When: June 7-8
Where: Université Pierre Mendès, Grenoble
Deadline for submissions: April 16
Episodic memory is the brain and mind capacity to remember past experienced events as such, that is to relive or reexperience them as a result of a mental time travel towards one’s subjective past. It sharply contrasts with other forms of memory, such as procedural memory (i.e. memory proper to practical skills) but also, within declarative and propositional memory, with semantic memory (i.e. knowledge of facts). The conference will focus on the very memory episodicity feature and address a wide range of questions it has given rise to through psychological and philosophical approaches. Here are listed (in a non exclusive way) some pivotal questions.
The term "episodicity" covers different things in the literature. It sometimes designates a type of memory information, whose distinctive feature is the richness of its contextual component and its sensory details, but also a certain kind of consciousness - so-called "autonoetic consciousness" (Tulving) - that accompanies certain memory retrievals, or an entire, distinct memory system, that is, a distinct set of cognitive and neural components that carry out specific functions. While those characterizations are not incompatible with each other, they suggest different ways to conceive of the episodicity feature and allow for competing accounts of episodicity - for instance, Tulving’s structuralism and Jacoby’s attributionalism for subjective awareness, or Hoerl and McCormack’s phenomenologism and Perner’s metarepresentationalism for the nature of episodic information.
i) Thus, a first and straightforward question is to
determine what the episodicity of memory consists in and where it is to be
located. This first question cannot be answered without adressing further
important and related problems.
ii) A central topic concerns the subjectivity of
episodic memory. How should we account for the subjective flavor or
autonoetic consciousness of episodic memory? Moreover, which concept of
the self - representational or not, embodied or not - is included in such
a memory? And
what is the relation between episodicity and autobiography?
iii) Time surely offers a third intriguing topic,
which raises the question of mental time travel and subjective (or
perceived) time, as well as the question of temporal navigation and the
temporal frames of reference it requires.
iv) The conference aims also to give voice to the
increasing acknowledgement of the role of spatiality in episodic memory;
for instance, by questioning how, and under which form (egocentric or
allocentric? dynamic or static?) spatiality determines episodic encoding,
or how it contributes to the subjective flavor of remembering.
v) A fifth axis concerns the question of the
specific informational content of episodic memories. Among other things,
the question of the singularity of the objects of memory, of the possible
reflexive (metarepresentational) structure of the episodic content, of its
imagistic nature will be dealt with.
vi) Last but not least, attention will be paid to the
differences and shared features of semantic and episodic memory, that is
to the relation of their respective natures - touching in this way on the
functionalism/structuralism debate - and on the functional relations
between them.
Psychological and philosophical interest on these
topics has seen very significant growth for about four decades. A leading
conviction of the organizers of the conference is that, despite differences in
what they lay stress on (experimental investigation for psychology, conceptual
analysis for philosophy), psychologists and philosophers widely share the
problems they address, the way they address them and the concepts they use to
do so. Against the background of those common features, the specificity of each
discipline has already turned out to be very fruitful for the other, much more
than an impediment to their cooperation. The conference will bring together
researchers of a wide array of approaches - from conceptual analysis to
anatomical inquiry - and give them the opportunity to confront and enrich their
different works on the fascinating topic of memory episodicity.
We invite
participants to submit a poster to the Episodic Memory 2012 conference. The
conference will focus on the underlying mechanisms and the core concepts of the
phenomenon in the original perspective of connecting philosophical and
psychological approaches. Among other things, the following questions will be
adressed from both perspectives: the self-knowledge and the self-concept, the
relation of episodicity with autobiographical memory, its link with spatial
processing, the perception of time and the nature of re-experiencing. Posters
can restrict themselves to the philosophical perspective or the psychological
one.
Submissions
Researchers interested in presenting a poster should prepare an overview of their proposed poster in the form of a single word page no more than 500 words in length
Deadline for poster submissions: April 16
Notification of Acceptance: April 30
Please, send your poster proposals or any question about the poster session directly to the following addresses:
No comments:
Post a Comment