1. MEMORY THROUGH THE AGES Prescientific approaches Ancient gods for memory Greek and Roman philosophy Plato (427-347 BC) –Innate concepts and memories –Metaphoric mechanisms for Encoding (a scribe; misencoding) Storage (wax tablet; distortable) Retrieval (aviary; retrieval failure) Aristotle (384-322 BC) –Retention versus “recollection” –Laws of association in recall Contiguity, similarity, contrast

2. Aristotle’s On Memory and Reminiscence Memory vs. recollection –Memory is necessary, not sufficient for recollection –Recollection a form of inference (attribution?) placing ourselves in a certain time and space –Some phrases sound like implicit/explicit, some availability/accessibility Recollection and association –Retrieval as “movement” between related memories –Associative “laws” (contiguity, similarity) –Automatic cuing vs. effortful search Interesting comments about: –Rehearsal and practice –Concrete vs. abstract “codes” –Role of the “substrate” (hard/soft walls) –Recollection may be in error –Arousal hurts memory –Dwarfs have lousy memory

3. Prescientific approaches (cont’d) Cicero (106-43 BC) –Practical aspects of memory –“method of loci” for remembering order Augustine (354-430 AD) –Sensory vs. ‘intellectual” memories –Active nature of remembering –Potential for “false memories” –Importance of emotion in memory

4. The Renaissance: Empirical observation Juan Luis Vives (1492-1540) –Spanish humanist/empiricist –“Three Books on the Soul of Life” (1538) –Importance of rehearsal for retention –Utility of “memory exercise” and practice –Three sources of forgetting “image’ is erased or destroyed Smeared or fragmented Or “escapes our search” Francis Bacon (1561-1626) –British philosopher/humanist –Describes the “inductive method” –Basic skills of memory, fancy, reason –Mnemonic strategies Visual imagery Study prior to sleeping Varied encoding Selective memory search (“prenotion”)

5. British Empricism and Continental Nativism Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) –Memory as “decaying sensations” –Knowledge results from experience –Founds British empiricist tradition (Locke, Hume, Hartley, Mill) Rene Descartes (1596-1650) –Mental laws vs. physical (dualism) –Importance of innate concepts and processes