Slide 2 of 25
Notes:
The dominant view of psychology is that memory involves the storage of a copy of ones experience in the brain. There are different ideas about what exactly is copied, but the essence of the idea is the notion that experience stamps in a pattern of activity or a set of symbols that are similar to those used/produced/derived at the time of the experience. Whatever it is like to experience the rose is what it is like to remember the rose.
William James (1890): “Vestiges of past experience must in some way be stored up in [memory], and must, when aroused by present stimuli, first appear as representations of distant goods and evils; and then must discharge into the appropriate motor channels for warding off the evil and securing the benefits of the good.”
Chomsky’s argument, for example, that language could not be learned is in part a reaction to the absence of any concept of learning other than the stamping in through reinforcement of associations.
