Episodic cognition: what is it, where is it, and when does it develop?

Episodic Cognition (or “Mental Time Travel”) is the ability to mentally re-experience events from our personal past and imagine potential events from our personal future. This capacity is fundamental to our lives and has been argued to be uniquely human. The aim of this thesis is to use behavioural tasks developed in comparative cognition to integrate both the literature on different research subjects (animals, children, adults, patients) but also from different theoretical perspectives, with the hope of facilitating communication and comparison between these fields. The backbone of the thesis is the behavioural tasks themselves, along with their origins in theory. Specifically, the “What-Where-When”, “Unexpected Question” and “Free Recall” episodic memory tasks and the “Bischof-Köhler” test of episodic foresight. Each of these tasks stems from different theoretical approaches to defining episodic cognition. Whilst extensively studied, these four tasks have never been undertaken by the same subjects and have never been directly compared. It is thus unclear whether these different theoretical perspectives converge on a single “episodic cognition” system, or a variety of overlapping processes. This thesis explores these issues by presenting these tasks to previously untested animal (the Eurasian Jay), developing children (aged 3-6), and a sample of human adults (Cambridge Undergraduates). Finally, these findings are applied in the assessment of episodic cognition in a population that is thought to have mild hippocampal damage – the overweight and obese. It was predicted that if all these putative tests of episodic cognition were tapping into the same underlying ability, then they should be passed by the same animal species, develop at the same time in children, correlate in human adults and be impaired in those with damage to the relevant brain areas. These predictions were, to some degree, confirmed. While the novel animal model could not be tested on all paradigms, the jays performed well on Bischof-Köhler future planning test. However, the results of the What-Where-When memory test were equivocal. There was a relatively low degree of correlation between performance on all the tasks in human children, along with a suggestion that each had a distinct developmental trajectory. The study of human adults revealed that while performance on all the tasks were related to one another, this relationship was often nonlinear, suggesting the contribution of several different psychological processes. Finally, it was found that both memory and performance on the Bischof-Köhler future planning task were altered in individuals who are overweight. A potentially surprising theme throughout the results is that performance on the Bischof-Köhler tasks is in fact negatively related to performance on memory tests, and improves in patients thought to have mild hippocampal damage. It is concluded that there may be a significant degree of overlap in the processes tapped by different putative tests of episodic memory, but that they can not be considered to be equivalent. Furthermore, it is suggested that episodic cognition is a fundamentally ineffective system with which to predict future motivational states, because it is biased by current feelings

'Exarcheia doesn't exist': Authenticity, Resistance and Archival Politics in Athens

My thesis investigates the ways people, materialities and urban spaces interact to form affective ecologies and produce historicity. It focuses on the neighbourhood of Exarcheia, Athens’ contested political topography par excellence, known for its production of radical politics of discontent and resistance to state oppression and eoliberal capitalism. Embracing Exarcheia’s controversial status within Greek vernacular, media and state discourses, this thesis aims to unpick the neighbourhoods’ socio-spatial assemblage imbued with affect and formed through the numerous (mis)understandings and (mis)interpretations rooted in its turbulent political history. Drawing on theory on urban spaces, affect, hauntology and archival politics, I argue for Exarcheia as an unwavering archival space composed of affective chronotopes – (in)tangible loci that defy space and temporality. I posit that the interwoven narratives and materialities emerging in my fieldwork are persistently – and perhaps obsessively – reiterating themselves and remaining imprinted on the neighbourhood’s landscape as an incessant reminder of violent histories that the state often seeks to erase and forget. Through this analysis, I contribute to understandings of place as a primary ethnographic ‘object’ and the ways in which place forms complex interactions and relationships with social actors, shapes their subjectivities, retains and bestows their memories and senses of historicity

Ekphrastic Medieval Visions: A New Discussion in Ekphrasis and Interarts Theory

Ekphrastic Medieval Visions: A New Discussion in Ekphrasis and Interarts Theory argues that the dream-vision and mystical-vision texts of the high and late Middle Ages are ekphrastic works. With their inclusion within the purview of criticism and theories of ekphrasis, new formal qualities of the ekphrastic mode come to the surface such as its dynamism and polytemporality, its reliance on the processes of memory, and diffuseness of narrative consciousness, rather than Murray Krieger\u27s still moment model that presupposes a sovereign subjectivity, an attempt to have the sign signify itself, or the paragone model espoused by W. J. T. Mitchell and James Heffernan that defines the ekphrastic parameters through a predetermined battle of binaries, visual and verbal, masculine and feminine. Chapter One of the dissertation provides an overview of the history of the study of ekphrasis and critiques mainstream definitions of ekphrasis. Discussion in the second chapter uncovers the differences between ekphrastic renderings of a static art object as per the traditional conceptions of ekphrasis, and the spatiotemporal dynamism that characterizes the ekphrastic dream. Chapters Three and Four examine these characteristics through close readings of two medieval dream-vision texts: Pearl and Piers Plowman respectively. Chapter Five treats the ekphrastic nature of the medieval mystical visionary text, noting its relationship to memory and traditional characteristics of mystical visions, such as apophasis and synaesthesia; the subsequent two chapters respectively examine the ekphrasis of Hildegard of Bingen\u27s Scivias and the space of revision between Julian of Norwich\u27s A Vision Showed to a Devout Woman and A Revelation of Love. The conclusion considers contemporary poetry by Barbara Guest, Kathleen Fraser, and Ciaran Carson in light of the new information that medieval texts bring to the understanding of the ekphrastic mode and discusses intersecting concerns of the medieval and contemporary periods about authorship and authority, interpretation, the time and space of the text, and the discernment or questioning of literary and aesthetic boundaries