thought

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Letting someone else jog your memory

• Great reliance on partners, not just for letting the other one recall some things, but for having the partner keep in mind what the first one actually remembered

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Redundancy

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Resilience through redundancies

Many of our older subjects systematically used redundant organization of their surroundings

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Other examples of social memory strategies

• Cooking – the surroundings are your extended mind to arrive at the proper result. (Helps explain why cooking in an unfamiliar kitchen is so frustrating)

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Further issues

• Research on memory and distributed cognition should focus on the process of remembering through detailed descriptions and analysis of naturally occurring situations. Lab settings often deceptive. Ethnographic studies will be useful.

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Co-workers

This work was done in cooperation with: • Nils Dahlbäck, Linköping University• Mattias Kristiansson, Linköping University

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References

• Clark & Chalmers 1998. ”The extended mind”, Analysis• Dahlbäck, Kristiansson, Stjernberg 2013. ”Distributed

Remembering Through Active Structuring of Activities and Environments”, Review of Psychology and Philosophy

• Shanon 1990, ”The knot in the handkerchief”, Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 5

• Tribble, E.B. 2005. “Distributing cognition in the globe”, Shakespeare Quarterly 56(2): 135–155.

• Tribble, E.B. 2011. Cognition in the Globe: Attention and memory in Shakespeare’s theatre. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.