Functional Disorders of Memory (PLE: Memory)

John Kihlstrom, Frederick Evans

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781848723733
• eBook ISBN: 9781317745518
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition
• Index: Psychology

Originally published in 1979, the chapters in this volume summarize the available knowledge pertaining to a variety of functional – as opposed to explicitly organic – amnesias and disruptions of memory. Each chapter is written by an expert, and each author has attempted to integrate his area of inquiry into the contemporary body of theory and research on memory and cognition. Functional memory disorders may prove to be a significant testing ground for current theorizing, and the study of these phenomena may provide insights into memory and cognition that might be obscured in the usual sorts of laboratory investigations. The intent of the volume is to contribute to the development of a more comprehensive account of the processes involved in remembering and forgetting. The reader will find bold new treatments of repression and childhood amnesia, systematic explorations of certain experimental amnesias, and challenging analyses of the anomalies of everyday memory, in this ground-breaking work of the time.

I

DISORDERED AND ANOMALOUS MEMORY IN EVERYDAY LIFE

1	Everyday Anomalies of Recall and Recognition

Graham Reed
York University

This chapter is concerned with some everyday memory anomalies experienced routinely by normal people; they are puzzling to the individual but so commonplace as to evoke little discussion. Also to be considered are some classical psychogenic phenomena such as déjà vu and depersonalization. These have been meticulously documented in the psychiatric literature, but that does not mean that they are associated exclusively with mental illness. On the contrary, although they may occur only rarely in any given individual’s lifetime, they seem to be experienced in some degree by the majority of normal people. They have been described by many writers, from Dostoyevsky to Oscar Wilde. Yet psychologists have tended to avoid both groups of phenomena. Memory disturbances associated with brain damage have always attracted the interest of experimental psychologists, but their psychogenic counterparts are rarely to be found indexed in textbooks of general, experimental, or cognitive psychology. Clinicians have discussed some of the classical phenomena but in terms of motivational or psychoanalytic theories. Occasionally, psychogenic memory anomalies have been described and discussed in cognitive terms (e.g., in an excellent little book by Talland, 1968). But with the exception of one attempt by the present writer (Reed, 1972), there has been no systematic analysis using a cognitive or information-processing approach.

Here, a collection of mnemonic anomalies are described and briefly discussed in cognitive terms. Later, attention is drawn to the significance of some of them in relation to issues in contemporary memory research. The approach taken throughout is of the “reconstructive” variety, deriving directly and unashamedly from the work of Sir Frederic Bartlett.

Many of the phenomena discussed later may be technically classified as examples of paramnesia. The crucial feature in any definition of paramnesia is that it involves some degree of distortion of recall as opposed to forgetting. (The latter includes a range of degrees of recall failure, the most extreme type of course being amnesia.) It was this element of distortion that Bartlett emphasized in his classical study, Remembering (1932). Bartlett pointed out that simple omissions or attenuation of recalled material can be explained in terms of any “trace” model of memory. But such models do not provide a ready answer to the problem of why so many recollections involve not attenuated versions of original material but elaborations or distortions of it. It is easy to see how a trace might “decay”; it is less obvious how it can “grow,” especially when the growth is in different directions from the original representation. It was this observation, coupled with a consideration of the storage problems implied by associationist formulations, that led Bartlett to assert that memory must involve dynamic organization. Recall, he asserted, cannot simply be a question of the retrieval of inert traces. Distortion must surely reflect an active process of reconstruction. Bartlett reluctantly called the necessary cognitive structures schemata, a term borrowed from the neurologist Sir Henry Head. New information, Bartlett argued, was not stored intact but was incorporated into a number of extant schemata. Perhaps it should be stressed that a “schema” is not merely a grouping or a static concept. Bartlett conceived it as plastic and dynamic, undergoing continual change as new material is incorporated. The same term and conceptualization are of course central to the theories of Piaget, for whom schemata are continuously enriched through the function of “accommodation” to new input. (A highly sophisticated version of the “schema” approach is presented in detail by Piaget & Inhelder, 1973.) This presumption of structures undergoing constant modification differentiates the schema approach from such theories as that of Anderson and Bower (1974), whose “nodes”—although interconnected by vast numbers of associations—seem to be static concepts. On this sort of model, changes in the network are accomplished by increased associations, not by changes in the structures themselves.

Bartlett hypothesized that remembering was the process of activating the relevant schemata and drawing upon them to reconstruct the search target. On this argument, distortions are readily explicable. The reconstructive process might well overdraw on some contributory schemata or overemphasize the contribution of one or more at the expense of others. Now it must be admitted that the concept of schemata is sketchy, and difficult to examine experimentally. Furthermore, it raises as many questions as it answers. How, for instance, are the appropriate schemata identified? How are their respective contributions determined? How are their relevant features extracted? What determines the synthesis of these features, and what sort of “match” mechanism is employed to establish acceptable criteria and quality control? However, it must be pointed out that these questions and many others like them offer a challenge to every theory of memory. Meanwhile, Bartlett’s model, however shaky, can be shown to encompass both everyday and experimental findings as well as any other and better than most. Its main features have been drawn upon, with or without attribution, by several contemporary theorists. Indeed, descendants of the very associationists assailed by Bartlett are now finding it necessary to borrow some of his postulations to bolster up their positions. And ironically, as Baddeley (1976) has pointed out, the development of computers has made Bartlett’s theoretical ideas seem much more viable.

THE PHENOMENA

The “I Can’t Quite Place Him” Phenomenon

Perhaps the most common of the paramnesias is the everyday experience of encountering a relatively well known person but being unable to identify him. In most cases the problem occurs when the other person is met outside of the context with which he is normally associated by the observer. To make things more complicated, the “I can’t quite place him” experience often leads to a perplexed and preoccupying attempt to “place” the familiar person appropriately. This may involve running through a series of possible hypotheses that can lead to quite incorrect attribution with subsequent social embarrassment.

As an undergraduate, I was in the habit of taking morning coffee in a café near the psychological laboratories, where I habitually sat at a particular table with my classmates. Every day there appeared at an adjoining table a slightly older man. He was familiar to me, and I consistently greeted him as an acquaintance. But after some weeks, I realized one day that he was not a fellow student, and the embarrassing realization dawned that our acquaintance dated back a couple of years to a shared army service. The next day, I hastened to the adjoining table, addressed him by name, and apologized for having so far failed to engage in appropriate reminiscence. “The problem, Corporal Jenkins,” I explained earnestly, “was that I didn’t quite place you out of uniform.” He regarded me closely for several seconds. “My name is Jenkins,” he replied at last, “and as it happens, I was a corporal in the Army, though we never met there. Perhaps I ought to remind you that we both work most evenings as coleaders in the local youth club!”

The most interesting characteristic of the “I can’t quite place him” phenomenon is that it seems to represent recognition without complete recall. In this, it has something in common with the more dramatic phenomenon of déjà vu, which is described later. However, in the present case there is an objectively sound basis for recognition, whereas in déjà vu there is not.

The “Know the Face, Not the Name” Phenomenon

A milder version of the “I can’t quite place him” phenomenon is that where another person is recognized and appropriately identified, but his name cannot be recalled. Here the issue is much simpler, because it seems to involve merely partial forgetting; recall is present but is attenuated. The situation can therefore be handled by all models of memory in terms of the deployment of attention in the original situation. When we meet someone initially, we usually have ample opportunity to observe and register his physical characteristics. We can code these in a number of ways, thus facilitating subsequent search and increasing the chances of correct retrieval. Typically, we pay less attention to the name. We probably hear it only once as introductions are made; indeed, we may never catch it in the first place. Certainly, unless we have been studying Dale Carnegie, we do not practise the name. And there is no obvious linkage in most cases between the perceptible characteristics of a person and the abstractness of his name. Furthermore, both given name and surname are probably familiar to us, but this merely makes recall more difficult, because they are thus insufficiently discriminable. We are more likely to recall a name correctly and with appropriate attribution if the name is foreign to us, or otherwise unusual.

An interesting point of relevance to the present case is that in everyday parlance we say that we “recognize” a person’s face, posture, voice, gait, etc. We never say that we “recognize” his given name if it is a familiar one. Thus we may say: “I know that man—I recognize his face.” We never say: “That man is called Bill—I recognize his name.” In relation to a person’s name, we only employ the term recognize if the name is novel (e.g., ‘Ah yes—Orumbajobi, I recognize that name”) or if the combination of given and surname is for us unique (e.g., “Harriet Q. Watkins? Yes—I recognize that name”). This apparent truism may have some significance for theories of memory, especially since laboratory studies of recognition typically involve the presentation of material that is familiar to the subject—digits, letters, or words. This point is reexamined later. Meanwhile, it may be pointed out that in the case of familiar names, “recognition” of a person usually subsumes not his name per se, but the association between the person and the name.

The “Time-Gap” Experience

It is not at all uncommon for motorists to “wake up” during the course of a journey, to realize that they have no conscious recollection of covering the miles since, for example, the last town. Understandably, they usually interpret this in terms of time, reporting, for example, “a slice out of my life” or “a lost half hour.” For this reason, Reed (1972) coined the term time-gap experience in his discussion of the phenomenon.

The gap in consciousness would be readily explicable had the individual been asleep. But part of the strangeness of the experience is due to the fact that his “waking up” was preceded by the continuous performance of a complex activity. He must have been awake to have got to the point where he “woke up.”

Even more disturbing for the individual is the inexplicable blank in awareness of the passage of time. Our particular culture trains us to be clock-watchers, and much of our social organization is rooted in strict temporal structuring. The continual reference to clock time is an integral part of our workaday lives, as is our ability to gauge temporal duration. But more importantly, any break in personal time is alarming. The awareness of oneself as an individual is inextricably associated with a sense of the continuity of one’s existence.

The key to this part of the puzzle is that what the time-gapper is reporting is not a question of time per se. Our awareness of time and its passage is determined by events, either external or internal. What the time-gapper describes as the loss of a slice of time (i.e., the failure to register a temporal segment) is really the failure to register or recall a series of external events that would “normally” have functioned as time markers. He fails to recall them, presumably because he did not pay conscious attention to them. The joker here is that the time-gapper registered other events—his passenger’s conversation, the car radio, or, more commonly, the internal events of his own thoughts. His perturbation regarding the loss of a slice of time may be rapidly assuaged by pointing out that under other circumstances, these other events would be accepted as time markers. His problem is that he persists in counting as “appropriate” only those events that he classes as proper to his ostensible pursuit—driving a car along the road. The individual recalls a sequence of events of this type (let us call them X’s) leading up to, for example, the limit sign outside the last town, X₁₀₀. He now wakes up to perceive event X_n—a major intersection, for example. He can recall no X events between X₁₀₀ and X_n, but his knowledge of the distance covered implies that there must have been many of them. Thus—a gap in time—because the individual fails to take into account all the Y and Z events that would have been accepted happily as “appropriate” time markers in some other situation (e.g., sitting in the garden).

Having solved the time-gapper’s problems, we can now turn to the underlying theoretical problem. Is it possible for a subject to fail to attend to a class of events while successfully engaging in a complex skill, the performance of which is largely dependent upon reactions to, and feedback from, that very class of events? The answer may be found in a brief consideration of the nature of skilled behavior. From the Bartlettian viewpoint, skilled performance is hierarchically organized. But most other theorists would also agree that elementary components become progressively habitual and automatized (i.e., not subject to conscious awareness). (Indeed, as the exponents of any complex skill know, de-automatization of particular elements can detract from the smooth performance of the whole sequence.) The experienced driver no longer needs to “pay attention” to each bodily movement or the positions of the controls as he, for example, steers, decelerates or changes gear. In the same way, the implications of routine external cues become predictable; the driver does not need to engage in continual conscious assessment of every individual event. He can afford to reserve attention for judgments of input at a strategic level. While the situation is undemanding and predictable, such strategic assessments are unnecessary, and the driver can “switch to automatic pilot.” Attentional resources can be deployed elsewhere. But any “emergency” signal or other significant change in the situation will demand the assessment of probabilities, the setting up of hypotheses, the making and implementation of decisions. All this requires the focusing of conscious attention and thus a switch back to “manual control.” But, it may be argued, such significant situational changes are a characteristic of driving. The answer to that is that the “time-gap experience” only occurs after a long stretch of undemanding driving. The incursion of the first relatively significant change is responsible for the time-gapper’s “waking up.”

The foregoing approach offers one explanation of why a prolonged series of events is not accessible to recall for the time-gapper. He did not consciously attend to the events, because they did not register above his “significance threshold.” Presumably they were registered at some level beyond the sensory one (otherwise they could not have been deemed routine). But the suggestion is that they did not require further processing and were held only transiently in short-term memory. Of course, there is the possibility that although information about the events is not accessible, it might still be available, to use Tulving and Pearlstone’s (1966) terminology. Unfortunately, we have no evidence that might clarify this point. It is quite possible that if prompted, offered retrieval cues, or merely urged to “try harder,” the time-gapper might retrieve enough information to dispel his uneasiness.

Underwood (1976) has noted an alternative to the explanation offered here: that the time-gapper does, in fact, attend to the “missing” events but forgets each one completely. Again, as he points out, this is a question not yet answered by experime...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• I Disordered and Anomalous Memory in Everyday Life
• II Disrupted Memory in Special States of Consciousness
• III Psychodynamic Factors in Memory
• Author Index
• Subject Index