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420The Creation of Space: narrative strategies, group agency, and skill in Lloyd Jones’s The Book of FameIn Chris Danta & Helen Groth (eds.), Mindful Aesthetics, Bloomsbury/ Continuum. pp. 141-160. 2014.Lloyd Jones’s *The Book of Fame*, a novel about the stunningly successful 1905 British tour of the New Zealand rugby team, represents both skilled group action and the difficulty of capturing it in words. The novel’s form is as fluid and deceptive, as adaptable and integrated, as the sweetly shaped play of the team that became known during this tour for the first time as the All Blacks. It treats sport on its own terms as a rich world, a set of bodily skills, and an honest profession in itself. …Read more
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719Between Individual and Collective Memory: Coordination, Interaction, DistributionSocial Research: An International Quarterly 75 23-48. 2008.Human memory in the wild often involves multiple forms of remembering at once, as habitual, affective, personal, factual, shared, and institutional memories operate at once within and across individuals and small groups. The interdisciplinary study of the ways in which history animates dynamical systems at many different timescales requires a multidimensional framework in which to analyse a broad range of social memory phenomena. Certain features of personal memory - its development, its constru…Read more
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461Critical review of Chaffin, Imreh, and Crawford, Practicing Perfection: memory and piano performance.Empirical Musicology Review 3 (3): 163-172. 2008.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 sugg…Read more
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209Review of Joseph Tabbi's, Cognitive Fictions (review)Metapsychology 7 (8). 2003.In the closing chapter of his recent bestseller The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker attributes what he dislikes in modern literature to the influence of poor empiricist psychology. The modernist ‘denial of human nature’ resulted, Pinker informs us sadly, in the replacement of ‘omniscient narration, structured plots, the orderly introduction of characters, and general readability’ by ‘a stream of consciousness, events presented out of order, baffling characters and causal sequences, subjective and dis…Read more
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929Distributed Cognition and Memory Research: History and Current DirectionsReview of Philosophy and Psychology 4 (1): 1-24. 2013.According to the hypotheses of distributed and extended cognition, remembering does not always occur entirely inside the brain but is often distributed across heterogeneous systems combining neural, bodily, social, and technological resources. These ideas have been intensely debated in philosophy, but the philosophical debate has often remained at some distance from relevant empirical research, while empirical memory research, in particular, has been somewhat slow to incorporate distributed/exte…Read more
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1084Porous memory and the cognitive life of thingsIn D. Tofts, A. Jonson & A. Cavallaro (eds.), Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History, Mit Press. pp. 130--141. 2002.Published in Darren Tofts, Annemarie Jonson, and Alessio Cavallaro (eds), _Prefiguring Cyberculture: an intellectual history_ (MIT Press and Power Publications, December 2002). Please do send comments: email me. Back to my main publications page . Back to my home page
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171Robert HookeIn Encyclopedia of the life sciences, Macmillan. pp. 202-203. 2001.English instrument-maker, experimentalist, and natural philosopher who made key contributions in a wide range of areas including physiology, geology, and mechanics. Born on the Isle of Wight, Hooke showed early aptitude with the design of mechanical toys. At Westminster School he learnt mathematics and geometry, and at Christ Church, Oxford, he joined a remarkable group of natural philosophers working before the Restoration on physiological and physical topics (Frank 1980). Much of Hooke’s caree…Read more
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60Cue generation and memory construction in direct and generative autobiographical memory retrievalConsciousness and Cognition 33 204-216. 2015.Theories of autobiographical memory emphasise effortful, generative search processes in memory retrieval. However recent research suggests that memories are often retrieved directly, without effortful search. We investigated whether direct and generative retrieval differed in the characteristics of memories recalled, or only in terms of retrieval latency. Participants recalled autobiographical memories in response to cue words. For each memory, they reported whether it was retrieved directly or …Read more
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668Moving and Thinking Together in DanceIn Robin Grove, Kate Stevens & Shirley McKechnie (eds.), Thinking in Four Dimensions: creativity and cognition in contemporary dance, Melbourne Up. pp. 51-56. 2005.The collaborative projects described in this e-book have already produced thrilling new danceworks, new technologies, and innovative experimental methods. As the papers collected here show, a further happy outcome is the emergence of intriguing and hybrid kinds of writing. Aesthetic theory, cognitive psychology, and dance criticism merge, as authors are appropriately driven more by the heterogeneous nature of their topics than by any fixed disciplinary affiliation. We can spy here the beginnings…Read more
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873The sense of agency and its role in strategic control for expert mountain bikersPsychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice 2 (3): 340-353. 2015.Much work on the sense of agency has focused either on abnormal cases, such as delusions of control, or on simple action tasks in the laboratory. Few studies address the nature of the sense of agency in complex natural settings, or the effect of skill on the sense of agency. Working from 2 case studies of mountain bike riding, we argue that the sense of agency in high-skill individuals incorporates awareness of multiple causal influences on action outcomes. This allows fine-grained differentiati…Read more
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3251Introduction: Memory, embodied cognition, and the extended mindPhilosophical Psychology 19 (3): 281-289. 2006.I introduce the seven papers in this special issue, by Andy Clark, Je´roˆme Dokic, Richard Menary, Jenann Ismael, Sue Campbell, Doris McIlwain, and Mark Rowlands. This paper explains the motivation for an alliance between the sciences of memory and the extended mind hypothesis. It examines in turn the role of worldly, social, and internalized forms of scaffolding to memory and cognition, and also highlights themes relating to affect, agency, and individual differences.
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272‘Learning to love’. Review of Richard Allen, David Hartley on Human Nature (review)Times Literary Supplement 5162. 2002.In a remarkable and utterly original work of philosophical history, Richard Allen revivifies David Hartley's Observations on Man, his Frame, his Duty, and his Expectations (1749). Though it includes a detailed and richly annotated chronology, this is not a straight intellectual biography, attentive as it might be to the intricacies of Hartley's Cambridge contacts, or the mundane rituals of his medical practice, or the internal development of the doctrine of association of ideas. Instead Allen br…Read more
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817The body and the brainIn S. Gaukroger, J. Schuster & J. Sutton (eds.), Descartes' Natural Philosophy, Routledge. pp. 697--722. 2000.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 bod…Read more
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1666A conceptual and empirical framework for the social distribution of cognition: The case of memoryCognitive Systems Research 9 (1): 33-51. 2008.In this paper, we aim to show that the framework of embedded, distributed, or extended cognition offers new perspectives on social cognition by applying it to one specific domain: the psychology of memory. In making our case, first we specify some key social dimensions of cognitive distribution and some basic distinctions between memory cases, and then describe stronger and weaker versions of distributed remembering in the general distributed cognition framework. Next, we examine studies of soci…Read more
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597Constructive memory and distributed cognition: Towards an interdisciplinary frameworkIn B. Kokinov & W. Hirst (eds.), Constructive Memory, New Bulgarian University. pp. 290-303. 2003.Memory is studied at a bewildering number of levels, with a vast array of methods, and in a daunting range of disciplines and subdisciplines. Is there any sense in which these various memory theorists – from neurobiologists to narrative psychologists, from the computational to the cross-cultural – are studying the same phenomena? In this exploratory position paper, I sketch the bare outline of a positive framework for understanding current work on constructive remembering, both within the variou…Read more
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374Extended and constructive remembering: two notes on Martin and DeutscherCrossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of History, Philosophy, Religion, and Classics 4 (1): 79-91. 2009.Martin and Deutscher’s remarkable 1966 paper ‘Remembering’ still offers great riches to memory researchers across distinctive traditions, both in its methodological ambition (successfully marrying phenomenological and causal discourses) and in its content. In this short discussion, after briefly setting the paper in its context, we hone in on two live and under-explored issues which have gained attention recently under new labels – the extended mind hypothesis, and the constructive nature of mem…Read more