Social memory strategies
KNEW 2013
Fredrik Stjernberg
fredrik.stjernberg@liu.se
Linköping University
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 memory
vs
• 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.
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