Sarah Robins

Talking About Writing: What We Can Learn from Conversations between Parents and Their Young Children.

In six analyses using CHILDES (MacWhinney, 2000), we explored whether and how parents and their 1.5 to 5-year-old children talk about writing. Parent speech might include information about the similarity between print and speech and about the difference between writing and drawing. Parents could convey similarity between print and speech by using the words say, name, and word to refer to both spoken and written language. Parents could differentiate writing and drawing by making syntactic and semantic distinctions in their discussion of the two symbol systems. Our results indicate that parent speech includes these types of information. However, young children themselves sometimes confuse writing and drawing in their speech.

Letter knowledge in parent–child conversations: differences between families differing in socio-economic status

When formal literacy instruction begins, around the age of 5 or 6, children from families low in socioeconomic status (SES) tend to be less prepared than children from families of higher SES. The goal of our study is to explore one route through which SES may influence childrens early literacy skills: informal conversations about letters. The study builds on previous studies (Robins and Treiman, 2009; Robins et al., 2012, 2014) of parent–child conversations that show how U. S. parents and their young children talk about writing and provide preliminary evidence about similarities and differences in parent–child conversations as a function of SES. Focusing on parents and children aged three to five, we conducted five separate analyses of these conversations, asking whether and how family SES influences the previously established patterns. Although we found talk about letters in both upper and lower SES families, there were differences in the nature of these conversations. The proportion of letter talk utterances that were questions was lower in lower SES families and, of all the letter names that lower SES families talked about, more of them were uttered in isolation rather than in sequences. Lower SES families were especially likely to associate letters with the childs name, and they placed more emphasis on sequences in alphabetic order. We found no SES differences in the factors that influenced use of particular letter names (monograms), but there were SES differences in two-letter sequences (digrams). Focusing on the alphabet and on associations between the childs name and the letters within it may help to interest the child in literacy activities, but they many not be very informative about the relationship between letters and words in general. Understanding the patterns in parent–child conversations about letters is an important first step for exploring their contribution to childrens early literacy skills and school readiness.

Confabulation and constructive memory

Confabulation is a symptom central to many psychiatric diagnoses and can be severely debilitating to those who exhibit the symptom. Theorists, scientists, and clinicians have an understandable interest in the nature of confabulation—pursuing ways to define, identify, treat, and perhaps even prevent this memory disorder. Appeals to confabulation as a clinical symptom rely on an account of memory’s function from which cases like the above can be contrasted. Accounting for confabulation is thus an important desideratum for any candidate theory of memory. Many contemporary memory theorists now endorse Constructivism, where memory is understood as a capacity for constructing plausible representations of past events (e.g., De Brigard in Synthese 191:155–185, 2014; Michaelian in Philos Psychol 24:323–342, 2012, 2016). Constructivism’s aim is to account for and normalize the prevalence of memory errors in everyday life. Errors are plausible constructions that, on a particular occasion have led to error. They are not, however, evidence of malfunction in the memory system. While Constructivism offers an uplifting repackaging of the memory errors to which we are all susceptible, it has troubling implications for appeals to confabulation in psychiatric diagnosis. By accommodating memory errors within our understanding of memory’s function, Constructivism runs the risk of being unable to explain how confabulation errors are evidence of malfunction. After reviewing the literature on confabulation and Constructivism, respectively, I identify the tension between them and explore how different versions of Constructivism may respond. The paper concludes with a proposal for distinguishing between kinds of false memory—specifically, between misremembering and confabulation—that may provide a route to their reconciliation.

Optogenetics and the mechanism of false memory

Constructivists about memory argue that memory is a capacity for building representations of past events from a generalized information store (e.g., De Brigard, in Synthese 191:155–185, 2014a; Michaelian, in Philos Psychol 24:323–342, 2012). The view is motivated by the memory errors discovered in cognitive psychology. Little has been known about the neural mechanisms by which false memories are produced. Recently, using a method I call the Optogenetic False Memory Technique (O-FaMe), neuroscientists have created false memories in mice (e.g., Ramirez et al., in Science 341:388–391, 2013). In this paper, I examine how Constructivism fares in light of O-FaMe results. My aims are two-fold. First, I argue that errors found in O-FaMe and cognitive psychology are similar behaviorally. Second, Constructivists should be able to explain the former since they purport to explain the latter, but they cannot. I conclude that O-FaMe studies reveal details about the mechanism by which false memories are produced that are incompatible with the explanatory approach to false memories favored by Constructivism.

Contiguity and the causal theory of memory

Abstract In Memory: A Philosophical Study, Bernecker argues for an account of contiguity. This Contiguity View is meant to solve relearning and prompting, wayward causation problems plaguing the causal theory of memory. I argue that Bernecker’s Contiguity View fails in this task. Contiguity is too weak to prevent relearning and too strong to allow prompting. These failures illustrate a problem inherent in accounts of memory causation. Relearning and prompting are both causal relations, wayward only with respect to our interest in specifying remembering’s requirements. Solving them requires saying more about remembering, not causation. I conclude by sketching such an account.

Mindreading and tacit knowledge

Debate over the nature of mindreading proceeds on the assumption that theory and simulation offer distinct characterizations of this ability. The threat of collapse objection questions this assumption, suggesting that simulation collapses into theory because both are committed to mindreading as tacit knowledge. Although both sides dismiss this objection, I argue that the threat is real. Theory and simulation are both accounts of mindreading as tacit knowledge and so the debate between them collapses.

In Defense of Vasubandhu's Approach to Episodic Phenomenology

ABSTRACT Ganeri [2018] explores three Buddhist approaches to episodic memory and concludes in favor of Buddhaghosas attentional account. When comparing it to Vasubandhus, Ganeri argues that Buddhaghosas is preferable because it does not over-intellectualize episodic memory. In my commentary, I argue that the intellectualism of Vasubandhus approach (at least as presented by Ganeri) makes it both a more plausible account of episodic memory and a more successful strategy for addressing the precarious role of the self in this form of memory.

Memory Traces, Memory Errors, and the Possibility of Neural Lie Detection

The civic response to crime is forever challenged by the human inclination to lie, deceive, mislead, and distort. There is thus perennial interest in creating lie detectors, which can distinguish between honest and deceptive reports during interrogation. Most lie detectors work by identifying behavioral or physiological correlates of deception. The traditional polygraph test, for example, measures a person’s heart rate, skin conductance, and blood pressure (amongst other physiological markers) while he or she answers questions, detecting the elevated arousal that often accompanies deception. The problems with such measures are well known: the connection between arousal and deception is imperfect, and respondents can develop tactics by which the connection is further weakened or suppressed. Many are excited by advances in neuroscience, which suggest the possibility of neural lie detection (e.g., Spence et al. 2001), as these are thought to provide more direct and reliable measures of guilt and deception.