How the mind works

饒斯對功效主義（Utilitarianism）的批評

The Art of Memory, was said to have been invented by a poet named Simonides (according to Cicero). In a bit of ancient forensics, Simonides had been able to identify the remains of guests at a banquet by their seating places around a table, after a roof had fallen in upon them and obliterated them beyond recognition. In the Classical use of the art, abstract images of a somewhat bizarre (and therefore memorable) nature were conceived that would be linked to parts of a speech and then to a well-known architectural feature of the hall in which the speech was to take place. By scanning the variety of statuary, friezes, articulated columns, or whatever, within the hall, the rhetorician skilled in the art could remember all the aspects of his speech. The hall would provide the order and a frame of reference which could be used over and over again for a complex constellation of constantly changing ideas.

The art of memory

Several influential publications have sensitized the community of behavioral scientists to the dangers of inflated effects and false-positive errors leading to the unwarranted publication of nonreplicable findings. This issue has been related to prominent cases of data fabrication and survey results pointing to bad practices in empirical science. Although we concur with the motives behind these critical arguments, we note that an isolated debate of false positives may itself be misleading and counter-productive. Instead, we argue that, given the current state of affairs in behavioral science, false negatives often constitute a more serious problem. Referring to Wason’s (1960) seminal work on inductive reasoning, we show that the failure to assertively generate and test alternative hypotheses can lead to dramatic theoretical mistakes, which cannot be corrected by any kind of rigor applied to statistical tests of the focal hypotheses. We conclude that a scientific culture rewarding strong inference (Platt, ...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1745691612462587

The Long Way From α-Error Control to Validity Proper Problems With a Short-Sighted False-Positive Debate

Distinguishing between living (animate) and nonliving (inanimate) things is essential for survival and successful reproduction. Animacy is widely recognized as a foundational dimension, appearing early in development, but its role in remembering is currently unknown. We report two studies suggesting that animacy is a critical mnemonic dimension and is one of the most important item dimensions ultimately controlling retention. Both studies show that animate words are more likely to be recalled than inanimate words, even after the stimulus classes have been equated along other mnemonically relevant dimensions (e.g., imageability and meaningfulness). Mnemonic "tunings" for animacy are easily predicted a priori by a functional-evolutionary analysis.

Adaptive Memory The Mnemonic Value of Animacy

Why do we remember? Research on memory is often concerned with the question 
of how our memory system works. It typically focuses on structural mechanisms, 
for example, how do we process and store information? How long can we hold 
information in our working memory? However, when thinking about the question 
of why human memory exists, it seems unlikely that it only evolved to learn, process, and store abstract information. If our memory system is a solution to adaptive 
problems, shaped by the process of natural selection, then its structural properties 
should reflect their functionality (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). However, what are the 
adaptive problems human episodic memory was designed to solve? Again, it seems 
implausible that its function is only to remember the past. It seems more plausible 
that we need to remember the past to predict the likelihood of events occurring 
in the future (Suddendorf & Corballis, 1997; Tulving, 2002). Specifically, memory 
could be designed to retain information relevant to survival, for example, remembering the location of food or water.

Survival processing effect

Memories formed in the context of an imagined survival scenario are more easily remembered, but the mechanisms underlying this effect are still under debate. We investigated the neurocognitive processes underlying the survival processing effect by examining event-related potentials (ERPs) during memory encoding. Participants imagined being either stranded in a foreign land and needing to survive, or in an overseas moving (control) scenario, while incidentally encoding a list of words. Words encountered in the survival context were associated with improved recall and reduced false-memory intrusions during a later memory test. Survival processing was associated with an increased frontal slow wave, while there was no effect on the overall P300 amplitude, relative to the control scenario. Furthermore, a subsequent memory effect in the P300 time window was found only in the control scenario. These findings suggest that survival processing leads to a shift away from lower level encoding processes, which are sensitive to motivation and stimulus salience and which were evident in the control scenario, to more active and elaborative forms of encoding. The results are consistent with a richness of encoding account of the survival processing effect and offer novel insights into the encoding processes that lead to enhanced memory for fitness-relevant information.

/pdf/survival-processing-modulates-the-neurocognitive-mechanisms-36b3zohs3t.pdf

Survival processing modulates the neurocognitive mechanisms of episodic encoding.

Interpersonal disturbances in Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) have been attributed to a negativity bias in social cognition. Adding to this literature, we experimentally tested whether those with BPD show altered memory for cooperative versus non-cooperative interaction partners. In a source memory paradigm, 51 female BPD patients and 50 healthy controls (HC) played a trust game with 40 different female target characters (trustworthy vs untrustworthy). In a subsequent surprise memory test, participants had to recognize those target individuals (vs distractor pictures), and had to recall whether they had shown cooperative behavior during the trust game. We hypothesized that BPD patients have better memory for uncooperative interaction partners as compared to cooperative interaction partners, and that a-priori expectations of untrustworthiness would influence recall. During the trust game, BPD individuals invested lower amounts of money than HC for trustworthy targets, but no differences were found for untrustworthy targets. During the memory test, BPD patients had significant difficulties to remember cooperative targets, as compared to HC. More specifically, those with BPD indicated more often than HC that they had not previously interacted with cooperative targets of the previous trust game. We did not detect any differences between BPD and HC in source memory, or with regard to the effects of trustworthiness expectations. The observed tendency to forget cooperative interaction partners in BPD is possibly caused by dysfunctional cognitive schemas. At the same time, it might also corroborate patients’ assumptions that others are untrustworthy, thereby fuelling interpersonal disturbances in BPD.

/pdf/impaired-memory-for-cooperative-interaction-partners-in-2im29kttl8.pdf

Impaired memory for cooperative interaction partners in borderline personality disorder.

Sleep right after studying new material is more conducive to memory than a period of wakefulness. Another way to counteract forgetting is to practice retrieval: taking a test strengthens memory mor...

Using day and night – scheduling retrieval practice and sleep

After imagining being stranded in the grasslands of a foreign land without any basic survival material and rating objects with respect to their relevance in this situation, participants show superior memory performance for these objects compared to a control scenario. A possible mechanism responsible for this memory advantage is the richness and distinctiveness with which information is encoded in the survival-scenario condition. When confronted with the unusual task of thinking about how an object can be used in a life-threatening context, participants will most likely consider both common and uncommon (i.e., novel) functions of this object. These ideas about potential functions may later serve as powerful retrieval cues that boost memory performance. We argue that objects differ in their potential to be used as novel, creative survival tools. Some objects may be low in functional fixedness, meaning that it is possible to use them in many different ways. Other objects, in contrast, may be high in functional fixedness, meaning that the possibilities to use them in non-standard ways is limited. We tested experimentally whether functional fixedness of objects moderates the strength of the survival-processing advantage compared to a moving control scenario. As predicted, we observed an interaction of the functional fixedness level with scenario type: The survival-processing memory advantage was more pronounced for objects low in functional fixedness compared to those high in functional fixedness. These results are in line with the richness-of-encoding explanation of the survival-processing advantage.

/pdf/how-can-i-use-it-the-role-of-functional-fixedness-in-the-1fuz2x2hii.pdf

Meike Kroneisen

Papers

Survival processing effect

Survival processing modulates the neurocognitive mechanisms of episodic encoding.

Impaired memory for cooperative interaction partners in borderline personality disorder.

Using day and night – scheduling retrieval practice and sleep

How can I use it? The role of functional fixedness in the survival-processing paradigm