Confabulation denotes the recitation of memories about events and experiences that never happened. Based on multiple case examples, The Confabulating Mind provides an in-depth review of the ...presentations, the causative diseases, and the mechanisms of this phenomenon and compares confabulation with normal false memories, as they occur in healthy adults and children. Memory-related confabulations are compared with false statements made by patients who confuse people, places, or their own health status, as this happens in disorders like déjà vu, paramnesic misidentification, and anosognosia. One form of confabulation called behaviourally spontaneous confabulation receives particular attention. It is characterized by a confusion of reality evident from disorientation and acts according to the confabulations. Recent studies revealed a specific mechanism—orbitofrontal reality filtering—which attributes a critical role to the orbitofrontal cortex for the ability to keep thought and behaviour in phase with reality. The book concludes with an overview of current interpretations of confabulations and recommendations for future study.
Within a week of the attack of September 11, 2001, a consortium of researchers from across the United States distributed a survey asking about the circumstances in which respondents learned of the ...attack (their flashbulb memories) and the facts about the attack itself (their event memories). Follow-up surveys were distributed 11, 25, and 119 months after the attack. The study, therefore, examines retention of flashbulb memories and event memories at a substantially longer retention interval than any previous study using a test-retest methodology, allowing for the study of such memories over the long term. There was rapid forgetting of both flashbulb and event memories within the first year, but the forgetting curves leveled off after that, not significantly changing even after a 10-year delay. Despite the initial rapid forgetting, confidence remained high throughout the 10-year period. Five putative factors affecting flashbulb memory consistency and event memory accuracy were examined: (a) attention to media, (b) the amount of discussion, (c) residency, (d) personal loss and/or inconvenience, and (e) emotional intensity. After 10 years, none of these factors predicted flashbulb memory consistency; media attention and ensuing conversation predicted event memory accuracy. Inconsistent flashbulb memories were more likely to be repeated rather than corrected over the 10-year period; inaccurate event memories, however, were more likely to be corrected. The findings suggest that even traumatic memories and those implicated in a community's collective identity may be inconsistent over time and these inconsistencies can persist without the corrective force of external influences.
This paper addresses the two main resistive switching (RS) memory technologies: phase-change memory (PCM) and redox-based resistive random access memory (ReRAM). It will review the basic concepts, ...the initial promises, and current state of the art, with focus on possible scaling pathways for low-power operation and dense, true 3-D memory. Recent physical insights and new potential concepts will be discussed.
Synaptic devices with linear high‐speed switching can accelerate learning in artificial neural networks (ANNs) embodied in hardware. Conventional resistive memories however suffer from high write ...noise and asymmetric conductance tuning, preventing parallel programming of ANN arrays. Electrochemical random‐access memories (ECRAMs), where resistive switching occurs by ion insertion into a redox‐active channel, aim to address these challenges due to their linear switching and low noise. ECRAMs using 2D materials and metal oxides however suffer from slow ion kinetics, whereas organic ECRAMs enable high‐speed operation but face challenges toward on‐chip integration due to poor temperature stability of polymers. Here, ECRAMs using 2D titanium carbide (Ti3C2Tx) MXene that combine the high speed of organics and the integration compatibility of inorganic materials in a single high‐performance device are demonstrated. These ECRAMs combine the speed, linearity, write noise, switching energy, and endurance metrics essential for parallel acceleration of ANNs, and importantly, they are stable after heat treatment needed for back‐end‐of‐line integration with Si electronics. The high speed and performance of these ECRAMs introduces MXenes, a large family of 2D carbides and nitrides with more than 30 stoichiometric compositions synthesized to date, as promising candidates for devices operating at the nexus of electrochemistry and electronics.
Electrochemical random‐access memories using multilayered 2D titanium carbide MXene that combine the speed, linearity, write noise, switching energy, and endurance metrics essential for parallel acceleration of artificial neural networks with near ideal numerical accuracy in image recognition simulations are reported. The multilayered 2D MXene films are also stable after heat treatment needed for back‐end‐of‐line integration with Si electronics.
Memory-augmented neural networks enhance a neural network with an external key-value (KV) memory whose complexity is typically dominated by the number of support vectors in the key memory. We propose ...a generalized KV memory that decouples its dimension from the number of support vectors by introducing a free parameter that can arbitrarily add or remove redundancy to the key memory representation. In effect, it provides an additional degree of freedom to flexibly control the tradeoff between robustness and the resources required to store and compute the generalized KV memory. This is particularly useful for realizing the key memory on in-memory computing hardware where it exploits nonideal, but extremely efficient nonvolatile memory devices for dense storage and computation. Experimental results show that adapting this parameter on demand effectively mitigates up to 44% nonidealities, at equal accuracy and number of devices, without any need for neural network retraining.
Ulric Neisser was the initiator of the contemporary psychology of autobiographical memory, as well as the founder of the ecological approach to human cognition. The present article reviews his ...empirical and theoretical contributions to an issue which is at the heart of the contemporary debate on autobiographical memory: that is, autobiographical memory accuracy. From the early 1980s to the mid‐1990s, Neisser empirically investigated this topic in a variety of memory research fields including legal testimony, flashbulb memory, and childhood memory. Overall, the empirical studies that Neisser conducted in these fields led him to conceptualize autobiographical memory as a reconstructive process serving the specific goals pursued by the rememberer at a particular time and place, and dynamically varying according to the social context in which autobiographical experiences are recalled. In the conclusions, the author discusses the influence of Neisser's empirical and theoretical work on autobiographical memory accuracy on the current memory literature.
Research on involuntary autobiographical memories has shown that such memories are also experienced as byproducts of voluntarily produced autobiographical memories Mace, 2006. Episodic remembering ...creates access to involuntary conscious memory: Demonstrating involuntary recall on a voluntary recall task. Memory, 14(8), 917-924. This study examined perceptions of these memories with respect to their evoking voluntary memories. Participants were engaged in an autobiographical memory recall task, and asked to report on the experience of involuntary memories. They were asked to report if involuntary memories and evoking voluntary memories were related, from the same lifetime period, if the involuntary memories had utility and relevance for evoking memories, and if the involuntary memories were experienced as intrusive. The results showed that involuntary memories were related to evoking voluntary memories, frequently from the same lifetime period, and generally not experienced as intrusive. While mostly perceived as relevant to evoking memories, less than one-half of the involuntary memories were perceived as useful. The results raise questions about the functional nature of this type of involuntary remembering.
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