Episodic Memory: Special issue of the Review of Philosophy and Psychology

CALL FOR PAPERS

Special issue of the Review of Philosophy and Psychology

Guest editor:  Denis Perrin

Deadline for submissions:  September 30, 2013

The Theme

Episodic memory is a fundamental form of human memory, the hallmark of which is the reliving of past experiences as a result of mental time travel towards one’s own past. As such, it plays a basic role in personal identity, time consciousness, action, and the grounding of knowledge. In the field of psychology, current research programs have revived classical accounts of that cognitive ability, such as attributionalism or constructivism, relying on well-established defining features, such as mental time travel. They have also brought out new features of episodic memory that make it necessary to go beyond traditional accounts. Suffice it to mention the dependence of episodic memory on the segmentation of the flux of consciousness in events, or the role of episodic memory in episodic future thinking. Those advances foster current philosophical works on remembering, by providing new empirical data and theoretical frameworks that are likely to challenge existing conceptions. But they also call for a philosophical assessment, given that psychology itself draws on distinctively philosophical frameworks to account for the data (e.g. inferentialism or reflexivism). This special issue of the Review of Philosophy and Psychology, devoted to episodic memory, encourages contributions seeking to show how psychological studies of episodicity (be they cognitive, developmental, clinical or neurological) renew the philosophical approach to remembering, or putting forward new conceptual analyses aimed at criticizing or further developing the existing accounts of episodic memory in psychology.

Key questions

• The distinctive subjective experience proper to episodic memory, that is:

-       how and why episodic memories are about the remembering subject;

-       the subjective time of episodic navigation;

-       the role played by semantic and procedural memories in the subjective experience of episodic memory.

• The epistemology of episodic memory:

-       the information contents provided by episodic memory, and how they differ from the contents of perception, imagination or semantic memories;

-       the relation of episodic memory to truth and falsehood.

• The functional roles of episodic memory with respect to:

-       personal and social identity;

-       knowledge and beliefs;

-       action and reality monitoring;

-       phylogenetic evolution and episodic future thought.

Guest authors

Dorothea Debus (University of York)

Jordi Fernandez (University of Adelaide)

Christoph Hoerl (University of Warwick)

James Russell (University of Cambridge)

Important Dates

September 30, 2013      submission deadline

April 31, 2013  target publication date

How to submit

Prospective authors should register at: www.editorialmanager.com/ropp to obtain a login and select Episodic memory as the article type.  Manuscripts should be approximately 10,000 words and conform to the author guidelines available on the journal's website.

About the journal

The Review of Philosophy and Psychology (ISSN: 1878-5158; eISSN: 1878-5166) is a peer-reviewed journal, published quarterly by Springer, which focuses on philosophical and foundational issues in cognitive science. The journal’s aim is to provide a forum for discussion on topics of mutual interest to philosophers and psychologists and to foster interdisciplinary research at the crossroads of philosophy and the sciences of the mind, including the neural, behavioural and social sciences.  The journal publishes theoretical works grounded in empirical research as well as empirical articles on issues of philosophical relevance.  It includes thematic issues featuring invited contributions from leading authors together with articles answering a call for papers.

Contact

For any queries, please email the guest editor:

denis.perrin@upmf-grenoble.fr

Workshop/Conference: Emotion - Violence - Memory

When: July 4-6

Where: Cluster of Excellence ‘Languages of Emotion’, FU Berlin

This workshop invites contributions that explore how people in societies of past and ongoing conflict overcome, communicate, and remember experiences of collective, political and gendered violence. It does so with a core focus on the emotions that are evoked, articulated, and/or regulated in these processes. By bringing together scholars from different disciplines we aim to break new ground in the emerging field at the intersection of emotion, collective memory and violence.
Recent studies on memory have revealed the dynamics between the individual and the social, emphasizing how individual and collective memory is mutually constitutive. The individual enters the collective and the collective shapes what is individually remembered. While highlighting these processes as both psychological and social, the role of emotions in processes of collective memory has been underexplored. Yet, research over the last decades has shown that emotions as bio-cultural processes are pivotal aspects of social relations, often embedded in relations of power. They constitute political and social resources that are crucial for the construction and reconstruction of communities.
We thus turn our attention to the linkages emotions articulate with various forms and practices of remembrance of violent experiences. Our vantage point is the assumption that all forms and acts of remembering are inseparable from emotions shaped by the social, cultural and political contexts in which they occur. This workshop discusses these processes and opens new avenues of thought.

Please find the complete program here (PDF).

Please note that registration is required for the workshop (reynaud@zedat.fu-berlin.de). The keynote address by Veena Das is open to the public.

New Project: Autobiographical memory, emotions and war: the narrative construction of the self in context and history

(This project has been put on hold, I hope I will get some funds to make it real one day)

The point of departure of the project is the assumption that autobiographical memories are always, to a greater from a lesser extent, embedded in society, culture and history. This sense of living in history is what connects people past experiences with the larger social milieu and makes them much more meaningful. This project seeks to comparatively explore, at intergenerational and international level (United Kingdom, Argentina and Malvinas/Falkland Islands), the autobiographical memories and emotions of average people about the actors, actions, and events involved in the Malvinas/Falklands War. For the most part this remains an understudied relationship in the interdisciplinary field of memory and emotion studies. It is assumed that a struggle between rival master narratives of the war underlies the struggle about the discursive construction of memories and emotions.

The aims of this project are: firstly, to explore the ways in which the self, embedded in the experience of the Malvinas/Falklands War in London, Buenos Aires and Port Stanley (Malvinas/Falkland Islands) is cognitively, emotionally and discursively constructed in real world settings at intergenerational and international level; and secondly, to show the ways in which context models sustain a coherent and consistent self-positioning in naturalistic settings and are the key to understanding how autobiographical memories, narrative schemata and emotional codes are interconnected and realized in self-narratives.

The aims of this project are focused on answering the following questions: a) How is the self embedded in the experience of the Malvinas/Falkland War narratively constructed in everyday interactions?; b) What cultural and generational differences can be seen in the manner in which actors (including the self), actions and events of the Malvinas/Falklands War are represented? Are these cultural and generational differences based on the influence exerted by distinct cultural models? If there are, how are they communicated?; c) How are the autobiographical narratives modelled by subjective context models?; d) What are the emotions shaping these autobiographical narratives? How are they narratively constructed and communicated? Are these emotions associated with emotional codes that are culturally shared (e.g. in national, generational terms)? If yes, how are they interwoven?; e) What is the pragmatic role of telling an autobiographical narrative about the one’s self-experience within the Malvinas/Falklands War in interactional terms (complaining, justifying, blaming, rejecting, etc.)?; f) How are autobiographical memories, narrative schemata and emotional codes interanimated in practices of autobiographical storytelling linked to political events (e.g. Malvinas/Falkland War)? Are there differences at generational and national levels? If there are, what strategies are used to interactionally construct them?; and g) How can a political event affect not only a person’s life story in general, but also the autobiographical memories in particular, of ‘ordinary’ people according to their physical location (Buenos Aires, London, Port Stanley) during the political conflict?