What Memory Is For: Creating Meaning in the Service of Action

March 10, 2022 Jeremiah Hendren

What Memory Is For: Creating Meaning in the Service of Action

Glenberg, Arthur
Behavioral and Brain Sciences 20, no. 1 (1997): 41-50.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X97000010

Why should psychologists interested in language, learning, and memory care about issues such as embodiment of memory? Because, by ignoring them, we have been making a big mistake. Most theories of memory treat internal representations as meaningless symbols such as a string of zeros and ones that “encode” features […], as pointlike objects with no structure […], or as propositions relating intrinsically meaningless symbols […]. Two problems arise from this treatment. The first is the symbol grounding problem […]: How do those meaningless symbols come to take on meaning? The answer is not as simple as referring the symbol to a lexicon, because words in the lexicon must also be grounded. Also, not all of those meaningless symbols are meant to represent words or wordlike concepts; some are meant to represent complex nonverbal displays […]. The second problem is that we have not availed ourselves of a golden opportunity. By treating internal representation as meaningless symbols, we have not thought about the possibility of taking advantage of other forms of representation. Instead of meaningless symbols, suppose that representations have a structure that is lawfully related to the objects being represented. The structure of the representations might then play an important role in determining, for example, what concepts are easily associated, because their structures literally fit together.

Arthur Glenberg

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