Radical Embodied Memory (Wilford & Anderson, 2025)

Of all the representation-hungry problems out there, memory seems to be the hungriest. It is clearly a fact that we can organise our present behaviour with respect to things that happened previously; we learn, I can shape my talking behaviour to be about what I did last summer, and so on. In order for this to be possible, something has to persist from the past into the present, and it seems intuitive that what persists is some sort of record of that past event. That seems like it has to be a representation, by the very definition of the term. 

Obviously, I don't think that ecological psychology can't find a way to talk about memory. I've done it a bit (Rob and I had a chat on his podcast, I've thought about it a little in papers) but never anything formal; all just thinking through the problem. So I was excited to see a preprint on the topic by Robyn Wilford and Michael Anderson. In this post I want to review the basic approach (overall I like the paper and I think the basic idea is exactly right) and list a few suggestions I would make if I was reviewing this paper. It's exciting to see this topic getting some attention, even if it is still very early days.

Mechanisms and Models of Mechanisms (#MechanismWeek 1)

In this first #MechanismWeek post, I will define a mechanism and briefly describe the kind of models of mechanisms you can build. I begin with various kinds of functional models (Cummins, 1975, 2001; Weiskopf, 2011). These either break capacities of systems into more coherent, easily studied sub-capacities (think of breaking memory into long term memory and short term memory as a simple example) or model them with components that may or may not be really implemented in the organism (e.g. geons, exemplars).

I will then introduce the idea of a dynamic causal mechanistic model (Bechtel & Abrahamsen, 2010) which attempt to map model components directly onto the real parts and processes of the mechanism at hand. The argument is that while functional models provide useful descriptions of mechanisms, they do not provide an explanation of that mechanism, and that only mechanistic models can explain.