Knowledge and Memory: the Real Story

Advances in Social Cognition, Volume VIII

Robert S. Wyer, Jr.

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780805814453
• eBook ISBN: 9781317781004
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Social Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Narrative forms of mental representation and their influence on comprehension, communication and judgment, have rapidly become one of the main foci of research and theory in not only psychology but also other disciplines, including linguistics, sociology, and anthropology. No one has been more responsible for the awakening of interest in this area than Roger Schank and Bob Abelson. In their target article, they argue that narrative forms of mental representation, or "stories," are the basic ingredients of social knowledge that play a fundamental role in the comprehension of information conveyed in a social context, the storage of this information in memory, and the later communication of it to others. After explicating the cognitive processes that underlie the construction of narratives and their use in comprehension, memory and communication, the chapter authors consider the influence of stories on a number of more specific phenomena, including political judgment, marital relations and memory distortions that underlie errors in eyewitness testimony.

The provocativeness of the target chapter is matched by that of the companion articles, each of which not only provides an important commentary on Schank and Abelson's conceptualization, but also makes an important contribution to knowledge in its own right. The diversity of perspectives reflected in these articles, whose authors include researchers in linguistics, memory and comprehension, social inference, cognitive development, social judgment, close relationships, and social ecology, testifies to the breadth of theoretical and empirical issues to which the target chapter is potentially relevant. This volume is a timely and important contribution to research and theory not only in social cognition but in many other areas as well.

1
Knowledge and Memory: The Real Story

Roger C. Schank
Northwestern University
Robert P. Abelson
Yale University

In this chapter, we argue that stories about one's experiences and the experiences of others are the fundamental constituents of human memory, knowledge, and social communication. This argument includes three propositions:

1. Virtually all human knowledge is based on stories constructed around past experiences,
2. New experiences are interpreted in terms of old stories,
3. The content of story memories depends on whether and how they are told to others, and these reconstituted memories form the basis of the individual's remembered self.

Further, shared story memories within social groups define particular social selves, which may bolster or compete with individual remembered selves.

Our style of presentation is discursive and probably prone to overstatement, as we seek to emphasize the differences between our position and competing views in cognitive psychology and cognitive science. Where suggestive empirical research is available, we adduce it. However, we do not believe that a definitive body of empirical evidence is presently available on one side or the other, and we have not attempted to fashion a fully databased theory here.

In the first major section, we lay out the shape of our overall argument. In following sections, we discuss each of our premises in more detail.

Storytelling and Understanding: The Basis for Human Memory

For thousands, maybe millions of years, people have been telling stories to each other. They have told stories around the campfire; they have traveled from town to town telling stories to relate the news of the day; they have told stories transmitted by electronic means to passive audiences incapable of doing anything but listening (and watching). Whatever the means, and whatever the venue, storytelling seems to play a major role in human interaction.

However, the role of storytelling and story understanding is far more significant in human memory than simply representing one kind of human interaction. The reason that humans constantly relate stories to each other is that stories are all they have to relate. Or, put another way, when it comes to interaction in language, all of our knowledge is contained in stories and the mechanisms to construct them and retrieve them.

Philosophers, psychologists, artificial intelligence types, and occasionally even linguists concern themselves with discussions of "knowledge." We talk about what people know, attempt to formalize what they know, make rules about what can follow from what they know, and so on. But, except in one part of the Artificial Intelligence community, the subject of how people use what they know rarely comes up. It is in this discussion of the use of knowledge that the idea of knowledge as stories becomes significant.

Simply put, humans engage in two broad classes of actions involving language that depend upon knowledge. They try to comprehend what is going on around them and refer to what they already know in order to make sense of new input. Then they attempt to tell things to others, again referring to what they already know in order to do so.

Knowledge is Functional

It is important to recognize that knowledge is functional; it is structured not to satisfy an elegant logic, but to facilitate daily use. However, when we say that all knowledge is encoded as stories (plus mechanisms to process them), we must deal in our analysis with bits of apparent knowledge that don't seem to be stories, such as "Whales are mammals," "I was born in New York," or "Stanford is in California." We discuss this in the next section. In the following sections, we cover the facilitory types of knowledge necessary to process stories.

The idea that knowledge is inherently functional, that it exists to be used for some purpose, imposes a constraint on how we talk about knowledge in this essay. We do not talk about what people know, but about the processes they engage in that utilize what they know. To this end, we can ask what people do that utilizes knowledge. Here are some of these things:

People answer questions.
People make plans and inform others of them.
People comprehend what others are saying.
People inform other people of events that have taken place.
People give advice to other people.

This is not intended to be a complete list of what people do in their mental lives, but it is intended to characterize a great deal of what people do mentally that involves the use of language. In each and every one of the situations listed earlier, the knowledge that people use to help them is encoded in the form of stories.

The Stories Behind “Facts”

When we find ourselves saying, "I was born in New York," we could be doing so for any of the reasons for talking previously listed. We could be answering a question. We could be prefacing some advice that we are about to give, perhaps about what to see in New York, or this could be part of an explanation of some events that have occurred. Whenever such a phrase is used, it is, quite obviously, an abbreviation of a much longer story.

Human memory is a collection of thousands of stories we remember through experience, stories we remember by having heard them, and stories we remember by having composed them. Any story in memory could have gotten there in one of these three ways. The key point is that, once these stories are there in our memory, we rely upon them for all that we can say and understand. Obviously, we can't recall where we were born. We are told the story of our birth, and when required to do so, we can tell others. There are many ways to tell this story, including the very short version: "I was born in New York." That sounds like a mere fact instead of a story.

Such very short versions are not the results of "table-look-up in memory," that is, finding the birthplace slot and reading its value. This may work for computers, but it doesn't make any sense psychologically. Search in human memory is a search for stories. The linguistic expression of those stories can range widely. We can say as much or as little as we like of the story. When we know that a story is funny or weird, we might digress and tell the best part. In fact, when one of us (Roger C. Schank) is asked about his birth by someone who seems willing to listen, he can tell two stories, one about why he was born in Manhattan rather than Brooklyn where his parents lived, and the other about his short-lived middle name (Wilco) that came from having overzealous Air Force officers for parents.

There are several stories of one's birth, and many more stories that comprise one's life. These stories get strengthened in the telling: The memories become more real because we tell them. When we tell them in the abbreviated way, they are simply that, abbreviated stories. Such really small stories should not be confused with factual knowledge. We propose that there is no factual knowledge as such in memory.

What about "Stanford is in California"? Surely this a fact in memory. Actually, it may be more a derived fact than a fact that exists as such in memory. One of us was a professor at Stanford for 5 years. Ask him about Stanford and he can think of hundreds of stories, any one of which could be used to derive the needed information. Just as there is no slot for birthplace in memory, neither is there a slot for Stanford filled in with various characteristics of the place. It is possible to have memorized stuff about the acreage of the campus, for example, but such memorized knowledge is hardly the usual sort of knowledge that we rely upon daily. The issue is not whether we can memorize facts, but whether that process has much to do with normal memory functioning.

Deriving static factual knowledge from stories we have in memory is, of course, quite possible. But, the fact that we can do this should not confuse us. This factual knowledge is yet again a very abbreviated story. In fact, even the phrase "Stanford is in California" is a story for one of us. When he was at Stanford, he took a course in Yiddish. The first sentence the students learned to say in Yiddish was "Stanford is in California" since, as it happens, that sentence sounds exactly the same in Yiddish as it does in English.

Even such banal facts as "Whales are mammals" can be stories. However, we need to guard against thinking that what we are talking about here is the attempt to understand such a sentence. We will deal with understanding later. Here we are discussing where and in what form that knowledge might reside in memory. In any discussion of static knowledge, particularly among those who believe in semantic memory, the whale issue is significant. For instance, knowing that whales are mammals, we can predict things about how they suckle their young. But, as it turns out, we have never needed to use such knowledge. Whale-suckling has simply never come up in any conversation we can remember. What has come up are discussions of how to represent knowledge. In these discussions we have always maintained that, despite what biologists say to the contrary, whales are better treated as fish, because an intelligent system would learn much more about them than this one nonfact. The problem here again is the formalist's view of knowledge that stands in contradistinction to the functionalist's view. Formalists make up names like "mammal" in an attempt to make rules about knowledge that will be predictive. This is handy for them, but it has little to do with what human memory is actually like. In human memory whales are fish if they have to be anything at all, which they probably do not. The real role for whales in memory is to be a part of Jonah stories or Sea-World-visit stories, from which we really derive what we know about whales. Everything else is just rote memorization that we did in school.

Applying Old Stories to New Situations

What we know that seems factual is actually derived from personal stories. Similarly, what we can say about things we believe is usually adapted from personal stories as well. When we ask individuals for their opinion on a subject, and they produce what seems to be a truly creative response, that is, a response that surely they have never uttered before, careful examination tells us that old stories in their memory are the ingredients of the seeming novelty.

To explore this idea, we asked the students in a graduate seminar why Swale had died. Swale was a racehorse that had won many important races and was one day found dead (at the age of three ). This was told to the students, and then they were asked to explain what had happened. They came up with some very creative hypotheses, including murder plots, drug overdoses, stress problems, and so on. The more we pushed, the more creative they became, referring, for example, to the "Janis Joplin Memorial Reminding," which basically said that Swale was too rich and too young and couldn't stand the success, so he overdid it by living "life in the fast lane."

The point is that even such new responses, explanations of totally new events, are really just rewrites of existing stories in memory, adapted to fit new circumstances. All of the students' new responses were already available in memory, or to put this another way, the responder already knew an answer. The problem was selecting from the stories in memory.

People have opinions about a large range of topics derived from the stories that exist in their memories. They know what they think, and more importantly, they have already thought up what they are likely to say long before they say it. The respondent's actual task then is to determine which of the many already known answers is relevant to the question at hand.

Understanding the world means explaining its happenings in a way that seems consonant with what you already believe. Thus, the task of an understander who has a memory filled with stories is to determine which of those stories is most relevant to the situation at hand. The old story is then used as a means for interpreting the new story. Doing things this way makes a seemingly unmanageable task much simpler. Otherwise, understanding the world is phenomenally complex. Finding a story that is like the one you are now seeing is much easier. The fewer stories you have in memory, the easier it is. To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But if you have many tools, you had better have a good system for knowing when to use them.

Scripts

In the mid-1970s at Yale, in our work on designing programs that understood English or natural language processing (Schank & Abelson, 1977), we applied the concept of a script. A script is a set of expectations about what will happen next in a well understood situation. In a sense, many situations in life have the participants seemingly reading their roles in a kind of play. The waitress reads from the waitress parts in the restaurant script, and the customer reads the lines of the customer.

Scripts are useful for a variety of reasons. They make clear what is supposed to happen and what various acts on the part of others are supposed to indicate. They make mental processing easier, by allowing us, in essence, to think less. You don't have to figure out every time you enter a restaurant how to convince someone to feed you. All you really have to know is the restaurant script and your part in that script.

Scripts are helpful in understanding the actions of others as long as we know the script they are following. Scripts also enable computers to understand stories about stereotypical situations (Cullingford, 1979). When a paragraph is about a restaurant, we can realize with very little effort that we need not wonder why the waitress agreed to bring what was asked for, and we can assume that what was ordered was what was eaten. To put this another way, not everything in the world is worthy of equal amounts of thought, and restaurant stories are readily understandable by a computer armed with a good enough restaurant script. In fact, not too much thinking has to be done by a computer or a person if the right script is available. One just has to play one's part, and events usually transpire the way they are supposed to. You don' t have to inferthe intentions of a waitress if her intentions are already well-known. Why concentrate one's mental time on the obvious?

Taken as a strong hypothesis about the nature of human thought, a script obviates the need to think; no matter what the situation is, people need to do no more in thinking than to apply a script. This hypothesis holds that everything is a script, and very little thought is spontaneous. Given a situation, there are rules to follow for the way things are supposed to be. We can follow those rules and not think at all. This works for all of us some of the time. People have thousands of highly personal scripts they use on a daily basis that others do not share. Every mundane aspect of life that requires little or no thought, such as sitting in your chair or pouring your daily orange juice, can be assumed to be a script. In fact, much of our early education revolves around learning the scripts that others expect us to follow. Yet this can all be carried a bit too far. Situations that one person sees as following a script may seem quite open-ended to another person. However, the more scripts you know, the more situations you will face feeling comfortable and capable of playing your role effectively. On the other hand, the more scripts you know, the more situations you will fail to wonder about, be confused by, and be challenged to figure out on your own. Script-based understanding is, therefore, a double-edged sword.

Scripts are also a kind of memory structure. They tell us how to act without our being aware that we are using them. They store knowledge that we have about certain situations. They serve as a kind of storehouse of old experiences of a certain type in terms of which new experiences of the same type are encoded. When something new happens to us in a restaurant that tells us more about restaurants, we must have some place to put that new information so that we will be wiser the next time. Scripts, therefore, change overtime and embody what we have learned. For this reason, my restaurant script won't be exactly the same as yours, but they will both include information such as "one can expect forks to be available without asking, unless the restaurant is Japanese." In most contexts, thinking means finding the right script to use, rather than generating new ideas and questions, so, essentially, we find it easier to apply scripts than to reason out every new situation from scratch. But scripts are...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Knowledge and Memory: The Real Story
• 2 Celebrating the Story in Social Perception, Communication, and Behavior
• 3 The Primacy of Stories, the Primacy of Roles, and the Polarizing Effects of Interpretive Motives: Some Propositions About Narratives
• 4 To Assert That Essentially All Human Knowledge and Memory Is Represented in Terms of Stories Is Certainly Wrong
• 5 Why Stories? Some Evidence, Questions, and Challenges
• 6 The Big Picture: Is It a Story?
• 7 Stories Are Fundamental to Meaning and Memory: For Social Creatures, Could It Be Otherwise?
• 8 Stories About Stories
• 9 Representation and Narrative: A Commentary on Schank and Abelson's "Knowledge and Memory"
• 10 Personal Storytelling In Everyday Life: Social and Cultural Perspectives
• 11 Stories in Memory: Developmental Issues
• 12 Memory for Events in Close Relationships: Applying Schank and Abelson's Story Skeleton Model
• 13 Stories, Identity, and the Psychological Sense of Community
• 14 So All Knowledge Isn't Stories?
• Author Index
• Subject Index