The causal and simulation theories are often presented as very distinct views about declarative memory, their major difference lying on the causal condition. The causal theory states that remembering involves an accurate representation causally connected to an earlier experience. In the simulation theory, remembering involves an accurate representation generated by a reliable memory process. I investigate how to construe detailed versions of these theories that correctly classify memory errors as misremembering or confabulation. Neither causalists nor simulationists (...) have paid attention to memory-conjunction errors, which is unfortunate because both theories have problems with these cases. The source of the difficulty is the background assumption that an act of remembering has one target. I fix these theories for those cases. The resulting versions are closely related when implemented using tools of information theory, differing only on how memory transmits information about the past. The implementation provides us with insights about the distinction between confabulatory and non-confabulatory memory, where memory-conjunction errors have a privileged position. (shrink)

Nesse artigo, investigo três casos de erros de memória obtidos em laboratório como forma de avaliar as principais teorias da memória : teoria causal e simulacionismo. De maneira geral, a teoria causal afirma que alguém lembra de algo somente se sua lembrança está numa relação causal adequada com uma experiência anterior daquilo que é lembrado. No simulacionismo, essa relação não é necessária. Os casos de erros de memória investigados são DRM, “perdido no shopping” e erro de conjunção de conteúdo. Esses (...) casos são difíceis para a teoria causal, especialmente em sua versão direta, mas não para o simulacionismo. Minha hipótese é a de que essa dificuldade se deve especificamente ao critério causal adotado. ENGLISH: I investigate three lab cases of memory error and test their consequences to the main theories of (declarative) memory: causal theory and simulationism. Roughly, the causal theory states that a subject remembers something only if her remembering is in a causal relation with a past experience of that thing. In simulationism, this relation is not necessary. The cases of memory error are DRM, “lost in the mall”, and memory -conjunction error. These are problem cases for the causal theory, but not for simulationism. My hypothesis is that this difficulty is because of the causal requirement. (shrink)

The term "false memories" has been used to refer to suggestibility experiments in which whole events are apparently confabulated and in media accounts of contested memories of childhood abuse. Since 1992 psychologists have increasingly used the term "false memory" when discussing memory errors for details, such as specific words within word lists. Use of the term to refer to errors in details is a shift in language away from other terms used historically (e.g., "memory intrusions"). (...) We empirically examine this shift in language and discuss implications of the new use of the term "false memories." Use of the term presents serious ethical challenges to the data-interpretation process by encouraging over-generalization and misapplication of research findings on word memory to social issues. (shrink)

Are those judgments that we make on the basis of our memories immune to error through misidentification? In this paper, I discuss a phenomenon which seems to suggest that they are not; the phenomenon of observer memory. I argue that observer memories fail to show that memory judgments are not IEM. However, the discussion of observer memories will reveal an interesting fact about the perspectivity of memory; a fact that puts us on the right path towards explaining (...) why memory judgments are indeed IEM. The main tenet in the account of IEM to be proposed is that this aspect of memory is grounded, on the one hand, on the intentionality of perception and, on the other hand, on the relation between the intentionality of perception and that of memory. (shrink)

First person judgments that are immune to error through misidentifi cation (IEM) are fundamental to self-conscious thought. The IEM status of many such judgments can be understood in terms of the possession conditions of the concepts they involve. However, this approach cannot be extended to first person judgments based on autobiographical memory. Th e paper develops an account of why such judgments have the IEM property and how thinkers are able to exploit this fact in inference.

In The Blue Book, Wittgenstein defined a category of uses of “I” which he termed “I”-as-subject, contrasting them with “I”-as-object uses. The hallmark of this category is immunity to error through misidentification (IEM). This article extends Wittgenstein’s characterisation to the case of memory-judgments, discusses the significance of IEM for self-consciousness—developing the idea that having a first-person thought involves thinking about oneself in a distinctive way in which one cannot think of anyone or anything else—and refutes a common objection to (...) the claim that memory-judgments exhibit IEM. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to defend the view that judgments based on episodic memory are immune to error through misidentification. I will put forward a proposal about the contents of episodic memories according to which a memory represents a perception of a past event. I will also offer a proposal about the contents of perceptual experiences according to which a perceptual experience represents some relations that its subject bears to events in the external world. The combination (...) of the two views will yield the outcome that the subject is always an intentional object of her own memories: In episodic memory, one remembers being the subject whose extrinsic properties were experienced in some past perception. For that reason, one cannot misidentify oneself in memory unless one is having an inaccurate memory. Thus, the source of immunity to error through misidentification in memory lies in the nature of mnemonic content. (shrink)

Much evidence suggests that, from a young age, humans are able to generalize information learned about a subset of a category to the category itself. Here, we propose that—beyond simply being able to perform such generalizations—people are biased to generalize to categories, such that they routinely make spontaneous, implicit category generalizations from information that licenses such generalizations. To demonstrate the existence of this bias, we asked participants to perform a task in which category generalizations would distract from the main goal (...) of the task, leading to a characteristic pattern of errors. Specifically, participants were asked to memorize two types of novel facts: quantified facts about sets of kind members and generic facts about entire kinds. Moreover, half of the facts concerned properties that are typically generalizable to an animal kind, and half concerned properties that are typically more idiosyncratic. We predicted that—because of the hypothesized bias—participants would spontaneously generalize the quantified facts to the corresponding kinds, and would do so more frequently for the facts about generalizable properties. In turn, these generalizations would lead to a higher rate of quantified-to-generic memory errors for the generalizable properties. The results of four experiments supported this prediction. Moreover, the same generalizable-versus-idiosyncratic difference in memory errors occurred even under cognitive load, which suggests that the hypothesized bias operates unnoticed in the background, requiring few cognitive resources. In sum, this evidence suggests the presence of a powerful bias to draw generalizations about kinds. (shrink)

The claim that episodic memory is immune to error through misidentification enjoys continuing popularity in philosophy. Psychological research on observer memory—usually defined as occurring when one remembers an event from a point of view other than that that from which he originally experienced it—would seem, on the face of it, to undermine the IEM claim. Relying on a certain view of memory content, Fernández, however, has provided an ingenious argument for the view that it does not. This (...) paper reconstructs Fernández’ argument and shows that there is reason to reject the definition of observer memory and the view of memory content on which it relies. Once these are rejected, it turns out that observer memory does indeed imply that the IEM claim is false. (shrink)

Autobiographical memories typically give rise either to memory reports (“I remember going swimming”) or to first person past-tense judgements (“I went swimming”). This article focuses on first person past-tense judgements that are (epistemically) based on autobiographical memories. Some of these judgements have the IEM property of being immune to error through misidentification. This article offers an account of when and why first person past-tense judgements have the IEM property.

Judgments based on episodic memory are often thought to be immune to errors of misidentification (IEM). Yet there is a certain category of episodic memories, viz. observer memories, that seems to threaten IEM. In the resulting debate, some say that observer memories are a threat to the IEM enjoyed by episodic memory (Michaelian, 2021); others say that they pose no such threat (Fernández, 2021; Lin, 2020). In this paper, we argue for a middle way. First, we frame (...) the debate, claiming that the existing literature lacks a satisfying definition both of observer memories and of the precise issue of errors of identification in such memories. Then, we contribute to the debate by challenging an anti-separatist view about the relation between phenomenal and intentional features of observer memories that looms behind this debate. On this view, if the rememberer's self is a phenomenal feature of the memory, by implication it is also built into the intentional content. We reject this view and offer a moderate separatist account. Distinguishing between empirically-grounded species of observer memories, we say that the phenomenal self sometimes is, and sometimes is not built into the intentional content of the memory, and this results in different implications for IEM. (shrink)

Prospective memory (PM) enables people to remember to complete important tasks in the future. Failing to do so can result in consequences of varying severity. Here, we investigated how PM error-consequence severity impacts the neural processing of relevant cues for triggering PM and the ramification of that processing on the associated prospective task performance. Participants role-played a cafeteria worker serving lunches to fictitious students and had to remember to deliver an alternative lunch to students (as PM cues) who would (...) otherwise experience a moderate or severe aversive reaction. Scalp-recorded, event-related potential (ERP) measures showed that the early-latency frontal positivity, reflecting the perception-based neural responses to previously learned stimuli, did not differ between the severe versus moderate PM cues. In contrast, the longer-latency parietal positivity, thought to reflect full PM cue recognition and post retrieval processes, was elicited earlier by the severe than the moderate PM cues. This faster instantiation of the parietal positivity to the severe-consequence PM cues was then followed by faster and more accurate behavioral responses. These findings indicate how the relative importance of a PM can be neurally instantiated in the form of enhanced and faster PM cue recognition and processing and culminate into better PM. (shrink)

The paper discusses the epistemic benefits of cognitive mechanisms producing distorted memories. Aimed at a non-specialist audience.

Fernández offers an account of the nature of episodic memory that marries two core ideas: role-functionalism about episodic memory, and self-reflexive mnemonic content. One payoff of this view is that episodic memory judgments are immune to error through misidentification. Fernández takes this to reveal something important about the nature of one’s self-awareness in memory and our first-person conception of ourselves. However, once one sees why such judgments are immune in this way, according to the proposed account, (...) the fact that they are immune becomes moot. While technically immune to error through misidentification, episodic memory judgments are not grounded in a way such that they have any interesting epistemological import for the subject, and any insights about our self-awareness and self-conception are directly derivable from the metaphysics of memory content alone. (shrink)

In this commentary, I raise several points. First, I argue that non-search tasks show that the A-not-B task is about object representation, even if perseveration can occur without objects. Second, I provide an alternative interpretation for the finding that changing body posture reduces A-not-B errors. Third, I provide an alternative interpretation for the finding of convergence in reaching behavior in two-target tasks. Fourth, I suggest attention deficits can explain the A-not-B error on their own with no necessity for motor (...) memories. (shrink)

Cultural differences occur in the use of categories to aid accurate recall of information. This study investigated whether culture also contributed to false (erroneous) memories, and extended cross-cultural memory research to Turkish culture, which is shaped by Eastern and Western influences. Americans and Turks viewed word pairs, half of which were categorically related and half unrelated. Participants then attempted to recall the second word from the pair in response to the first word cue. Responses were coded as correct, as (...) blanks, or as different types of errors. Americans committed more categorical errors than did Turks, and Turks mistakenly recalled more non-categorically related list words than did Americans. These results support the idea that Americans use categories either to organize information in memory or to support retrieval strategies to a greater extent than Turks and suggest that culture shapes not only accurate recall but also erroneous distortions of memory. (shrink)

Software vulnerabilities are the root cause for a multitude of security problems in computer systems. Owing to their efficiency and tight control over low-level system resources, the C and C++ programming languages are extensively used for a myriad of purposes, from implementing operating system kernels to user-space applications. However, insufficient or improper memory management frequently leads to invalid memory accesses, eventually resulting in memory corruption vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities are used as a foothold for elaborated attacks that bypass (...) existing defense methods. In this paper, we summarise the main memory safety violation types (i.e. memory errors), and analyse how they are exploited by attackers and the main mitigation methods proposed in the research community. We further systematise the most relevant techniques with regards to memory corruption identification in current programs. (shrink)

We explored whether children’s suggestion-induced omission errors are caused by memory erasure. Seventy-five children were instructed to remove three pieces of clothing from a puppet. Next, they were confronted with evidence falsely suggesting that one of the items had not been removed. During two subsequent interviews separated by one week, children had to report which pieces of clothing they had removed. Children who during both interviews failed to report that they had removed the pertinent item completed a choice (...) reaction time task. In this task, they were presented with different clothing items. For each item, children had to indicate whether or not they had removed it. Significantly more errors were made for those removed items that children failed to report than for those they had not removed. This indicates that children’s suggestion-based omission errors are not due to erasure of memories. (shrink)

It is easy to construct pairs of sentences X, Y that lead many people to ascribe higher probability to the conjunction X-and-Y than to the conjuncts X, Y. Whether an error is thereby committed depends on reasoners’ interpretation of the expressions “probability” and “and.” We report two experiments designed to clarify the normative status of typical responses to conjunction problems. © 2004 Cognitive Science Society, Inc. All rights reserved.

Motor learning is the process of updating motor commands in response to a trajectory error induced by a perturbation to the body or vision. The brain has a great capability to accelerate learning by increasing the sensitivity of the memory update to the perceived trajectory errors. Conventional theory suggests that the statistics of perturbations or the statistics of the experienced errors induced by the external perturbations determine the learning speeds. However, the potential effect of another type of (...) error perception, a self-generated error as a result of motor command updates, on the learning speeds has not been examined yet. In this study, we dissociated the two kinds of errors by controlling the perception of the aftereffect using a channel-force environment. One group experienced errors due to the aftereffect of the learning process, while the other did not. We found that the participants who perceived the aftereffect of the memory updates exhibited a significant decrease in error-sensitivity, whereas the participants who did not perceive the aftereffect did not show an increase or decrease in error-sensitivity. This suggests that the perception of the aftereffect of learning attenuated updating the motor commands from the perceived errors. Thus, both self-generated and externally induced errors may modulate learning speeds. (shrink)

Goal‐directed cognition is often discussed in terms of specialized memory structures like the “goal stack.” The goal‐activation model presented here analyzes goal‐directed cognition in terms of the general memory constructs of activation and associative priming. The model embodies three predictive constraints: (1) the interference level, which arises from residual memory for old goals; (1) the strengthening constraint, which makes predictions about time to encode a new goal; and (3) the priming constraint, which makes predictions about the role (...) of cues in retrieving pending goals. These constraints are formulated algebraically and tested through simulation of latency and error data from the Tower of Hanoi, a means‐ends puzzle that depends heavily on suspension and resumption of goals. Implications of the model for understanding intention superiority, postcompletion error, and effects of task interruption are discussed. (shrink)