Felipe De Brigard

The constructive episodic simulation hypothesis is a prominent view in cognitive neuroscience. It postulates that episodic simulations of past, future, and counterfactual events engage similar neural processes because they share a common cognitive function: planning and executing future actions. From this, it follows that the utility of episodic simulations critically depends on retrieving their content at the appropriate time. However, very little work has characterized how humans retrieve the various contents of previously entertained mental simulations. This chapter focuses on the retrieval of one class of these contents: temporal contents, which convey information about the temporal location of a simulated event (e.g. recalling that an imagined future event is to occur next Tuesday at 3 p.m., or that a simulated counterfactual event would have occurred last Christmas). It reviews existing theoretical and empirical work on retrieval of temporal contents from episodic memory, and proposes an extension to explain retrieval of temporal contents from episodic simulations more broadly. It corroborates the theoretical claims with a novel demonstration of asymmetries in retrieval of temporal information for previously imagined versus previously remembered events, and then discusses how ideas from this framework can be leveraged to improve planning and decision making.

Despite Dennett’s vast scholarship, he seemed to only have directly addressed the topic of memory in a relatively unknown coauthored article published in a somewhat obscure volume. The current chapter attempts to reconstruct the ideas from this old article, and argues that it offers a viable and coherent view of episodic memory with substantial empirical support. Specifically, the chapter uncovers three empirically supported theses. A _functional_ thesis, according to which our memory system not only processes information about past events but also uses this information to construct useful anticipations of possible future events. A _computational_ thesis, according to which statistical regularities, along with individual limitations and goals, probabilistically constrain the search space examined during memory retrieval. And a _metaphysical_ thesis, according to which memories do not exist as subpersonal-level brain structures encoding particular intentional contents but rather as personal-level psychological phenomena only accessible from the intentional stance.

In The Entangled Brain, Pessoa criticizes standard approaches in cognitive neuroscience in which the brain is seen as a functionally decomposable, modular system with causal operations built up hierarchically. Instead, he advocates for an emergentist perspective whereby dynamic brain networks are associated, not with traditional psychological categories, but with behavioral functions characterized in evolutionary terms. Here, we raise a number of concerns with such a radical approach. We ultimately believe that while much revision to cognitive neuroscience is welcome and needed, Pessoa’s more radical proposals may be counterproductive.

In the film Dark City, mysterious pale-skinned creatures rearrange a city and alter the inhabitants’ identities and memories each night. Every morning, residents awaken in a different city with new identities, unaware of what changed while they slept. Though fictional, this scenario seems to mirror an intriguing aspect of our lives—not when we wake up, but when we go to sleep. Each night, as we dream, we often find ourselves in strange environments, experiencing unrealistic or implausible events, intense negative emotions, and even transformations that make us feel like different people. The dream world appears to rupture waking reality, making anything possible. Some researchers argue that this suggests our dreaming life is discontinuous with our waking life. But is this really so? Are dreams a complete break from wakefulness, implying that we lead two separate lives: one grounded in consistency and stability by day, and another filled with fleeting, bizarre experiences at night? This chapter explores whether the relationship between our dreaming mind and our waking mind is best understood as one of continuity or discontinuity. Since continuity and discontinuity can be interpreted in different ways, we examine various dimensions through which this debate can be framed. The first section focuses on the content of experiences, while the second addresses their affective dimension. The third section explores the continuity and discontinuity of the self in wakefulness and dreaming, and the fourth discusses brain activity and other physiological markers. The last section presents some concluding thoughts on this debate.

In this paper, we focus on whether and to what extent we judge that people are responsible for the consequences of their forgetfulness. We ran a series of behavioral studies to measure judgments of responsibility for the consequences of forgetfulness. Our results show that we are disposed to hold others responsible for some of their forgetfulness. The level of stress that the forgetful agent is under modulates judgments of responsibility, though the level of care that the agent exhibits toward performing the forgotten action does not. We argue that this result has important implications for a long-running debate about the nature of responsible agency.

The notion of cognitive system is widely used in explanations in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Traditional approaches define cognitive systems in an agent-relative way, that is, via top-down functional decomposition that assumes a cognitive agent as starting point. The extended cognition movement challenged that approach by questioning the primacy of the notion of cognitive agent. In response, [Adams, F., and K. Aizawa. 2001. The Bounds of Cognition. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.] suggested that to have a clear understanding of what a cognitive system is we may need to solve “the demarcation challenge”: the problem of identifying a reliable way to determine which mechanisms that are causally responsible for the production of a certain cognitive process constitute a cognitive system responsible for such process and which ones do not. Recently, [Rupert, R. 2009. Cognitive Systems and the Extended Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.] offered a solution based on the idea that the mechanisms that constitute a cognitive system are integrated in a particular sense. In this paper I critically review Rupert’s solution and argue against it. Additionally, I argue that a successful account of cognitive system must accommodate the fact that the neural mechanisms causally responsible for the production of a cognitive process are diachronically dynamic and yet functionally stable. At the end, I offer a suggestion as to how to accommodate this diachronic dynamicity without losing functional stability. I conclude by drawing some implications for the discussion on cognitive ontologies.