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The pervasiveness of memory

Gerald Echterhoff Culture Psychology 2011 17: 3 DOI: 10.1177/1354067X10388856 The online version of this article can be found at: http://cap.sagepub.com/content/17/1/3

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Continuing Commentary

The pervasiveness of memory

Gerald Echterhoff
University of Mu nster, Germany

Culture & Psychology 17(1) 39 ! The Author(s) 2011 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1354067X10388856 cap.sagepub.com

Abstract The article by Jens Brockmeier (2010) provides a multifaceted, well-written, and thought-provoking synopsis of challenges faced by the study of memory. There are several critical issues and unwarranted conclusions associated with key claims of the article. First of all, the authors criticism of the archival notion of memory is well made but falls short of taking into account long-standing debates and conceptual developments in the psychology of memory. Second, contrary to the authors claim, memory for past events and experiences, however accurate or biased, serves important psychological functions. Third, ignoring fundamental differences between types or systems of memory poses the risk of overgeneralized and eventually unwarranted claims about memory. Differentiation can be an important step in research progress, if it goes along with an adequate level of integration. Fourth, I argue that something like memory must exist that produces learning behavior, which is ubiquitous in humans and animals. I conclude by drawing attention to the pervasiveness of memory in psychological phenomena. From this perspective, the challenges outlined in the target article are not so much due to the elusiveness or lack of substance, but rather the very pervasiveness of memory. Keywords conceptualization, critique, definition, learning, memory, memory systems, neuroscience, psychology

Consistent with habitual scientic practice, I begin my commentary with a confession about constraints and limitations. The subsequent responses to Jens Brockmeiers article (Brockmeier, 2010) are formulated from the viewpoint of social and cognitive psychology and thus are bound to overlook insights and approaches from other elds.

Corresponding author: Gerald Echterhoff, Social Psychology, Department of Psychology, University of Mu nster, D-48149 Mu nster, Germany Email: g.echterhoff@uni-muenster.de

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I hope that these responses can provide input for further, psychologically informed thinking about the important issues raised in the target article. The target article provides a multifaceted, well-written, and thought-provoking synopsis of challenges faced by the study of memory. There are several things I appreciate about the paper. Exceptional eort is devoted to adopting a nonreductionist, interdisciplinary outlook to conduct a comprehensive critique of memory research. Several observations and interpretations of extant approaches to memory strike me as unusual, fresh, and stimulating. The paper stands out in todays memory literature by taking the freedom to embark on the long and arduous journey to the frontiers of thinking about memory. And it does succeed in testing and taxing the limits of our knowledge by questioning, and at times attacking, commonly held assumptions and truths about memory. All in all, I admire the authors unswerving resolve to take on such a complex and far-ung issue, despite the relatively unrewarding costbenet ratio of such an endeavor in todays scientic world. Also, I believe that it behooves everyone who is scientically interested in memory to be aware of the sorts of questions and quandaries that are raised in the article. Based on the disenchanting results of his analysis, the author argues that a fundamental shift of thinking about memory is needed. To indicate possible directions of this shift, he outlines new opportunities and burgeoning approaches that are unencumbered by the conceptual baggage and predicaments of traditional views of memory. In the proposed alternative view, memory appears as a transitory practice that is rooted in and shaped by social and cultural environments, human intentionality, language, and communication. I feel generally sympathetic to the visions sketched by the author, especially regarding the close interplay between memory, social context, and communication (see Echterho, Higgins, & Groll, 2005; Hirst & Echterho, 2008). However, there are several critical issues regarding the main claims and arguments that I address in the following. To make my own understanding of the paper explicit, I briey recapitulate key claims before formulating my responses. 1. According to the rst claim I want to examine, the traditional view of memory as an archive that supplies information about the past is in deep trouble and in dire need of revision. Various arguments and research ndings across dierent disciplines are mustered to challenge the idea of memory as a device for storing experiences for later retrieval and usage. From my viewpoint, the authors criticism of the archival notion of memory is well-taken but falls short of taking into account long-standing debates and conceptual developments in the psychology of memory. It has been recognized for a while that human memory does not record and store information like technical devices. According to a view that has been prominent since the 1970s, memories are dynamic and temporary constructions profoundly shaped by a host of factors like the rememberers cognitive schemata, attitudes, and environmental conditions (e.g., Conway & PleydellPearce, 2000). Memory psychologists have marveled at the impact of memories

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on peoples current thinking and feeling, the exibility and creativity of human memory (Schacter, 1996) and its adaptation and contribution to human sociality (Hirst & Brown, in press). At the same time, they have discovered various shortcomings such as mnemonic gaps, omissions, and amnesia, or the susceptibility to biasing inuences and unwanted distortions. Faced with a complex array of empirical ndings, they have struggled with the conceptualization of memory (e.g., Foster & Jelicic, 1999; Tulving, 2000), and have debated models of memory that bear hardly any resemblance to the traditional archival view that is singled out in the target article. For instance, the thrust of so-called process theories of memory (e.g., Blaxton, 1989; Jacoby, 1991; Roediger, 1990) is to conceptualize memory without invoking spatial storage structures and to focus instead on the stages and transformations of information in the process of learning and the construction of memory reports. Furthermore, the dierent analogies that are used to describe memory phenomena have been critically evaluated in the psychological literature. As early as 1980, Henry Roediger, a leading memory researcher, reviewed various metaphors for memory that were employed in pertinent theories. He found that memories are often regarded as objects stored in a mental space and that remembering involves a search of this space, for instance in theories that compare memory to a store, a library, or a dictionary. Roediger (1980) also reviewed alternatives to the dominant spatial search notion, such as concepts of reconstruction (Neisser, 1967), signal detection (Bernbach, 1967), and levels of processing (Craik & Lockhart, 1972). Overall, I agree that the notion criticized in the target article does play a role when people, including researchers, talk and think about memory. However, the limitations of this notion have long been acknowledged in the eld of psychology, and substantial eort has been devoted to developing alternative approaches. On a related note, I think that a broad critique like the one advanced in the target article should at least acknowledge the tradition of ecological approaches in memory psychology (e.g., Neisser, 1982). Ecological memory studies emphasize the everyday uses of memory and refrain from the reductionism pursued in much of mainstream cognitive psychology. 2. According to another key claim, there are no grounds for granting memory the crucial psychological functions that have been hitherto assumed. Specically, so the argument goes, it is wrong to regard memory as a faculty that allows people to re-experience the past in a fairly accurate way, as well as to establish and maintain a sense of self. In this context, the author also bids farewell to the common conception that memory is indispensable for mental health and regular psychological functioning: it was a truism that losing it [ones memory] is losing ones mind (p. 22). However, there are several reasons to doubt the validity of this claim. First of all, countless studies have shown that people can correctly report or identify previously studied material. While such memory is notoriously susceptible to failures and biases, there is no reason for the sweeping claim that people are altogether incapable of having some idea of what actually

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happened in the past. Regarding the health-related function of memory, it is well established in both basic research and clinical practice that lacking access to past experiences, as in cases of amnesia (Cermak, 1982), is highly detrimental to peoples well-being and successful functioning in a given social environment. Also, there is ample empirical evidence that a subjective sense of ones past experiences, however accurate or biased, is critical for peoples sense of identity (e.g., Wilson & Ross, 2003). Furthermore, the validity of the authors claim is constrained by its apparent focus on episodic memory, which is only one among several basis types of memory. Episodic memory is characterized by conscious recollection of previous self-experienced episodes, or mental time-travel to events one has experienced in the past (Tulving, 2002). The authors arguments do not seem applicable to other established systems or types of memory, such as working memory, semantic memory, and procedural memory (e.g., Schacter, Wagner, & Buckner, 2000). For instance, semantic memory refers to our knowledge about the world, such as knowing the capital of Cameroon or the dening features of a penguin in contrast to other birds. It seems impossible to dispute the fundamental function that this type of memory serves in our lives. Similar arguments could be made for the basic functions of working memory and procedural memory (see also my notes on learning below). 3. According to a third main claim, memory cannot be construed as a unitary phenomenon, largely because the investigation of memory has become highly heterogeneous and has resulted in a pandemonium of diverse and partly inconsistent ndings. This diversication is taken as evidence that the concept of memory is in the process of dissolving. I agree that a concept may lose its utility when it becomes too diversied, and eminent scholars have drawn attention to this issue (Tulving, 2007), as the author aptly notes. However, ignoring fundamental dierences between types or systems of memory poses the risk of overgeneralized and eventually unwarranted claims about memory. Dierentiation can as well be taken as a sign of research progress and the achievement of balanced insights, given that it is accompanied by a corresponding level of integration. As outlined above, memory psychologists have not only been concerned with drawing ever more distinctions between types of memory, but also with nding common denominators and integrative views of memory. 4. At a fundamental level Jens Brockmeier raises severe doubts about the ontological and psychological reality of memory. In contrast to established biological entities like the lung or the heart, memory does not have a safe and sound place in the world or, at least, in the human head (p. 21). Although I tend to welcome a critical stance regarding ontological presuppositions, essentialism, and reication, I think that something like memory must exist that produces basic patterns of behavior that are ubiquitous in the living world. Humans and most other animals clearly are capable of some kind of learning, however decient and short-lived it may be. Organisms, including humans, do not start anew every second of their lives, as if being perpetually newborn. They change and become more versatile in operating in their environment through experience.

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In other words, encounters with the environment often make a dierence for the future of an organism. For a dogs future behavior, it matters whether it has received a meat chunk after sitting down or whether it has not; and feedback from teachers does not always fail to have an eect on students performance. In this context, the author draws on ndings in cognitive neuroscience to question the existence of a distinctive entity that corresponds to the psychological concept of memory. The argument rests to a large extent on evidence that remembering, perceiving, and imagining the future have non-distinguishable neural correlates. However, the scientic evidence is not as clear-cut as the author would want us to believe. For instance, based on evidence from neuroimaging, researchers have recently identied a neural signature for remembering the past that diers from the neural activity pattern found for imagining the future (Addis, Pan, Vu, Laiser, & Schacter, 2008). Overall, the ndings suggest that there are dierent subsystems for remembering vs. imagining events in addition to a common brain network that is highlighted in the target article. 5. The presumable elusiveness of memory gures prominently in the target article. From my point of view, to understand some of the challenges faced by memory research, one needs to appreciate the pervasiveness of memory. To make this case, memory is dened as a mechanism that prevents experiences from passing without further consequence for the experiencing individual. In other words, memory occurs when past experiences have some consequence for an individuals subsequent behavior and psychological functioning. In this sense, memory is implied in and required for most cognitive processes, such as perception, thinking, judgment, problem-solving, and language, and involved in many other psychological phenomena, such as emotional responses, intention, and motivation. All these basic capacities would be virtually impossible if individuals could not draw on previous experiences and available knowledge. Memory is constantly recruited and harnessed by other psychological processes, and in these cases it is not a goal in itself. It allows us to construct perceptions of objects, to solve math problems, and to read a newspaper. Researchers interested in a comprehensive view of memory need to take into account that it is deeply entangled in and functional for a plethora of other processes. The pervasive entanglement may well constitute the unique nature of memory compared to other psychological phenomena. Regarding research pragmatics, the sheer pervasiveness of memory makes it dicult to dene or discern a circumscribed, well-dened domain of study. From this perspective, the challenges outlined in the target article are not so much due to the elusiveness or lack of substance, but rather the very pervasiveness and ubiquity of memory.

Acknowledgments
The preparation of this article was supported by a grant from the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, reference number EC 317/2).

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Author Biography Gerald Echterhoff, Dr. habil., PhD (New School for Social Research, New York, 2000), is professor of social psychology at the University of Mu nster, Germany. Previously he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University (2001 2002), assistant professor (wiss. Assistent) at Bielefeld University (20042008), visiting professor at the University of Cologne (2008), and professor of psychology at Jacobs University Bremen. His research interests include interpersonal communication, shared reality, social influence on memory and judgment, social cognition, and cultural contexts of remembering. In a signature field of investigation, his lab group studies how communication shapes speakers own memory and thinking. His research has been published in leading journals such as Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Psychological Science, Perspectives on Psychological Science, and Social Cognition. Also see http://geraldechterhoff.com.

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