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Episodic memory across species and across purposes: What really matters and why| title | Episodic memory across species and across purposes: What really matters and why |
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| start_date | 2022/06/28 |
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| schedule | 16h15 - CEST |
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| online | no |
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| summary | A central part of human cognition is episodic memory: roughly, remembering events we personally experienced, whether watching a movie last Friday or a holiday to Greece ten years ago. Which if any other animals enjoy the same kind of memory? Decades of research suggests that many species, from rats to jays to cuttlefish, have states with some of the features of human episodic memory. Some non-human animals represent numerous unique features of individual events, including how long ago they occurred and the order in which sub-events occurred. And such states often depend on the hippocampus, just as in humans. However, no other animal will have states with exactly the features of typical human episodic memories, any more than they will have skeletons exactly like humans’. For example, non-human animal memory may well involve less narrative structure, and no explicit higher-order awareness that this was an event which occurred in my past. This raises a question: which features does an animal’s mental state need to possess to count as being an episodic memory, and which features of human episodic memory are merely features of human episodic memory? There is little agreement on how to even go about answering this question — or similar questions which arise for many other important mental states and capacities. The best approaches on the market are (i) to search for what if anything makes episodic memory a natural kind, and (ii) to adopt a form of pluralism on which what matters to episodic memory is largely determined by specific aims on particular occasions. I argue that each of these approaches gets something right, but limits the theoretical use of a notion like ‘episodic memory’. The pluralist approach rests on a simplistic understanding of how different aims of inquiry fit together, and as a result misses the potential utility of a less context-sensitive notion of episodic memory. The natural kind approach does (somewhat) avoid this problem, but relies on empirically dubious claims about episodic memory’s actually being a natural kind in the relevant sense. I then sketch an approach to determining which features are essential to a state’s counting as episodic memory, irrespective of species, which can allow for a notion of episodic memory which can do the work which the pluralist account misses, whilst avoiding the problems with the natural kind approach. Roughly, this approach involves searching for sets of features which are jointly important to episodic memory’s broader contribution to intelligence. |
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| responsibles | Peeters, Kourken, Andonovski |
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Workflow history| from state (1) | to state | comment | date |
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| submitted | published | | 2022/06/23 09:18 UTC |
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