HAPSAT GRADUATE WORKSHOPS

Emma Sigsworth will present:

What’s in a Concept? Comparing General Biological Memory and Cognitive-Psychological Memory

                                                                                                          Wednesday, December 6, 2023

                                                                                                                           12—1 PM

                                                                                                                         Room VC304

ABSTRACT: In this talkwill examine the differences between general biological memory concepts and cognitive-psychological memory concepts, highlighting the role that information plays in.is a small but growing trend in contemporary memory science to understand memory, at its core, as a very simplebiologically basic capacityby allorganisms. Biologists describe memory in bacteria(Wolf et al., 2008), slime molds(Reid et al., 2012), and ciliates(Kunitaal., 2016), as well as within sub organismallike gene regulatory networks(Biswas et al., 2021).broad concept of memory as a general biological process differs markedly from concepts of memory in cognitive psychology, where the domain is fragmented into distinct memory kinds that are individuated by separate-processing. For this reason,tend to be skeptical about the utility of general memory as a superordinate category encompassing, e.g., both declarative and non-declarative memory. The psychologist Endel Tulving illustrated this perspective by“no profound generalizations may be made about memory as a whole, but general statements about particular kinds of memory are perfectly possible” (1985, p. 385). Yet biologists studying adaptive behaviourunicellular organismsdomake these profound generalizations — albeit usually implicitly — when they characterize memory as an informational structure (Fields & Levin, 2016) or storage process (Bédécarratsal., 2018) fundamental to the adaptive behaviourliving systems. Despite their,-psychological memory concepts and many accounts of general biological memory appeal to notions of information. In other words, memory is a matter of the encoding, storage, and retrieval of information. But when biologists describe memory behavioursunicellular organismsthese terms, what does ‘information’ mean in this context? By examining how general biological and cognitive-psychological memory concepts rely upon the information-processing approach, I will ask whether biological and cognitive-psychological accounts of memory are more closely related than they might first appear.