MEMORY THROUGH THE AGES
Prescientific approaches
Ancient gods for memory
Greek and Roman philosophy
• Plato (427-347 BC)
– Innate concepts and memories
– Metaphoric mechanisms for
• Encoding (a scribe; misencoding)
• Storage (wax tablet; distortable)
• Retrieval (aviary; retrieval failure)
• Aristotle (384-322 BC)
– Retention versus “recollection”
– Laws of association in recall
• Contiguity, similarity, contrast
Aristotle’s On Memory and
Reminiscence
• Memory vs. recollection
– Memory is necessary, not sufficient for
recollection
– Recollection a form of inference
(attribution?) placing ourselves in a
certain time and space
– Some phrases sound like implicit/explicit,
some availability/accessibility
• Recollection and association
– Retrieval as “movement” between related
memories
– Associative “laws” (contiguity, similarity)
– Automatic cuing vs. effortful search
• Interesting comments about:
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Rehearsal and practice
Concrete vs. abstract “codes”
Role of the “substrate” (hard/soft walls)
Recollection may be in error
Arousal hurts memory
Dwarfs have lousy memory
Prescientific approaches
(cont’d)
• Cicero (106-43 BC)
– Practical aspects of memory
– “method of loci” for
remembering order
• Augustine (354-430 AD)
– Sensory vs. ‘intellectual”
memories
– Active nature of
remembering
– Potential for “false
memories”
– Importance of emotion in
memory
The Renaissance:
Empirical observation
• Juan Luis Vives (1492-1540)
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Spanish humanist/empiricist
“Three Books on the Soul of Life” (1538)
Importance of rehearsal for retention
Utility of “memory exercise” and practice
Three sources of forgetting
• “image’ is erased or destroyed
• Smeared or fragmented
• Or “escapes our search”
• Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
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British philosopher/humanist
Describes the “inductive method”
Basic skills of memory, fancy, reason
Mnemonic strategies
• Visual imagery
• Study prior to sleeping
• Varied encoding
• Selective memory search
(“prenotion”)
British Empricism and
Continental Nativism
• Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)
– Memory as “decaying sensations”
– Knowledge results from experience
– Founds British empiricist tradition
(Locke, Hume, Hartley, Mill)
• Rene Descartes (1596-1650)
– Mental laws vs. physical (dualism)
– Importance of innate concepts and
processes