How to Become a Memory: The Individual and Collective Aspects of Mnemicity

Abstract

Human adults distinguish their mental event simulations along various dimensions—most prominently according to their “mnemicity”: we track whether these simulations are outcomes of past personal experiences or not (i.e., whether we are “remembering” or “imagining”). This distinction between memory and imagination is commonly thought to reflect a deep architectural distinction in the mind. Against this idea, I argue that mnemicity is not based on a fundamentalstructural difference between memories and imaginations but is instead the result of metacognitive attribution and social construction. On this attributional view, mnemicity is likely a uniquely human capacity that both serves collective functions and has been shaped by collective norms. First, on the individual level, mnemicity attribution is an outcome of metacognitive learning: it relies on acquired interpretations of the phenomenal features of mental event simulations. Such interpretations are in part acquired through interactive reminiscing with other community members. Further, how the distinction between memory and imagination is drawn is likely sensitive to cultural norms about what remembering is, when it is appropriate to claim to remember, what can be remembered, and what remembering entails. As a result, how individuals determine whether they remember or imagine is bound to be deeply enculturated. Second, mnemicity attribution solves an important collective challenge: who to grant epistemic authority about the past. Solving this challenge is important because—for humans—the past represents not just an opportunity to learn about the future but to coordinate present social realities. How a community determines such social realities both draws on individuals’ remembering and in turn shapes when, what, and how individuals remember.

A tale of two distrusts: Memory distrust toward commission and omission errors in the Chinese context.

“…Like false memories more generally, memory distrust has been suggested to be related to people’s susceptibility to social influence (Zhang, Otgaar, et al, 2022), which has been found to be shaped by self-construal, with people who are more interdependent and exhibiting greater compliance to others (Oeberst & Wu, 2015). Furthermore, it has been argued that judgments of mnemicity—that is, the attributions of mental representations as being memories—are a result of metacognitive and social construction processes that are influenced by collective norms (Mahr, 2023; Mahr et al, 2023). That is to say, the “criteria” for what counts as memory may differ across cultures.…”