Abstract
Compared to other forms of memory, episodic memory is commonly viewed as special for being distinctively metarepresentational and, relatedly, uniquely human. There is an inherent ambiguity in these conceptions, however, because “episodic memory” has two closely connected yet subtly distinct uses, one designating the recollective experience and the other designating the underlying neurocognitive system. Since experience and system sit at different levels of theorizing, their disentanglement is not only necessary but also fruitful for generating novel theoretical hypotheses. To show this, I first argue that accepting the phenomenally conscious contents of episodic remembering as metarepresentational does not necessitate a metarepresentational conception of the episodic memory system. In its stead, I sketch an alternative account on which the metarepresentational character of episodic remembering is generated through the interaction of first-order outputs of the episodic memory system with other neurocognitive components of the brain. Complemented with a first-order account of the memory system, the system-experience distinction further supplies a novel understanding of the human uniqueness of episodic recollection, one that is compatible with there being an evolutionarily conserved episodic memory system. Overall, by distinguishing the two equivocal senses of “episodic memory” in our theorizing, we unearth an opportunity to understand how the distinctive phenomenology of our episodic recollection is related to and implemented in the cognitive architecture.
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Notes
This is now commonly referred to as “what-where-when” information.
Autonoesis is more generally associated with mental time travel, which includes event constructions in both the past and future directions. As Tulving (1985, p. 1) puts it, autonoesis “mediates an individual’s awareness of his or her existence and identity in subjective time extending from the personal past through the present to the personal future”. My concern in this paper is with episodic memory only, and for our purposes, of most relevance is the unique sense of self rather than the temporality of autonoetic consciousness. For general discussions of autonoesis and mental time travel, see Perrin (2016), Perrin and Rousset (2014), and Vandekerckhove and Panksepp (2009).
Some recent phenomenological characterizations do not explicitly put the emphasis on experiential self-awareness as Tulving does. Thus, Dokic (2014) characterizes the phenomenology in terms of what he calls an “episodic feeling of knowing”. Likewise, Fernández (2019) and Perrin et al. (2020) propose that central to episodic remembering is a certain “feeling of pastness”. Note that these characterizations are nevertheless Tulvingian, in that they share a commitment to the unique sense of self as characteristic of episodic remembering. For instance, the notion of the feeling of pastness in recent literature is grounded in the rememberer’s own subjective past, not the past in general (cf. B. Russell, 1921).
The system-experience distinction advocated here is not a controversial one, even though I will say a bit more in Sect. 2 to bring out its significance for our purposes. In her assessment of the (dis)continuism debate, Robins (2020) calls attention to what is essentially the same distinction between episodic remembering, as an occurrent mental state, and the episodic memory system. Why has this distinction been largely overlooked, however? My suggestion is that the two uses of the term “episodic memory”—one designating a conscious state with a distinctive phenomenology, the other designating a neurocognitive system—are both perfectly natural and closely connected. Notwithstanding their connection, they sit at different levels of theorizing, and the exact way in which they are connected is an open and empirical question.
Note that while both claims can be understood as a metarepresentation thesis about episodic memory, only the latter is strictly about the episodic memory system. Here the notion of metarepresentation is that of a representation of a representation as a representation (Perner, 1991), and Tulving himself is ultimately concerned with whether the episodic memory system is metarepresentational in this sense. In proposing an explanation for childhood amnesia, for example, Tulving and colleagues argue for a subtle but what they consider crucial distinction between encoding personally experienced events and encoding events as personally experienced: “[to] episodically remember a prior happening, the episode must have been originally encoded as a subjective experience and integrated into the personal perspective of the rememberer” (Wheeler et al., 1997, p. 346; emphasis added).
I take the representational structure of the memory system to be specified by the contents the system is specialized to store. The qualification “specialized” is important, since, after all, everyone should allow that some contents stored within the episodic memory system are metarepresentational. Some experiences have a metarepresentational structure to begin with (e.g., seeing oneself as dancing, assessing one’s subjective certainty) and will be remembered as such. Moreover, remembering is itself an experience which may be recursively embedded in future remembering states (e.g., remembering oneself remembering). Occasionally storing such metarepresentational contents is compatible with a memory system specialized to store first-order contents.
For the sake of the argument, I take for granted that autonoetic episodic remembering does have a metarepresentational structure, effectively accepting the metarepresentation thesis construed as a claim about episodic recollective experience. To be sure, this is an assumption that some have called into question (see, e.g., Carruthers, 2018; Conway, 2001; Ganeri, 2017). But my goal here is to make the case that even accepting it does not lead to the conclusion that the episodic memory system is metarepresentational.
While not specifically focusing on episodic memory, Kriegel (2015) suggests that the phenomenology may be better explained under nonreductive representationalism. His idea is that when we episodically remember an event and experience it as past, this pastness is not part of what is represented (i.e., a conceptual ingredient of the content), but rather an aspect of how the remembering represents what it does (i.e., an irreducible mode of presentation). Additionally, an anonymous referee suggests that another option would be to consider how the phenomenology might be explained in a non-representationalist approach to consciousness. In what follows, I will have to set these intriguing suggestions aside. The literature by and large assumes a reductive representationalist approach, so I will not circumvent a methodological commitment shared by my interlocutors.
Here I choose two general findings from vision primarily because vision science is arguably one of the more mature branches of cognitive psychology, the lessons of which may be reasonably expected to generalize. Masked priming occurs when certain target stimuli are presented for short durations and then masked by other stimuli, such that participants will report not having seen the target stimuli, even though the influence of the target stimuli can be observed in downstream behavior. Initial findings in support of the ventral-dorsal split come from blindsight patients, who, despite their lack of conscious experience within an area of their visual field, were able to appropriately control their motor actions. The phenomenon has since been investigated in neurological and neural network-based studies as well (Fang & He, 2005; Goodale, 2014; Milner & Goodale, 1995; Weiskrantz, 1999). Notably, the ventral-dorsal split fits a general pattern that many cognitive tasks can be performed in the absence of conscious awareness (for a review and discussion, see Shea & Frith, 2016). As a relevant further example, recent evidence shows that individuals with aphantasia (who self-reportedly lack voluntary visual imagery) can perform just as well as typical individuals on imagery-related memory tasks, likewise suggesting a dissociation between conscious experience and cognitive function (Keogh et al., 2021; Pounder et al., 2021).
Epistemic generativity is a technical notion first introduced in epistemology (Lackey, 2005). For our purposes, the basic idea behind it can be illustrated by the observation that in remembering something episodically one does not merely know that such-and-such happened, but also knows why one knows, viz. on the basis of remembering (see also Dokic, 2001; Fernández, 2016). On the account offered by Mahr and Csibra (2018), this is because episodic recollection comes with a representation of its own origin.
It is somewhat surprising that theorists working in the generative framework have not said more to flesh out these different and potentially other possibilities. But there are two exceptions. McCarroll (2018) proposes that observer memory involves an implicit representation of the self via a particular mode of presentation of the past event. Likewise, Cheng, Werning and Suddendorf (2016) suggest that autonoesis may be grounded in either the perspectival character or the phenomenological transparency of the constructed scenario. I have some reservations about these proposals, which will become clear shortly.
Consider, for example, how in seeing something as being a certain distance away in that direction, the organism’s internal representation of the object constitutively involves information associated with the organism’s egocentric perspective. It is relative to this perspective that the location of the object is specified, but the perspective itself need not be represented as such. This is the sense in which perceptual experience involves minimal self-representation.
What if we locate metarepresentational embedding strictly at the stage of retrieval, thus within the bounds of the episodic memory system? In this case, the contents stored within the episodic memory system can be purely first-order—including both the what-where-when information and self-representation. But they are not merely retrieved alongside each other; rather, when retrieved they are combined into metarepresentations before becoming available to downstream “consumer” systems. This, then, may be another way for a first-order memory system to give rise to autonoetic episodic remembering. While such an organization of the episodic memory system is certainly possible, it seems rather mysterious as to why the retrieved-as-metarepresentational contents are not instead encoded as metarepresentational and stored as such in the first place. There is certainly more to be said here, but fleshing out the proposal and its implications would go beyond the scope of this paper.
We may call such temptations to conflate features of representational content of conscious experience and features of discrete neurocognitive systems “feature internalizing”. This is analogous to what Millikan (1991) calls “content internalizing”, a mistake that projects representational content to the vehicles of representations.
Indeed, Perrin et al.’s (2020) metacognitive account of the phenomenology of episodic recollection is one in which the feeling of pastness is developmentally enriched by other acquired concepts such as self and causality.
A consequence is that, in the same way that we do not have direct, privileged access to others’ minds, the interpretive sensory-access theory contends that we do not have direct, privileged access to our own minds either. In my view, the interpretive sensory-access theory is well-supported by behavioral, imaging, and neuropsychological evidence (see also Carruthers, 2013; Cassam, 2014; Rimkevičius, 2020). But a full defense is beyond the scope of what can be accomplished in the space available. Hence, I will instead motivate utilizing this theory with the uncontroversial idea that memory is, after all, a form of knowledge and that episodic memory in particular is viewed as a form of self-knowledge. Developed to explicate the nature of self-knowledge, the interpretive sensory-access theory is thus well-suited for our purposes.
It is an ongoing debate as to what the types of heuristic cues are utilized by memory monitoring. For my purposes, I am not taking a stand on whether the cues are based on contents or procedural features. Hence here I include cues of both types.
This account assumes that remember is part of the conceptual repertoire of the mindreading system. Also assumed to be part of the mindreading system are implicit inferential rules such as “remembering entails knowing”, “reporting that one remembers that such-and-such entails that one remembers that such-and-such”. Whereas the development of the conceptual repertoire and inferential rules of the mindreading system is a matter of ongoing investigation, that the mindreading system in human adults is thus equipped is not in dispute.
I thank an anonymous referee for inviting me to further clarify my thinking on these issues.
It is telling, in this regard, that the so-called minimalist approach to episodic memory and its development is motivated precisely by deference to the conceptual richness of autonoetic remembering (J. Russell, 2014; J. Russell & Hanna, 2012). If what I have been arguing is on the right track, however, this deference is not really necessary.
Charitably understood, the human uniqueness thesis is purely negative: extant evidence does not substantiate the proposition that nonhuman animals have episodic memory. In this sense, the human uniqueness thesis serves as a null hypothesis. But devising an apt null hypothesis in comparative cognition research is not as straightforward as it may seem (Andrews & Huss, 2014; Mikhalevich, 2015), and as I shall argue, the logical strength of the human uniqueness thesis is particularly strong even as a null hypothesis, especially when the system-experience distinction is not drawn.
Recall that for human beings, episodic memory is standardly assessed by the remember/know paradigm, wherein the subjects verbally report either remembering or merely knowing something. This paradigm plainly is not applicable to nonhuman animals.
Tulving’s (2005) own suggestion to comparative psychologists is to look for evidence of future-directed mental time travel in nonhuman animals. But this likely only pushes the question one step back. For the same considerations that count against attributing episodic memory to nonhuman animals on the basis of non-linguistic behavioral evidence will likely count against attributing future-directed mental time travel to nonhuman animals as well (Suddendorf, 2013).
This point applies to cases involving neuropsychological patients and young children as well (see, e.g., Klein & Nichols, 2012; J. Russell, 2014), where the disputes in my view are not about different theoretical possibilities, but are instead due to different opinions regarding what the equivocal term “episodic memory” denotes.
This is related to a point recently raised by Craver (2020) regarding what he calls the “epistemic” versus “empirical” conception of episodic memory. While he is not concerned with the human uniqueness thesis in particular, Craver urges against assuming that the epistemic conception on which episodic remembering is an epistemic achievement can be reduced to the episodic memory system. One reason for this is that as an epistemic achievement, remembering as we know it is part of a much larger practice of communicating as well as tracking what we know about the world. It is thus likely to implicate more cognitive resources than a memory system specialized for storing and retrieving information.
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Acknowledgements
For helpful comments and discussions, I am grateful to Juan Álvarez, Vilius Dranseika, Chris Masciari, Chris McCarroll, Denis Perrin, Aida Roige, and Alvin Zhou. I thank Peter Carruthers, Kirk Michaelian, and André Sant'Anna for their encouragement as well as extensive comments on multiple earlier drafts. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Issues in Philosophy of Memory 2; I am grateful to the participants for their questions. Finally, I thank the two anonymous reviewers for providing valuable comments and suggestions on how to improve this paper.
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Pan, S. What is so special about episodic memory: lessons from the system-experience distinction. Synthese 200, 5 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03500-9
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Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03500-9