Human Memory: A Constructivist View

manuscript.

Introduction

One of the most vivid memories of my life involved a time when I traveled with my family to Tangier in Morocco. I was 8 years old.

The first impact came when I saw the Rock of Gibraltar. The colors of that weird shape, the huge lump of mountain, were unlike anything I had seen before. I felt as if some kind of force had picked me up into the air and put me down again. And what followed had the same quality. A ride in a small plane across ink blue water; my father met us at the little airport on the other side. We went out to dinner that evening. The walls of the restaurant were covered in a Technicolor mural of people in (Spanish-looking) fields, carrying sheaves of yellow wheat and fruit and purple grapes, which again impacted me like a hammer. There was deep red wine in glasses on the table. The hotel we went to was called the Isle de France. Our room in the hotel was described as cent-huit in French; so I learned cent-huit, probably with a bit of fast mapping, and knew that it was 108 in English. Also, the sound of huit was like the wheat seen in the restaurant murals.

Our 6-month stay in Tangier brought even more astonishing images and happenings, such that the introduction paled in comparison.

I always knew that I remembered a lot about that time. As an adult I decided to check on the quantity of information. Of course (other than my then 10-year-old sister) I had no way of checking on whether my memory was accurate. But I wrote the material down, and the quantity was indeed very large. Another sign of the power of this particular recollection was the fact that I recalled, after 50 years, the number of the room at our hotel: an achievement I have never duplicated since. And the memories came out in pretty much continuous narrative style: what happened the day we arrived (as described above) and after that while we were at the hotel, and when we moved, and the events that followed later. For a remote memory, this was a lot of information. The perhaps 4 months that we had lived in Dover, in the UK, before the Tangier trip, brings back only a sequence of chimney-pot moments: special events that stand out from a foggy context. Tangier wasn’t like that; it was more of a—long, clear—short story. Across that time I was experiencing something of a state of ongoing happiness and excitement; I loved the place. At eight, I did not see the extreme poverty of the people around me. I saw the donkeys.

I hope in the present book to make a case for why certain memories like these are very strongly retained, across time, while others are also well retained although they do not involve quite such dramatic events. I also hope to make a case for the critical importance of constructive events: under the view offered here, such events, far from harming our ability to recall through the role of inference, are critical to the remarkable effectiveness and even accuracy of human recall.

I have found, on occasion, that the way memory is understood in mainstream psychology differs slightly from my own understanding. The difference is trivial, but if a wall were measured to run forty feet, under one reading, and forty feet three inches under another, the practical outcome of your choice—between the two measures—could be serious. At any rate, what I hope to do in the present book is to describe the way in which I conceptualize human memory. I am offering a minority position and am aware that many readers will disagree with that position. However, this at least provides a means of raising issues that otherwise might not be considered at all: a way, perhaps, of moving some concerns out of the shadows and into a degree of light.

Sir Francis Galton (1879) famously asked his friends and acquaintances to describe the appearance of their breakfast table earlier in the day. The responses ranged from no imagery at all (i.e. a knowledge of what had been present, but without visual memory pictures) to highly vivid imagery. This appears to be the human range—a large one. I myself generate both memory and mental images, but they are weak: I am a low visualizer. As I walk about in the world, I experience the vivid perceptual input that is common to all humans, but my thoughts and memories are mostly abstract. Or at least there is a huge quantity of abstract material, accompanied, in the case of memories, by what might be called ghost images.

I was therefore puzzled to read accounts of working memory (consciousness and the domain of material just about to enter awareness) that included structures for maintaining language sounds, and for maintaining sounds in order, and for visual and spatial images—all sensory information—but nothing for abstract meanings. The researchers appeared to take it as given that our awareness did not include abstract thought. Models of this kind have prevailed since the 1960s, and have only recently begun to change. Other areas of research were also puzzling. Cognitive psychologists often cited context as a means of accessing a memory, that is, as a means of finding the memory in the long-term store. This did not appear feasible. In short, there were a number of theoretical assumptions to which I found myself saying, But that can’t be right.

When it comes to philosophical and theoretical models, I am not an empiricist. When I first read the empiricist philosophers, I may have responded as I did (not being converted) because my own cognition leans so heavily toward the abstract. My reaction was that this was beautiful work—very impressive and thought-provoking: and quite wrong. My reaction to Kantian constructivism was different, although I certainly found that work thought-provoking too.

When it comes to psychological models, my orientation is toward hardline constructivism. This includes the approach to memory developed by Jean Piaget. But a strong case—perhaps a very strong case—can be made that the dominant theoretical influence in mainstream cognitive psychology has been empiricist. I believe this is the source of the disconnect—the perhaps three inches of difference in a long wall. At any rate, what I hope to offer in the present book is the other view: a view that understands human memory as being geared to record input from the environment only to a limited degree. Seen in this way, human cognition has other, additional, concerns.

John Locke, generally seen as the father of philosophical empiricism, raised the question (often raised before) of the origins of our ideas. Given that I know what a flower is—how do I know? It seemed clear to Locke that the only source of human knowledge of the outside world must be through our senses—through our eyes and ears and our capacity to touch. For, what other source could there be? The alternative was, Locke thought, the assumption of ideas simply emerging inside us, as if we could know about the universe without recourse to what we saw or heard or touched. The notion had the feeling of magic—or, more precisely, in Locke’s day, mysticism: something given perhaps from God (Locke, 1690/1956). As a man who liked the path of reason, and believed that human cognition was a natural process, such a view was not acceptable to the philosopher. It followed, though, from this position, that our ideas must consist of copies of sensory information—images of things seen and heard and touched. It would not be possible to move beyond such images to something else, to abstract meanings, without encountering the same impossible jump: where would the meanings come from?

So, abstract thought, and memories with abstract content, must be rejected. What appeared to be such was really a complex of sensory images. Further, the organization of the human mind would be largely copied from the organization of the environment: the source of knowledge. And just as it appears in perception, the images in the mind were composed from basic, smaller sensory elements: the shape of a leaf, the lines of its veins, the green color. So, ideas and memories were built from units, and the idea as a whole could be understood once the units were understood. The idea was an addition of the units.

Based on an empiricist model, human ideas and thought were also a direct (from the senses) copy of the world outside. Later philosophers in the same line accepted the Aristotelian notion that links (such as identity, similarity, and contiguity links) connect memory representations together. The emphasis here, though, was on the factor of contiguity: the idea that when two things repeatedly occur together in the world outside, they become linked in memory. So, fork becomes linked with knife, and flower with petal. Here the environment determines the organization of memory content, and contiguity can be expected to play a kind of lion’s role in the work of recollection.

More to the point, though, if human cognition is a copy of the world accessed through eyes and ears, i.e. a fundamental copying function, then processes inside the brain should not come into play to transform the original input. (Some minimal processes were allowed in the case of concepts, such as the additive mixing of original images—a horse and a horn put together to portray a unicorn, for instance: but neither the horse nor the horn, in and of themselves, would alter.) The basic assumption here, when it comes to memory, is one of nontransformation.

Several theoretical positions follow from the nontransformation view. Most notably, memory content could weaken and fade across time, much like a picture fading from cloth, but, again, the content could not alter. If you saw a rose, then that particular memory would involve a code for rose, and could never shift to a code for, say, geranium. Memory was like a moving, if dimmed, photograph. David Hume (1739/1965, bk. 1, sect. 1) described this tenet as follows: Memory preserves the original form in which its objects were presented, and that wherever we depart from it in recollecting anything, it proceeds from some defect or imperfection in that faculty.

No less important in terms of how memory is perceived, a necessary implication of the present view is that separate environmental experiences will also be held separately in the long-term store. The true memory is the input from the world, so it would be harmful to reassociate or reorganize or otherwise shift the original content. For instance, information acquired in a particular episode, Episode X, should not become assimilated to information acquired in another episode, Episode Y (see Chapter 7).

Some modern researchers who basically support the empiricist view see the alternative model as rationalism. According to the French philosopher René Descartes, almost all concepts contain abstract components. This is true even of concrete objects that can be easily represented through imagery, such as a table. Descartes’ argument was that even a table cannot be understood without the properties, for instance, of solidity and extension—basically abstract qualities, not given through sensory experience. The rationalist conclusion, though, concerning this fairly compelling point, was that we are born with concepts already latently present in us. The concepts need to be activated through experience, but the notion is that we are biologically provided with knowledge of what, say, a rabbit is, requiring only that we encounter a rabbit in the world for the concept to be triggered. Although this view has been defended in the modern age, for instance by Fodor (1975, 1986) and some researchers into artificial intelligence, the difficulties associated with rationalism are quite severe. It can probably be concluded, then, that the real contender against theoretical empiricism involves yet a third view: one that rejects innate ideas (of a rabbit or any other physical thing) no less than Locke rejected them. This is Kantian constructivism.

Locke’s model is easy to describe. I think the same can be said for Descartes’ various arguments. But Kant’s (1781/1965) model is not. Language in his own day may not have served him well, and I am not sure that language is doing any better today. Some aspects of Kant’s thought are expressed in The Critique of Pure Reason; however, Kant can be tentatively described as follows.

We receive sensory experience. Without this, we could never develop ideas or thought or memories. We do not have innate concepts such as a concept of houses or fish or flowers. However, the human mind possesses certain innate capacities. These could be described in modern terms as certain ways of thinking, ways of understanding, or, in the end, ways of interpreting sensory experience. They involve abstract conceptualizations (for lack of a better term). The sensory input to the human mind generally consists of moving and changing lines, contours, colors, sounds, and so on. The capacity for abstract comprehension enables us to interpret sensory experience of this kind. For instance, when we see one object move and make sharp contact with another object, which then also begins to move, our mind intuits the notion of causality: the first object caused the second to move. We never see or hear or touch causality, as such: the mind makes that jump when we see certain kinds of events.

At an even more fundamental level, although what we see directly are shifting line contours and colors, our cognition will interpret certain concatenations of these stimuli as involving individual objects. We construct the idea of objects existing within a space. Again, we directly see lines, but we interpret certain groups of lines as reflecting a thing, an object. And when the lines-reflecting-objects change their locations in our visual field in a certain way, we interpret this as movement.

Thus, what we understand about the world is constructed (interpreted) information. The knowledge is not given to us directly through our eyes or ears. Sensory input is, again, essential; it provides the data for the work of construction. But you never see causality, or even number, as such.

Under this view, concepts of things in the outside world, or concepts of any possible entity, are slowly constructed on the basis of experience. In dealing with spoons or tables the child would see and touch the object, gaining sensory experience, which could be interpreted on the basis of the innate capacity for abstract understanding. It would be discovered that spoons have the capacity to carry food, (capacity for motion and containment) and to be grasped (capacity to be encircled by another thing) and that tables are solid and are used to maintain smaller objects away from the ground, and so on. In this fashion, information concerning the meaning—the nature—of things in the world could be developed.

Under the Kantian model, most concepts in fact involve the synthesis of various different representations into a single functional entity. For instance, we have the concept of a physical body, but that body could be metal or wood or flesh; the single concept body allows for many constituents. Dog is the superordinate idea that includes all types of dog. Further, if I encounter a spaniel, the meaning of this entity for me will literally include other representations: dog, animal, living entity, entity. These are not associations with the concept; they are an integral part of the concept, even though each can be distinguished from the other, and employed in quite different contexts from spaniel.

Kant’s view was that the objects of perception have been constructed (no less than the objects of thought). The mind was understood as transforming the waves of light or sound received into images: again, acts of unconscious interpretation (processing) were involved. Today, this view appears to be universally accepted when it comes to perception, and models exist that attempt to explain how the visual information is derived (Marr, 1982). But the notion of extensive construction in the domain of memory has not been accepted to anything like the same extent.

Shifting now to a modern understanding of the basic ideas of the present model (which is not necessarily a direct copy of Kant’s original views, and takes no account of his particular goals in the Critique), when, again, we see the contours of an object shifting perhaps from left to right across our visual field in a certain way, we do not register just shifting contours, but rather what we intuit—conceptualize—is the fact of movement. In this example the thing out there, perhaps a ball, is moving. What we see are changing visual lines; what we understand is the reality of a moving thing. When one object collides with another, and the second begins to accelerate (in the direction of the applied force), we understand this as causality. We do not see causality, but the human mind achieves that effective jump.

Locke wrote that understanding could not simply exist somehow in us: we must receive such understanding directly through the senses. He could see no way in which such given knowledge could be achieved, short of a literal recourse to the supernatural. But this point, I believe, is less troubling to the modern scientist. The idea that natural functions exist for which we as yet have no model is now generally considered a reasonable idea, and perhaps should be considered particularly so in the case of the human brain with its thousand billion constantly interacting neurons. Certainly, physicists accept this view, in their own field, with no struggle. We do not know as yet how the mind can somehow come to understand properties such as motion, containment, extension, or change—or, say, a condition of not being: but it does.

The tenet that all representation must be of sensory content appears to have been widely abandoned in the cognitive field across the second half of the twentieth century, probably beginning with its abandonment in the area of concepts (Medin & Smith, 1981). It is clear, though, that the influence of the original empiricist model has nonetheless been extensive. For instance, the empiricist tenet that mental functions can best be understood by breaking them down into their units has dominated work in the field of memory since the time of Ebbinghaus. In fact, research involving verbal units [e.g. CVCs (consonant-vowel-consonant pseudowords), words, and numbers] has proved highly successful, not, the case can be made, because the resulting data really do encompass all the phenomena of more complex material, but because such work does tap some of the most critical variables that operate in both simple and complex information. Also, the argument can be made that reducing memory content to its simplest form can, in some cases, reveal properties that might be missed (or discovered only after an extended time) in more complicated material. Even so, the overwhelming bulk of research has focused on word item or number item recall, with a relatively trivial quantity of work pursued in the case of memory for material with higher-order meaning, even though such content provides the fabric of our daily lives.

There has also been a long-standing tendency in the field to attribute functions related to memory to a copy of direct, i.e. perceived, environmental qualities, as in the case of the emphasis on environmental context in providing access to learned material. A constructivist in the older tradition would reject the view that context plays more than a trivial role in promoting the recall of, say, a list of words. Something more abstract and more cognitive would be assumed: something like a concept of the list, to which the learned material becomes associated. In short, a kind of continuing environmental bias can be identified in the literature.

Probably the most striking form of this bias, though, involves the following widely held view. It is assumed that events happen in the world, and humans form a copy in memory of these events. Concepts stored in longterm memory (LTM) are indeed activated in the forming of a memory, as may be higher-order interpretation based on background knowledge. But this copy of an external event is the essential work performed by the memory function: to all intents and purposes, the function ends there. The goal is a copy of experience, of course corresponding to the nature of that experience. If what you saw was a river, then a river will be represented in memory. What is involved at first is the coding of an episode: what happens later is the retrieval of the episode, and the latter embodies the critical work of human memory. This is a copier theory, with allowance for the role of LTM in forming the content of some recollections; but the resulting copy is the point.

The same view would of course be held for non-episodic material, such as memory for the contents of a book or a film, a list of words, and so on.

If the most basic function of human memory is to copy and retain environmental experience, then it would not make sense for the system to permit changes in memory records. The information should be held as it was: an input copy of the world. This would necessarily produce—as it has produced—a strong orientation against the view that memory content, as coded in LTM, can change. And perhaps just as critical, there would also be a bias against the view that the information in a given memory, say for Episode A, could interact with the information in another memory, say Episode B. The point of the function is to hold the content of the original episode, and as such interactions between them would violate the most basic principle within the system: that of copying what comes in from the world outside.

In contrast, a view based on a constructivist theory would posit that the basic function of the system is to develop the most powerful or deepcutting information about reality (the world outside) in general. To achieve this outcome, new content needs to be generated—going beyond the immediate conceptual information and images that can be embodied in a memory—and change would be expected. Thus, the hard-line constructivist tradition includes the tenet that content as held in LTM will undergo various transformations: it will change. Also, under the present model, this change is normally adaptive and increases the power of memory, even though on occasion it may lead to error. It is, thus, necessary within this context for information to interact within LTM itself. At any rate, an opposition here between the empiricist and constructivist traditions emerges clearly: under the former, content in LTM itself does not transmute in the sense of leading to further constructed information, while under the latter, it does.

In the present book, I hope to describe some of the work from the mainstream field that I believe is particularly important to achieving an understanding of human memory. I also hope to introduce the major ideas of hard-line constructivism, and connect the two approaches into a kind of mixed theory of human recall. I have also used personal recollections throughout to illustrate various points.

M.B.H.

Houston, TX

August 2012

Chapter 1

Links and Cues

Abstract

Chapter 1 reviews the underlying processes by which retrieval operates through links that provide movement between experiences in awareness and content stored in memory. Various types of links are identified such as identity, temporal, contiguity, opposition, similarity, and causality, as well as examples of how these links function in everyday memory. The historical role of links in shaping our understanding of retrieval processes in memory is also examined, with insights from Aristotle to present-day investigators. Research on the significance of cues in providing specific links between target material and memory content is also discussed through Tulving’s cue-dependent theory of recall and forgetting. Two specific models for cued retrieval are reviewed: the cyclical retrieval model, based largely on Gillund and Shiffrin’s (1984) work, is contrasted with Anderson and Bower’s (1973) spreading activation model. Differences between key components of these models, such as how links operate in working memory and long-term memory, as well as how these models account for the retrieval of autobiographical memory content, are discussed and illustrated with real-world examples.

Keywords

Link; Retrieval; Long-term memory; Coding; Cues; Working memory; Cue-dependent theory of recall; Cyclical retrieval models; Spreading activation models; Compound cue models; Interference

One summer night in 1999, I heard a thumping noise. I was on the upstairs landing of my house, and the sound came from the front bedroom. It was already dark.

When I entered the bedroom I saw something bang against a window. It was moving fast, but seemed too large to be an insect. Also there was a clear view, as it swung away, of a long tail. The tail and perhaps the body were apple green, as shown by the artificial light from the house. The weight of the thing—its capacity to thump—was alarming. Heavy like an animal: but green.

In the end I decided that it must have been a moth—a very large one. But as I first watched this object coming against our screens, I was reminded of a (science fiction) story in which abnormal life forms—mutants—began appearing at house windows: large furred things that wanted to come