Mahr and Csibra view autonoesis as being essential to episodic memories and construction as being essential to the process of episodic remembering. These views imply that episodic memory is systematically misleading, not because it often misinforms us about the past, but rather because it often misinforms us about how it informs us about the past

Michaelian, Kourken

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International audienceMahr & Csibra (M&C) view autonoesis as being essential to episodic memories and construction as being essential to the process of episodic remembering. These views imply that episodic memory is systematically misleading, not because it often misinforms us about the past, but rather because it often misinforms us about how it informs us about the past

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Autonoesis and reconstruction in episodic memory: Is remembering systematically misleading?

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whether episodic memory might show some functional adapta-tion to facilitate commitment. Specifically, might there be a pro-pensity for stronger encoding of or retention of episodicmemories that are commitment related? This could be tested –following a procedure developed by Conway (2009; cf. Williamset al. 2008) – by asking people to list as many specific memoriesas possible for yesterday, two days ago, three days ago, and so on,and measuring the frequency of memories in which social com-mitments are generated. In order to determine whether there iscommitment-specific facilitation, it would be important tocompare the effects of commitment on memory with otherfactors such as generalized personal or social significance.Should commitment-specific facilitation be found, the furtherquestion would be whether this is an evolutionary adaptation,and it would be important to rule out alternative explanationssuch as enculturation operating on developmental plasticity. Itis in general challenging to infer back from current function toevolutionary adaptation, and especially so in the case of multi-functional traits.With this cautionary note in mind, we may venture to observethat Conway’s theory of episodic memory also raises interestingconsiderations for understanding the origins of commitment inhuman evolution. Conway’s hypothesis is that the function of epi-sodic memory is to maintain a record of progress in relation toshort-term goals (Conway 2009). In this respect, it is importantto note that active working memory has limited capacity, whichmeans that over the course of temporally extended goal-directedactivities, task-related information must be stored and retrievedfrom long-term memory (LTM). There are compelling reasonsto think that the form of LTM involved is episodic memory(self-involving) and not mere event memory (no self present).After all, Alan must be aware that X is his goal and that he has per-formed a particular set of task-related actions up to this point.Merely remembering that some agent was performing a task,which the individual somehow egocentrically remembers, isn’tenough to carry on with the task.Complex, temporally extended goal-directed activities argu-ably play an important adaptive role for a number of nonhumanspecies, and clearly were extremely important in human evolu-tion. This lends considerable plausibility to Conway’s theory.More recently (in phylogenetic terms), human lifeways havebeen shaped by the importance of coordinating with othersin joint goal-directed activities. It is therefore tempting,against the backdrop of Conway’s theory, to speculate that epi-sodic memory may have come to support the function ofkeeping track of who is committed to what within the contextof joint goal-directed activities. Could such information beencoded directly to semantic memory, bypassing episodicmemory? Possibly, but on Conway’s account, episodicmemory forms the basis for higher-order conceptual memorystructures (e.g., a conceptual frame like a day at work) thatprovide narrative structure which organizes specific episodes.Thus, according to Conway, episodic memory plays a founda-tional role in the development of higher levels of narrativelystructured memory.Conway’s theory offers an attractive framework for under-standing the evolution of social commitment and, in so doing,provides an illuminating backdrop to M&C’s analysis. As M&Cpoint out, episodic memory is important in grounding socialcommitments. This is surely true. It is also true that, to make acommitment, you have to already be capable of engaging in tem-porally extended goal-directed activity – otherwise there isnothing to make a commitment about. Furthermore, the socialregulation of commitments (especially to the extent that thecommitment is implicit and/or indeterminate) is likely toinvolve the detailed narrative memory for goal-directed activitydescribed by Conway’s theory.Autonoesis and reconstruction in episodicmemory: Is remembering systematicallymisleading?doi:10.1017/S0140525X17001431, e22Kourken MichaelianDepartment of Philosophy, University of Otago, Dunedin 9054, New Zealand.kourken.michaelian@otago.ac.nz http://phil-mem.org/Abstract: Mahr & Csibra (M&C) view autonoesis as being essential toepisodic memories and construction as being essential to the process ofepisodic remembering. These views imply that episodic memory issystematically misleading, not because it often misinforms us about thepast, but rather because it often misinforms us about how it informs usabout the past.Mahr & Csibra (M&C) argue that the function of episodicmemory is to enable a subject to persuade others to endorse thesubject’s descriptions of past events. Although the authors buildan impressive case for this communicative account, it turns outto be committed to a counterintuitive claim, namely, that episodicmemory is systematically misleading. Other accounts, includingthe future-oriented account (e.g., Schacter & Addis 2007), like-wise turn out to be committed to this misleadingness claim. Thefuture-oriented account sees episodic memory, along with epi-sodic future thought (Szpunar 2010), as a form of mental timetravel (MTT) (Suddendorf & Corballis 1997), with future-ori-ented MTT or episodic future thought being primary, in thesense that the function of the MTT system is to enable thesubject to imagine future events, while the ability to engage informs of past-oriented MTT, including episodic memory,emerges as a by-product. Although they differ on the questionof the function of the memory or MTT system, the future-ori-ented account and the communicative account agree on twoclaims that together imply the misleadingness claim: (1) that epi-sodic memories necessarily involve autonoesis (the autonoesisclaim) and (2) that episodic remembering is necessarily a con-structive process (the construction claim).The autonoesis claim: M&C understand autonoesis in metare-presentational terms (cf. Dokic 2014; Fernández 2016), character-izing the content of a retrieved memory as having twocomponents: a first-order component informing a subject aboutan event and a second-order component informing him or herthat the information provided by the first-order component orig-inates in the subject’s own experience of the event. If retrievedmemories are indeed metarepresentational, then, when retrievalresults in the formation of a belief, the subject believes notsimply that such-and-such an event occurred but rather that heor she knows that such-and-such an event occurred because ofhaving experienced its occurrence. Crucially, the second-ordercomponent of a memory belief might be inaccurate – and hencethe belief as a whole might be false – even if the first-order com-ponent is accurate, simply because there are sources of accurateinformation about an event other than one’s own experience.The autonoesis claim is essential to the communicative account:In making a memory claim, a subject claims epistemic authorityover the event in question, and autonoesis is normally the subject’sonly ground for doing so. The claim might not, strictly speaking,be essential to the future-oriented account: Because autonoesismay not play a role in episodic future thinking (Perrin 2016),the future-oriented account might replace it with a weakerclaim, namely, that although autonoesis typically plays a role inepisodic remembering, it is not a necessary feature of retrievedmemories (Michaelian 2016b). Even this weakened claim is,however, sufficient to commit the future-oriented account tothe misleadingness claim.Commentary/Mahr & Csibra: Why do we remember? The communicative function of episodic memoryBEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES, 41 (2018) 33https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X17001431Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Otago Library, on 22 Jan 2018 at 07:38:19, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available atThe construction claim: M&C understand construction as occur-ring through Bayesian prediction of features of past events based onevidence provided by both episodic traces and semantic informa-tion (De Brigard 2014a). Alternative understandings are available(Michaelian 2016b), but they concur that, at least in typical cases,not all of the content of a given retrieved memory originates inthe subject’s experience of the remembered event. This, in turn,implies that retrieved memories will often be, to some degree, inac-curate with respect to remembered events. But construction doesnot make inaccuracy inevitable: The incorporation of nonexperien-tial information into a retrieved memory representation, in particu-lar, does not necessarily imply inaccuracy, simply becauseincorporated information may itself be accurate (Michaelian 2013).The construction claim is essential to the communicativeaccount: If the point of making memory claims is not to conveyaccurate descriptions of past events but rather to convey descrip-tions that the subject wants an audience to endorse, a constructivememory process is needed to enable the subject to generate suit-able representations of events. The claim is likewise essential tothe future-oriented account: TheMTT systemmust be able to con-structively recombine andmodify information fromvarious sourcesin order to generate representations of possible events in episodicfuture thinking, and if episodic remembering is carried out by thesame system, it is bound to be constructive in the same sense.The misleadingness claim: Together, the (weakened) autonoesisclaim and the construction claim imply the misleadingness claim.If the autonoesis claim is right, a memory might be false even ifthe event that it represents occurred exactly as the belief repre-sents it as having occurred. In particular, the belief will be falsein cases in which its first-order content originates at least in partin a source other than the subject’s own experience of theevent. If the construction claim is right, such cases occur fre-quently. Indeed, because, as M&C acknowledge, episodicremembering is driven as much by current beliefs as by episodictraces, they are the rule rather than the exception. Therefore,the second-order component of a memory belief – and thebelief as a whole –will frequently be false. In short, both the com-municative account and the future-oriented account are commit-ted to the claim that episodic memory beliefs are frequently false,not because construction results in inaccurate representations ofevents, but rather because autonoesis results in inaccurate meta-representations of the relationship between representations andthe sources in which they originate, both where events are repre-sented inaccurately and where they are represented accurately.We might, in principle, attempt to avoid the misleadingnessclaim by rejecting either the construction claim or the autonoesisclaim, but we have good reason to accept both of these claims. Wemight also attempt to avoid it by modifying the metarepresenta-tional understanding of autonoesis so that the autonoesis claimsays that the second-order component of a retrieved memoryinforms a subject only that part of the first-order component ofthe memory, as opposed to the first-order component as awhole, originates in the subject’s experience of the event, but itis unclear whether this is compatible with the roles assigned toautonoesis by the communicative and future-oriented accounts.We may thus be forced to accept the counterintuitive conclusionthat episodic memory is indeed systematically misleading.Autonoesis and dissociative identity disorderdoi:10.1017/S0140525X17001558, e23John MortonInstitute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College, London WC1N 3AR,England.j.morton@ucl.ac.uk https://johnmorton.co.uk/Abstract:Dissociative identity disorder is characterised by the presence inone individual of two or more alternative personality states (alters). Forsuch individuals, the memory representation of a particular event canhave full episodic, autonoetic status for one alter, while having the statusof knowledge or even being inaccessible to a second alter. Thisphenomenon appears to create difficulties for a purely representationaltheory and is presented to Mahr & Csibra (M&C) for their consideration.A good test of a framework is the way in which it handles rarecases. The challenging example I wish to introduce for Mahr &Csibra’s (M&C’s) consideration is that of the episodic memoryof individuals with dissociative identity disorder.TheDiagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5thed.; DSM-V) diagnostic category for dissociative identity disorder(DID) has two main criteria:A. Disruption of identity characterized by two or more distinctpersonality states. …B. Recurrent gaps in the recall of everyday events, important per-sonal information, and for traumatic events that are inconsistentwithordinary forgetting. (American Psychiatric Association 2013, p. 292)Other criteria include the ruling out of cultural factors and generalmedical conditions. Any gap in the recall of everyday events is usuallyfilled by the recall of another personality state. Thus, detail of theprevious day’s activities might be traced by piecing together the(non-overlapping) episodic recall of three or four alters.With DID patients, then, the phenomenon of interest relates towhat one alternative personality state (alter) knows about whathappened to another alter. One experimental demonstration ofthis involves an alter learning 24 nouns. A second alter, whodenies all knowledge of the preceding procedure, is taught a dif-ferent set of nouns. A week later, without warning, the secondalter is brought out and asked to follow a recognition memorytest with the 48 stimuli together with distractors. Huntjens et al.(2003; 2007) found that their DID subjects responded to thewords presented to the other alter as though they had previouslyseen them, in spite of having no recollection of the presentation.These authors conclude that “dissociators … seem to be charac-terised by the belief of being unable to recall informationinstead of an actual retrieval inability” (2007, p. 788, theiritalics). This situation, where there is no phenomenal experienceof an event, but where the event is exerting a clear influence onbehaviour, matches the phenomenon of post-hypnotic amnesia(e.g., Smith et al. 2013). Here, subjects claim no recollection ofrecent experiences which, nonetheless, affect current behaviour.Smith et al. (2013) have suggested that executive processes areresponsible for controlling the initial access to material and thendetermine whether retrieved information is allowed into con-sciousness. However, material that has been accessed will exertsome influence on processing even though it is not allowed intoconsciousness. Morton (2017) gives a similar account for theresults of Huntjens et al. (2003; 2012) described above.Using the same experimental procedure as Huntjens et al.(2003), Morton (2012; 2017) found two individuals with DIDwhere one alter responded to the words that had been presentedto another alter in exactly the same way as they responded to thecontrol words. In other words, this material could not even beaccessed by the second alter despite being a full part of the firstalter’s phenomenal past.Similar results have been shown with more complex material.Reinders et al. (2003) studied DID patients who were in eithera trauma-related identity state or a neutral identity state. Theformer generated an autobiographical traumatic memory thatthe latter failed to recognise as relating to themselves. Thesememories were contrasted to neutral memory scripts, whichboth states accepted as autobiographical. The two scripts wereput into the third person and read in a neutral tone to the patientswhile they were in a scanner. The scans were similar with theneutral script for the two states, and there were only small differ-ences between the scans of the two scripts for the neutral identitystate. The big difference occurred when the trauma-related stateCommentary/Mahr & Csibra: Why do we remember? The communicative function of episodic memory34 BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES, 41 (2018)https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X17001431Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Otago Library, on 22 Jan 2018 at 07:38:19, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at

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AbstractMahr &amp; Csibra (M&amp;C) view autonoesis as being essential to episodic memories and construction as being essential to the process of episodic remembering. These views imply that episodic memory is systematically misleading, not because it often misinforms us about the past, but rather because it often misinforms us about how it informs us about the past.</jats:p

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Autonoesis and reconstruction in episodic memory: Is remembering systematically misleading?

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