Editors’ Introduction: Remembering With Others: Conversational Dynamics and Mnemonic Outcomes

Remembering the past through conversations with others is a uniquely human endeavor. Conversational remembering consists of specific dynamics and can lead to mnemonic outcomes. While conversational dynamics refer to the interactive processes (e.g., the roles speakers and listeners may undertake during the conversation) shaping collaborative remembering, conversational outcomes are about the mnemonic and functional consequences (e.g., forging social bonds) of those processes. Thus, the aim of the present article is to introduce the reader to key concepts and paradigms that have been rigorously developed to empirically investigate the dynamics and outcomes of conversational remembering in cognitive research. The collected review and empirical articles gathered in this topic provide the state‐of‐the‐art in the field.     

Features of Successful and Unsuccessful Collaborative Memory Conversations in Long‐Married Couples

While we often engage in conversational reminiscing with loved ones, the effects of these conversations on our memory performance remain poorly understood. On the one hand, Wegner's transactive memory theory predicts that intimate groups experience benefits from remembering together. On the other hand, research on collaborative recall has shown costs of shared remembering in groups of strangers—at least in terms of number of items recalled—and even in intimate groups there is heterogeneity in outcomes. In the current research, we studied the effects of particular communicative features in determining the outcomes of collaborative recall in intimate groups. We tested 39 older, long‐married couples. They completed a non‐personal recall task (name all the countries in Europe) and a personal recall task (name all your mutual friends), both separately and together. When they collaborated, we recorded their conversation. We coded for specific “communication variables” and obtained measures of “conversational style.” Overall, we found two clusters of communication variables positively associated with collaborative success: (a) cuing each other, responding to cues, and repeating each other; and (b) making positive statements about memory performance and persisting with the task. A negative cluster of behaviors—correcting each other, having uneven expertise, and strategy disagreements—was associated with less interactive, more “monologue” style of collaboration, but not with overall recall performance. We discuss our results in terms of the importance of different conversational processes in driving the heterogeneous outcomes of group remembering in intimate groups, suggesting that a focus on recall output alone limits our understanding of conversational remembering.     

Brain‐derived neurotrophic factor interacts with adult‐born immature cells in the dentate gyrus during consolidation of overlapping memories

Successful memory involves not only remembering information over time but also keeping memories distinct and less confusable. The computational process for making representations of similar input patterns more distinct from each other has been referred to as “pattern separation.” Although adult‐born immature neurons have been implicated in this memory feature, the precise role of these neurons and associated molecules in the processing of overlapping memories is unknown. Recently, we found that brain‐derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) in the dentate gyrus is required for the encoding/consolidation of overlapping memories. In this study, we provide evidence that consolidation of these “pattern‐separated” memories requires the action of BDNF on immature neurons specifically. © 2014 The Authors. Hippocampus Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Episodic Memory and Remembering in Adults with Asperger Syndrome

A group of adults with Asperger syndrome and an IQ-matched control group were compared in remember versus know recognition memory. Word frequency was also manipulated. Both groups showed superior recognition for low-frequency compared with high-frequency words, and in both groups this word frequency effect occurred in remembering, not in knowing. Nor did overall recognition differ between the two groups. However, recognition in the Asperger group was associated with less remembering, and more knowing, than in the control group. Since remembering reflects autonoetic consciousness, which is the hallmark of an episodic memory system, these results show that episodic memory is moderately impaired in individuals with Asperger syndrome even when overall recognition performance is not.     

Reflections and Comments on Research on Memory and Conversation From an Ethnographic Perspective

Reflecting on three papers included in this issue, we suggest that research on memory and conversation could benefit by making more use of analyzing real‐life situations or close to real‐life scenarios, full speech and body interactions, and the interaction with the physical environment. We also suggest that the process of remembering during conversation is investigated on a level of detail and sequence that allow for locating actual functions of different actions. Finally, we suggest that a life‐span perspective on transactive memory systems must also model the development, maintenance, breakdown, and reestablishment of such systems.     

A Case of Unusual Autobiographical Remembering

This report describes AJ, a woman whose remembering dominates her life. Her memory is “nonstop, uncontrollable, and automatic.” AJ spends an excessive amount of time recalling her personal past with considerable accuracy and reliability. If given a date, she can tell you what she was doing and what day of the week it fell on. She differs from other cases of superior memory who use practiced mnemonics to remember vast amounts of personally irrelevant information. We propose the name hyperthymestic syndrome, from the Greek word thymesis meaning remembering, and that AJ is the first reported case.     

Language Learning From Positive Evidence,Reconsidered: A Simplicity‐Based Approach

Children learn their native language by exposure to their linguistic and communicative environment, but apparently without requiring that their mistakes be corrected. Such learning from “positive evidence” has been viewed as raising “logical” problems for language acquisition. In particular, without correction, how is the child to recover from conjecturing an over‐general grammar, which will be consistent with any sentence that the child hears? There have been many proposals concerning how this “logical problem” can be dissolved. In this study, we review recent formal results showing that the learner has sufficient data to learn successfully from positive evidence, if it favors the simplest encoding of the linguistic input. Results include the learnability of linguistic prediction, grammaticality judgments, language production, and form‐meaning mappings. The simplicity approach can also be “scaled down” to analyze the learnability of specific linguistic constructions, and it is amenable to empirical testing as a framework for describing human language acquisition.     

Information‐seeking behaviour for epilepsy: an infodemiological study of searches for Wikipedia articles

Millions of people worldwide use the internet daily as a source of health information. Wikipedia is a popular free online encyclopaedia used by patients and physicians to search for health‐related information. Our aim was to evaluate information‐seeking behaviour of English‐speaking internet users searching Wikipedia for articles related to epilepsy and epileptic seizures. Using Wiki Trends, which provides quantitative information on daily viewing of articles, data on global search queries for Wikipedia articles related to epilepsy and seizures were analysed. The daily Wikipedia article views on syncope, psychogenic non‐epileptic seizures, migraine, and multiple sclerosis served as comparative data. The period of analysis covered was from January 2008 to December 2014. Overall, the Wikipedia article “epilepsy and driving” was found to be more frequently visited than the articles “epilepsy and employment” or “epilepsy in children”. Since January 2008, the Wikipedia article “multiple sclerosis” was more often visited compared to the articles “epilepsy”, “syncope”, “psychogenic non‐epileptic seizures” or “migraine”; the article “epilepsy” ranked 3,779 and was less frequently visited than “multiple sclerosis”, ranked at 571, in traffic on Wikipedia. The highest peak in search volume for the article “epilepsy” coincided with the news of a celebrity having seizures. Fears and worries about epileptic seizures, their impact on driving and employment, and news about celebrities with epilepsy might be major determinants in searching Wikipedia for information.     

Division of Labor in Vocabulary Structure: Insights From Corpus Analyses

Psychologists have used experimental methods to study language for more than a century. However, only with the recent availability of large‐scale linguistic databases has a more complete picture begun to emerge of how language is actually used, and what information is available as input to language acquisition. Analyses of such “big data” have resulted in reappraisals of key assumptions about the nature of language. As an example, we focus on corpus‐based research that has shed new light on the arbitrariness of the sign: the longstanding assumption that the relationship between the sound of a word and its meaning is arbitrary. The results reveal a systematic relationship between the sound of a word and its meaning, which is stronger for early acquired words. Moreover, the analyses further uncover a systematic relationship between words and their lexical categories—nouns and verbs sound differently from each other—affecting how we learn new words and use them in sentences. Together, these results point to a division of labor between arbitrariness and systematicity in sound‐meaning mappings. We conclude by arguing in favor of including “big data” analyses into the language scientist's methodological toolbox.     

Inconscients et Mémoires : considérations sur les recherches en neurosciences et l’approche freudienne de ces notions

The word of “memory” is such a complex and rich concept. But behind this simple word, a lot of different memories have been divided during last decades. Different models have been established like the Tulving's model or the Squire's model but there are still lot of researches about different kind of memories. It's such a specific domain that there are many studies about specific memories like declarative memory with the semantic memory and the episodic memory, or non-declarative memory which includes procedural memory, priming and perceptual learning or non-associative learning. Each specific memory is a wonderful and limitless perspective of researches and new discoveries. But we must add to these distinctions between all this kind of memories, the difference between a conscious or an unconscious treatment of the information stocked in memories. Due to the studies of these phenomenons, we are about to go further in comprehension of memory's working. With neurosciences and cognitive psychology, we can use the concept of “cognitive unconscious” and, with Freud and his conception of memory, we can still summon this other unconscious that we have to define as “Freudian”. Because this is a real issue to understand how the unconscious and obviously memory have an influence on conscious life. Like Freud said, many acts, many choices, even many sentences when we speak consciously, have a curious origin. What we are interested in is the understanding of the relation between elements stored in memories, such as episodic memory, semantic memory, or autobiographical memory, and the specific moment of awareness. Then we must include processes like sorting, weighting and selecting information. At last, we must add the fundamental question in Freudian theory: the influence of unconscious mental life on our acts and our conscious thoughts. Thus armed, we can study the singularity of the conscious answer, its specificity and the multiple influences that participated in its emergence. Memories, especially because they are based on a partially unconscious mode, are precious to understand the cognitive as well as subjective mechanisms that lead to consciousness. They allow to study brain's mechanisms, but also to ask the question of the causality of conscious mental life. Then, we can go further in these reflections on memory studying how from neural functions to elaborate and conscious metacognitive work, subjectivity emerge in every human being. Because through the different memories, the Freudian unconscious and consciousness we can try to understand how the accumulation of elements lead to an original and singular answer that would be the possible signature of subjectivity in human kind.     

A logical analysis of disease concepts

In everyday conversation and also in medical discourse we often use phrases that appear perfectly sensible on the surface and yet are of shaky meaning when examined more closely. It then often emerges that we have used phrases which embody past ideas that have long lost all validity. In medical discussions of diseases, such phrases come readily to our minds so that statements are made which, if taken literally, would convey meanings that are not intended, meanings that are only echoes of dead and obsolete theories.Let me quote as an example the statement: “Doctors treat diseases.” At first sight, this statement does not only make sense; it also seems to be factually true. Yet when we stop to think, doubts arise. The meaning of the statement depends on how we understand the word “disease.” Nowadays “disease” designates a concept which is abstracted from attributes that characterize patients and from theories that have been spun around these attributes. Yet concepts cannot be ill in any medical sense nor are they amenable to medical treatment. One can only treat patients or their observable symptoms, but the concepts which medical theories construct from them.     

Autobiographical memory, the sense of recollection and executive functions after severe traumatic brain injury

Residual disorders of autobiographical memory long after trauma resulting from head injury are rarely assessed, even though they may affect social adjustment and the resumption of daily life. We conducted a thorough study of autobiographical memory in severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) patients, examined at least one year post-trauma. Twenty-five patients were submitted to a novel and controlled autobiographical procedure specially designed to measure episodic memories (i.e., unique, specific in time and space, and detailed) from their entire life span with two kinds of self-remembering experience. The ability to mentally travel back through time and re-experience the source of acquisition, i.e. autonoetic consciousness, was assessed via the "Remember/Know" paradigm and a checking procedure of sense of remembering. Self-perspective in visual imagery, which is also critically involved in episodic recollection, was assessed by the "Field/Observer perspective" paradigm. In addition, the patients underwent a battery of standardized neuropsychological tests to assess episodic and semantic memory, orientation and executive functions. The results showed that the patients, compared with healthy controls, were significantly impaired in recalling episodic autobiographical memories. This impairment was not related to the life period tested or the patients' ages nor the intellectual impairment. Deficits involved disturbances in sense of remembering, visual imagery self-perspective and recollection of spatiotemporal details. Stepwise-regression analyses carried out in the TBI patients revealed a significant relationship between an abnormal sense of remembering and executive dysfunction covering both anterograde and retrograde components. The novel assessment used in this study provides the first detailed evidence of a more fine-grained deficit of autobiographical memory in TBI patients. Indeed, the results suggest that these patients, long after trauma, present autonoetic consciousness and self-perspective disorders, which include sense of identity (the self) as a continuous entity across time, probably related to frontal dysfunction.     

Factors that influence the relative use of multiple memory systems

Neurobehavioral evidence supports the existence of at least two anatomically distinct “memory systems” in the mammalian brain that mediate dissociable types of learning and memory; a “cognitive” memory system dependent upon the hippocampus and a “stimulus‐response/habit” memory system dependent upon the dorsolateral striatum. Several findings indicate that despite their anatomical and functional distinctiveness, hippocampal‐ and dorsolateral striatal‐dependent memory systems may potentially interact and that, depending on the learning situation, this interaction may be cooperative or competitive. One approach to examining the neural mechanisms underlying these interactions is to consider how various factors influence the relative use of multiple memory systems. The present review examines several such factors, including information compatibility, temporal sequence of training, the visual sensory environment, reinforcement parameters, emotional arousal, and memory modulatory systems. Altering these parameters can lead to selective enhancements of either hippocampal‐dependent or dorsolateral striatal‐dependent memory, and bias animals toward the use of either cognitive or habit memory in dual‐solution tasks that may be solved adequately with either memory system. In many learning situations, the influence of such experimental factors on the relative use of memory systems likely reflects a competitive interaction between the systems. Research examining how various factors influence the relative use of multiple memory systems may be a useful method for investigating how these systems interact with one another. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

The Role of Analogical Relatedness in Personal Integration or Coherence

A feeling of coherence is at the heart of ordinary personal existing. It is frequently lost in those who seek therapeutic help. Despite its clinical importance, there is no generally accepted theory of how psychic coherence comes about. William James is one of the few theorists who have pondered the matter. His ideas form the background to the therapeutic approach to the problem of coherence proposed here. The therapeutic approach depends on the Baldwin-Janet principle that those states experienced as “inner” in adult life had their first forms in the outer world as activity. We suggest that the activity promoting coherence is a particular style of conversation involving analogical responses, that is, those with a corresponding “shape.” The developmental trajectory of such analogical relatedness is shown in “protoconversation” and symbolic play.     

Le concept d’insight narratif chez les personnes souffrant de schizophrénie : une revue systématique de la littérature

AimThe aim of this systematic revue of literature is to examine articles dealing with the narrative insight (patient's explanatory models of his difficulties) in patients suffering from schizophrenia. In addition to the theoretical interest of this work, it would make it possible to better adjust the clinical practices concerning the stories of patients about their disorders.MethodA study was conducted using the databases ScienceDirect, Medline, PsychInfo and PubPsych using the key words “narrative insight”, “cultural insight”, “subjective insight”, “narrative awareness”, “mental illness”, and “psychiatric disorder”. This search by keywords led to eighty-six results; abstracts of all the articles were consulted. Then the authors selected and studied all articles corresponding to inclusion criteria and compared their results and reached agreement by consensus in case of difference. The theme of the study was to focus on the concept of narrative insight or any other close concept mentioning an explanatory model of mental and/or psychiatric disorders, moving away from the biomedical model. Nine articles were selected based on the inclusion criteria (articles published in peer reviewed journals, where the both the resume and article are accessible; articles dealing with narrative insight of people suffering from schizophrenia).ResultsThe authors of these articles agree that awareness of mental illness, insight, is a narrative act in which people give a personal meaning to their disorder. The most popular biomedical model used has many limitations and is the subject of many controversies. Results of the conducted study suggest considering narrative insight as adaptive strategies to mental illnesses. Indeed the process of narrative insight essentially consists in the patient adapting his life story to his conceptions and his values. To tell the story of one's own troubles with one's own values and beliefs gives meaning that helps protect identity and give back hope. This concept is considered to be dynamic and multidimensional. In addition, studies highlight its positive effects including the simultaneous presence of several models, which would have a greater favorable impact on the prognosis than the medical explanation alone.ConclusionIt seems necessary to take into account the concept of narrative insight in order to evaluate insight of patients suffering from mental illness. This implies that the evaluation methods of insight as well as the clinical practice must evolve to adapt to the culture and subculture of the patient. This could have beneficial effects on the well-being of patients, therapeutic relations, access to treatment as well as psychiatric research, as well as limit controversies around this topic. It would be interesting to confirm this new conception of insight and the therapeutic relations by carrying out new studies as well as by starting to take it into account in patient care.     

Electrophysiological measures of familiarity memory.

Event-related potentials are a valuable tool for the study of human memory function. This selective review provides a brief introduction in models of recognition memory and then describes how ERPs can be used to investigate familiarity memory, an acontextual form of remembering that can be distinguished from the recollection of detailed information of prior events. ERP studies on the mid-frontal old/new effect, the putative electrophysiological correlate of familiarity memory are reviewed. It will be illustrated how familiarity memory is reflected in this effect, how it can electrophysiologically be dissociated from other forms of memory and which brain systems mediate this form of remembering. Recent studies will be reviewed that illustrate that familiarity is not only restricted to single items but can also support the retrieval of associative information.     

Memory amplification for trauma: Investigating the role of analogue PTSD symptoms in the laboratory

Victims of trauma often remember their experience as being more traumatic later, compared to immediately after, the event took place. This finding—the “memory amplification effect”—is associated with increased re-experiencing symptoms. However, the effect has been found almost exclusively in field-based studies. We examined whether the effect could be replicated in the laboratory. In two studies, we exposed participants to negative photographs and assessed their memory for the photographs and analogue PTSD symptoms on two occasions. In Study 1, analogue symptoms at follow-up were positively associated with remembering more negative photos over time. In Study 2, we focused on “memory amplifiers”: people whose memory of the photos amplified over time. Consistent with field research, analogue re-experiencing symptoms were associated with memory amplification. Overall, our findings confirm that analogue PTSD symptoms are also associated with an amplified memory for a trauma analogue.     

Memory,Narrative, and the Consequences

Drawing on papers from three different areas — evolutionary psychology, developmental psychology, sociolinguistics analysis — this commentary states that there is by now an empirically grounded and theoretically reflected memory research that has begun to break with the traditional individual‐centric orientation of the memory sciences. This break, it is argued, is the consequence of a new interest in the dialectics between memory and language, between social (or collective or collaborative) remembering and narrative. On this view, memory is taken less as a substance and more as a set of practices, of intersubjective and interpretive acts of a remembering subject.     

The Construction of Meaning

We argue that word meanings are not stored in a mental lexicon but are generated in the context of working memory from long‐term memory traces that record our experience with words. Current statistical models of semantics, such as latent semantic analysis and the Topic model, describe what is stored in long‐term memory. The CI‐2 model describes how this information is used to construct sentence meanings. This model is a dual‐memory model, in that it distinguishes between a gist level and an explicit level. It also incorporates syntactic information about how words are used, derived from dependency grammar. The construction of meaning is conceptualized as feature sampling from the explicit memory traces, with the constraint that the sampling must be contextually relevant both semantically and syntactically. Semantic relevance is achieved by sampling topically relevant features; local syntactic constraints as expressed by dependency relations ensure syntactic relevance.     

Investigation of Everyday Memory in Normal Subjects Using the Subjective Memory Questionnaire (SMQ)

This study examined memory for everyday events by method of self-report using the Subjective Memory Questionnaire (SMQ). The purpose of the study was to repeat and extend existing normative data.The SMQ was found to be adequately reliable, but this finding needs to be replicated in a large sample of subjects. Data from 170—224 control subjects revealed no effects of age or sex on total SMQ scores. However, sex differences occurred in 50% of individual questions, possibly reflecting cultural sterotypes. Higher social classes rated their memory more optimistically than lower classes. Overall subjects estimated their memory as being above “average”.Principal Component Analysis revealed 10 factors with eigen-values greater than 1.0. These included factors for “male” and “female” memory that have not been found previously in studies using subjective measures of everyday memory. Factors identified as “absentmindedness”, “names” and “how to get somewhere” were similar to those reported elsewhere.