Jocelyn Yuxing Wang

What is the epistemic role of memory? In this paper, I depart from two kinds of views in the literature. The first type of view that I reject is the traditional “storehouse” view that memory merely functions to preserve previously acquired information, such as information acquired through perception. Memory, I argue, plays a more active role. The second type of view argues that memory generates new epistemic values in addition to preserving information, but it narrowly focuses on memory’s epistemic generativity with respect to justification. In the view I propose here, in addition to generating justification, memory also improves our understanding of previously encoded contents. I provide this argument using empirical evidence about the role of memory consolidation, a process that has been overlooked by most of the philosophy literature. I argue that through several different mechanisms, including pattern extraction and integration of piecemeal information, the consolidation process enhances some of the important cognitive abilities that constitute understanding.

Why are some people better at generating creative ideas than others? This paper focuses on memory as an unexpected source of creative ideas, i.e., ideas that are both novel and useful. According to my account, highly creative people are able to use memory gists to guide their memory search. Memory gists are memory contents that represent more abstract or qualitative features extracted from the specific, surface-level features in memory contents. Using memory gists in memory search involves a mode of attention that is the internal analog of diffuse attention in perception. Just as diffuse attention in perception has been recognized for its distinctive benefits for processing global targets, I argue that its internal analog directed towards contents in memory and cognition also comes with its own distinctive benefits. Using memory gists allows creative individuals to activate disparate contents that share abstract features despite their superficial differences. My account therefore sheds new light on the underlying mechanisms of creative thinking.

This paper reconciles an inconsistency between the benefits of mind wandering and a prominent conception of attention in philosophy and cognitive psychology, namely, the prioritization view. Since we prioritize the information in a task less if we are doing it while mind wandering compared to solely concentrating on it, why does our performance in the task sometimes improve when we are mind wandering? To explain this, we offer a conception of diffuse attention that generalizes from external to internal forms of attention and captures deep commonalities between the two (Chun et al. 2011). We conceptualize mind wandering as an instance of internal diffuse attention that also induces diffuse attention in other concurrent tasks. Moreover, pace the prioritization view, certain tasks are in fact better performed with diffuse attention, which prioritizes information less than focused attention. Our account of mind wandering as an instance of the more general category of diffuse attention improves upon current leading philosophical views of mind wandering (such as Irving 2016) by better explaining the interaction between mind wandering and other tasks.