Abstract
Amongst philosophers, there is ongoing debate about what successful event remembering requires. Causal theorists argue that it requires a causal connection to the past event. Simulation theorists argue, in contrast, that successful remembering requires only production by a reliable memory system. Both views must contend with the fact that people can remember past events they have experienced with varying degrees of accuracy. The debate between them thus concerns not only the account of successful remembering, but how each account explains the various forms of memory error as well. Advancing the debate therefore must include exploration of the cognitive architecture implicated by each view and whether that architecture is capable of producing the range of event representations seen in human remembering. Our paper begins by exploring these architectures, framing casual theories as best suited to the storage of event instances and simulation theories as best suited to store schemas. While each approach has its advantages, neither can account for the full range of our event remembering abilities. We then propose a novel hybrid theory that combines both instance and schematic elements in the event memory. In addition, we provide an implementation of our theory in the context of a cognitive architecture. We also discuss an agent we developed using this system and its ability to remember events in the blocks world domain.
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Notes
Here, our goal is to evaluate the hybrid memory system on its ability to unify aspects of causal and simulation theories, and this makes Blocks World an ideal domain for evaluation. Our future work will adopt a more complex domain and address the time complexity of our event memory system.
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Acknowledgements
This research is partially supported by A*STAR under its Human–Robot Collaborative AI for Advanced Manufacturing and Engineering (Award A18A2b0046). The first author was supported by Self Graduate Fellowship at the University of Kansas while performing this research. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not reflect the views of the A*STAR or the University of Kansas.
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Ménager, D.H., Choi, D. & Robins, S.K. A Hybrid Theory of Event Memory. Minds & Machines 32, 365–394 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-021-09578-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11023-021-09578-3