John Sutton

Although wayfinding is a central domain for 4E research, much work on spatial cognition and navigation still operates within an internalist framework. This is particularly damaging in evaluating the cognitive impact of technologies like Global Positioning Systems (GPS), where negative assessments about ‘de-skilling’ and the digital disruption of biocognitive spatial memory capacities are widespread in science and popular culture alike. We offer a new, broader perspective for understanding the alleged technological fragmentation of spatial knowledge. Critically surveying evidence for GPS effects on spatial cognition, we reconstrue such effects as configurations of wayfinding ecologies – the flexible and dynamic distributed cognitive systems we use to navigate. Long before GPS, human spatial memory was far from complete or perfectly effective – more of a collage or a patchwork than a detailed map – and is heavily dependent on enculturation, shared social practices, and the specific features of experienced environments. Where there are negative effects of persistent GPS use on spatial cognition, these are not inevitable results of new digital systems acting out of the blue, but emerge from longer historical processes in which other forms of cognitive-technological coevolution configure the fragile balances of our wayfinding ecologies. What matters both psychologically and politically, we argue, is not simply that GPS technologies are used, but how they are used. There is still dramatic individual and group variability in spatial cognition and in the ways that navigation technologies are deployed in practice. Some users may become relatively passive in handing over all engagement with their environments to increasingly personalized algorithms. Others develop unique or expert strategies of skilful incorporation, adding new hybrid capacities to already specialized socio-cognitive practices. An analysis that resists nostalgia and techno-gloom can identify opportunities for deliberate ecological design to help shape conditions under which technologies operate, rather than accepting whatever configurations emerge from market forces or design defaults. There is no simple choice between resisting or embracing technological change, but a range of ways we can more or less thoughtfully and sensitively craft the wayfinding ecologies of our own shared future.

Context has long been regarded as an important element of long-term memory, and episodic memory in particular. The ability to remember not only the object or focus of a memory but also contextual details allow us to reconstruct integrated representations of events. However, despite its prevalence in the memory literature, context remains difficult to define and identify, with different studies using context to refer to different sets of stimuli or concepts. These varying definitions of context have not prevented it from being a key element of many models of memory. Within these models, context is usually explicitly encoded as an element of an event and processed through different neural pathways to other elements of the event, such as objects. Here we challenge the notion that context in memory is encoded. We offer an alternative where context in memory takes a variety of forms depending on the question being asked

Coach–athlete interaction is a central component of skill learning in sports. When done well, interventions by a coach can shape an athlete’s perceptual, motivational, and physical capacities and dramatically improve performance. Such interaction is not well modelled by thinking of a coach as transferring rules and directives to the individual athlete. Instead, an ecological perspective on coaching encourages attention to interactions during play, and the diverse ways it can support athlete development and performance. This paper uses microethnographic analysis of a Muay Thai developmental bout to showcase methods that track rich and dynamic real-world interactions between coach and athlete to ground better theoretical understanding of skill learning in the wild. Based on close analysis of coach–athlete interactions, including during and between rounds of a bout, we examine how skill is achieved in a complex learning environment. We suggest how specific coaching interventions scaffold a novice’s capacity to perform and identify five coaching functions – diagnosis, strategy, implementation, affirmation and consolidation – that were part of the coach’s approach to enhancing the fighter’s performance. Intensive field-based methods like microethnography can more precisely chart the complex ecological features of authentic skill learning and coaching and move us beyond individualistic or exclusively laboratory-based understandings of skill.

Collective memory is deeply connected to place. Places are powerful mnemonic cues, and many practices of collective remembering are tied to place. However, experimental psychology has largely overlooked this connection. Here, we leverage distributed cognition theory to develop a framework within which existing psychological research can explore the connection between place and collective memory. We do so by focusing on two areas of growing recent research attention: social wayfinding and atmospheres, two key examples of how collective memory and place are intertwined.

This chapter introduces the idea that remembering, as a cognitive process, is spread or ‘distributed’ over bodily and worldly resources as well as the brain. It sets this claim, natural enough in cultural memory studies, within a ‘situated cognition’ movement that has transformed the cognitive sciences and philosophy of mind from within over 40 years. After critically surveying broader debates in contemporary philosophy of memory, the chapter focusses on this ‘distributed remembering’ framework in theory and application. The approach demands insistently interdisciplinary methods, because the material, technological, and environmental resources that compose disparate ecologies of memory are heterogeneous and dynamic. Research on socially distributed remembering challenges assumptions in cognitive psychology that other people are sources of error or distortion in memory, instead identifying groups and microprocesses that produce benefits in collaborative recall. Our mnemonic interdependence with others and with diverse external scaffolding is one key source of our cognitive-affective vulnerability.

Memories of personal events can generate complex subjective experiences with highsensory details, a clear visuospatial context, and deep emotions. Future events, on the other hand, are thought to be experienced less strongly and less clearly than remembered past events. In this experiment, participants either remembered past events, imagined future events, or planned future events. Each mental representation of the event was followed by an extensive phenomenological questionnaire. As a second step, we added a new level of comparison by asking participants to generate alternative versions of these events and answer the same phenomenological questionnaire to examine phenomenology in counterfactual thinking, prefactual thinking, and prefactual planning. We ran an exploratory factor analysis to reveal common underlying features to this variety of autobiographical thinking. We extracted four principal factors that explained 53% of the total variance: an Autonoesis factor, a Scene-Construction factor, a Visual-Perspective factor, and an Optimism-Bias factor. When comparing remembered, imagined and planned events using our factor scores, we found that memory and prospection did not generate significantly different subjective experiences. However, participants experienced the representation of counterfactual events less vividly and less clearly than memories, whereas they experienced prefactual imagined and prefactual planned events similarly to their original versions. In conclusion, our findings indicate that humans construct diverse forms of autobiographical events with similar underlying features, but with some differences in the phenomenology of retrospection and prospection, as reality constrains the way we perceive the past, but not so much the future.

In everyday life remembering occurs within social contexts, and theories from a number of disciplines predict cognitive and social benefits of shared remembering. Recent debates have revolved around the possibility that cognition can be distributed across individuals and material resources, as well as across groups of individuals. We review evidence from a maturing program of empirical research in which we adopted the lens of distributed cognition to gain new insights into the ways that remembering might be shared in groups. Across four studies, we examined shared remembering in intimate couples. We studied their collaboration on more simple memory tasks as well as their conversations about shared past experiences. We also asked them about their everyday memory compensation strategies in order to investigate the complex ways that couples may coordinate their material and interpersonal resources. We discuss our research in terms of the costs and benefits of shared remembering, features of the group and features of the remembering task that influence the outcomes of shared remembering, the cognitive and interpersonal functions of shared remembering, and the interaction between social and material resources. More broadly, this interdisciplinary research program suggests the potential for empirical psychology research to contribute to ongoing interdisciplinary discussions of distributed cognition.

Remembering Stephen Gaukroger’s extraordinary contributions on the history of the mind-body problem and other key issues in cognitive history, this essay assesses relations between historical and contemporary ideas about memory and mind. It considers forms of anachronism and presentism that Stephen avoided. It contrasts persistent prevailing stereotypes and misinterpretations of Descartes’ putative errors, in committing what Rorty called ‘the original sin of modern philosophy’, with the richer reality described in Stephen’s revisionary account. On a range of issues, contemporary quests for ‘post-Cartesian agency’ could paradoxically draw on Descartes’ own views about embodied and dynamic cognitive processes.

This is the editorial introduction to a collection that "aims to bring together work about the varied harms caused or aggravated by external cognitive and affective factors, and what we can do about them. Taking a situated perspective on these harms involves going beyond thinking of them as merely involving negative causal stimuli to the real internal cognitive processes. We encourage submission of original papers advancing our understanding of the harms. Since people aren’t passive victims, we also welcome work on the ways that we can respond to these harms." The introduction itself does not have an abstract.

Does self?knowledge help? A rationalist, presumably, thinks that it does: both that self?knowledge is possible and that, if gained through appropriate channels, it is desirable. Descartes notoriously claimed that, with appropriate methods of enquiry, each of his readers could become an expert on herself or himself. As well as the direct, first?person knowledge of self to which we are led in the Meditationes , we can also seek knowledge of our own bodies, and of the union of our minds and our bodies: the latter forms of self?knowledge are inevitably imperfect, but are no less important in guiding our conduct in the search after truth.

Descartes thought about memory in the distinct contexts of method, metaphysics, medicine, mortality, and morals. Keenly aware of the fallibility and instability of natural corporeal memory, he considered various ways to bypass it or avoid relying on it, but also came to see its importance in understanding and dealing with the passions and the union of mind and body. His account of memory influenced Malebranche and associationist traditions, but was subject to sharp attack from critics who saw it as dangerously materialist and chaotic.

How do concert pianists commit to memory the structure of a piece of music like Bach’s Italian Concerto, learning it well enough to remember it in the highly charged setting of a crowded performance venue, yet remaining open to the freshness of expression of the moment? Playing to this audience, in this state, now, requires openness to specificity, to interpretation, a working dynamicism that mere rote learning will not provide. Chaffin, Imreh and Crawford’s innovative and detailed research suggests that the key to this skill is a declarative mental roadmap aiding musical performance. This hypothesis is neatly and unintentionally summarized by professional pianist Imreh, who states when learning a new piece of music “My fingers were playing the notes just fine. The practice I needed was in my head. I had to learn to keep track of where I was. It was a matter of learning exactly what I needed to be thinking of as I played, and at exactly what point. . .” (Chaffin & Imreh 1997, p.326).

Remembering seems, to philosophers and scientists, one of the most mystifying of human activities. Yet natural language users have no problem understanding what is meant by ‘memory’. Memory is simply the ability to recall personally experienced events and certain kinds of information such as facts, names, or faces; or how to perform certain actions, like riding a bike or playing chess. It is on this basis that people sometimes make claims about themselves or others having a good or bad memory, especially for things like names, numbers, or faces. Why then is memory such a mystery? Because, firstly, of its diversity: memory enables us to perform a plethora of different tasks, including the continuous interpretation of every moment of consciousness. Secondly, different forms of memory have different standards of accuracy, and often dramatically different criteria for success.

Traces of many past events are often layered or superposed, in brain, body, and world alike. This often poses challenges for individuals and groups, both in accessing specific past events and in regulating or managing coexisting emotions or attitudes. We sometimes struggle, for example, to find appropriate modes of engagement with places with complex and difficult pasts. More generally, there can appear to be a tension between what we know about the highly constructive nature of remembering, whether it is drawing on neural or worldly resources or both, and the ways that we need and use memory to make claims on the past, and to maintain some appropriate causal connections to past events. I assess the current state of work on situated affect and distributed memory, and the recent criticisms of the ‘dogma of harmony’ in these fields. I then deploy these frameworks to examine some affective dimensions of place memory, sketching a strongly distributed conception of places as sometimes partly constituting the processes and activities of feeling and remembering. These approaches also offer useful perspectives on the problems of how to engage – politically and aesthetically – with difficult pasts and historically burdened heritage. In assessing artistic interventions in troubled places, we can seek responsibly to do justice to the past while fully embracing the dynamic and contested constructedness of our present emotions, memories, and activities.

In Tulving’s initial characterization, episodic memory was one of multiple memory systems. It was postulated, in pursuit of explanatory depth, as displaying proprietary operations, representations, and substrates such as to explain a range of cognitive, behavioural, and experiential phenomena. Yet the subsequent development of this research program has, paradoxically, introduced surprising doubts about the nature, and indeed existence, of episodic memory. On dominant versions of the ‘common system’ view, on which a single simulation system underlies both remembering and imagining, there are no processes unique to memory to support robust generalizations with inductive potential. Eliminativism about episodic memory seems to follow from the claim that it has no dedicated neurocognitive system of its own. After identifying this under-noticed threat, we push back against modern eliminativists by surveying recent evidence that still indicates specialized mechanisms, computations, and representations that are distinctly mnemic in character. We argue that contemporary realists about episodic memory can retain lessons of the common system approach while resisting the further move to eliminativism.

As a topic in the philosophy of psychology, dreaming is a fascinating, diverse, and severely underdeveloped area of study. The topic excites intense public interest in its own right, while also challenging our confidence that we know what the words “conscious” and “consciousness” mean. So dreaming should be at the forefront of our interdisciplinary investigations: theories of mind which fail to address the topic are incomplete. This chapter illustrates the tight links between conceptual and empirical issues by highlighting surprisingly deep disagreements among leading dream scientists over what might seem basic aspects of their topic.

The imagery we adopt when recalling the personal past may involve different perspectives. In many cases, we remember the past event from our original point of view. In some cases, however, we remember the past event from an external “observer” perspective and view ourselves in the remembered scene. Are such observer perspective images genuine memories? Are they accurate representations of the personal past? This chapter focuses on such observer perspectives in memory, and outlines and examines proposals about the nature of such imagery.

To better understand the nature of joint expertise and its underlying processes, we need not only analyses of the general conditions for skilled group action, but also descriptive accounts of the features and dimensions that vary across distinct performances and contexts, such as sport and the arts. And in addition to positioning our accounts against current models of individual skill, we need concepts and lessons from work on collaborative processes in other cognitive domains. This paper examines ecological or situational components of expert joint action in practice, then offers a selective survey of some key cognitive and affective resources that shape and transform group performance.

We remember in social contexts. We reminisce about the past together, collaborate to remember shared experiences, and, even when we are alone, we remember in the context of our communities and cultures. Taking an interdisciplinary approach throughout, this text comprehensively covers collaborative remembering across the fields of developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, social psychology, discourse processing, philosophy, neuropsychology, design, and media studies. It highlights points ofoverlap and contrast across the many disciplinary perspectives and, with its sections on "Approaches of Collaborative Remembering" and "Applications of Collaborative Remembering", also connects basic and applied research.Written with late-stage undergraduates and early-stage graduates in mind, the book is also a valuable tool for memory specialists and academics in the fields of psychology, cognitive science and philosophy who are interested in collaborative memory research.

Cutting-edge scholarship in performance studies, cognitive science, sociology, literature, psychology, philosophy and sport science is brought together to ask: What do individuals bring to and do in collaborative embodied performance? How do group members with distinct capacities complement each other in skilled action? Innovative methodological approaches are applied to detailed case studies from martial arts, tango, social interaction, English Restoration Theatre, Body Weather, traditional and digitally-informed experiences of music composition, and failing at handstands. Each investigation exposes performance and theory as mutually revealing, informative and captivating. Short chapters fall into thematic clusters exploring embodied coordination, cognition, and collaboration, followed by commentaries from leading scholars in performance studies and cognitive science. Each brings to light different facets of the performance ecology present in the collaborative moment, equipping performance makers, students and researchers with theoretical, methodological and practical inspiration to delve deeper into their own embodied practices and critical thinking.