Memory and cognition

This chapter draws on just a few of these traditions in cognitive, clinical, developmental, social, and personality psychology, in the cognitive sciences and cognitive anthropology, in phenomenology and philosophy of mind, and in social ontology to trace one idiosyncratic path through contemporary approaches to memory and cognition. Our choice of topics is driven by a desire to suggest that diverse “cognitive” approaches have much to offer memory researchers in the humanities and social sciences. The recent history of the sciences of memory offers a sharp contrast and corrective to the stereotyped image of cognitive science as a scientistic quest to model all the mind’s complexities on the dull mechanism of our current digital computers. The scope of cognition broadens, as we seek to demonstrate, to include emotion and motivation, embodiment and movement, and to address factors below conscious awareness and control as well as beyond the individual. The activities of remembering that matter in everyday life often involve the interaction and coordination of memory-related processes at many different levels and timescales: neural, cognitive, affective, bodily, social, material, and cultural.