Action in memory and memory in action: experiments in the encoding and retrieval of spatial representation

Thesis

In this thesis, I posit a fundamental link between action and memory in human cognition. I present results from a series of behavioural experiments which examine this interplay from two distinct angles: I investigate how action representations modulate memory formation (action in memory) and examine how memory representations shape action sequences (memory in action).

I offer a contribution to the cognitive sciences by presenting fourteen studies across five empirical chapters, which demonstrate behavioural markers of cognitive ties between action and memory. This work pertains to theories of cognition and curriculum design in service of learning.

Chapter I lays the theoretical foundations of the investigation through a review of memory research and previously revealed cognitive effects at the junction of action and memory. I situate the focus on action in memory amidst long established inquiries: at the intersection between procedural and declarative memory formation, amidst theories of active learning and epistemic actions, and in relation to the embodied cognition paradigm. I review and rely on theories of memory as reconstructive, which position memory as a substrate for mental simulation or model-based reconstruction of unseen, future or fictional scenes and behaviours.

Chapters II-IV (Action in Memory) report the foundational modulation of memory through a manipulation of the alignment between action selections and supervision signals in an associative, spatial memory task. These chapters empirically demonstrate that memory performance during test phases is superior when action selections during training were aligned with feedback signals, compared to when action selections were misaligned during training. I introduce this action alignment effect and show its generalisations and robustness against a range of controls.

In chapters V, VI (Memory in Action), I reverse and expand the inquiry and consider how memories are used to guide action sequences in a self-simulation task. Here, the experiments ask humans to reconstruct their own prior behaviour from incomplete memory in the context of a spatial rule discovery task. A re-enactment of their own learning dynamics requires an emulation of the behavioural markers associated with an epistemic transition from ignorance to knowledge. I first identify subtle behavioural markers of this epistemic transition, and then, by use of a comparison between behaviour during discovery and behaviour during a simulation of discovery, I quantify distinct biases in self-simulation of counterfactual epistemic states. Chapters V, VI thus explore the role of partial memory in metacognitive access as revealed by action sequences. In a final discussion chapter (VII), I summarise my contributions and their limitations.

Authors: Cremer, CZ

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-nyjqrxpm5
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: epistemic action; self-model; metacognition; embodied cognition; test-effect; active learning; memory; epistemic counterfactual
• Subjects: Memory consolidation; Cognitive science; Metacognition