Abstract
The pressures that led to the evolution of episodic memory have recently seen much discussion, but a fully satisfactory account of them is still lacking. We seek to make progress in this debate by taking a step backward, identifying four possible ways that episodic memory could evolve in relation to simulationist future planning—a similar and seemingly related ability. After distinguishing each of these possibilities, the paper critically discusses existing accounts of the evolution of episodic memory. It then presents a novel argument in favor of the view that episodic memory is a by-product of the evolution of simulationist future planning. The paper ends by showing that this position allows for the maintenance of the traditional view that episodic memory operates on stored memory traces, as well as explaining a number of key features of episodic memory: its being subject to frequent and systematic errors, its neural co-location with the capacity for simulationist future planning, and the potential existence of non-human episodic memory.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Note that the fact that a memory is self-involving crosscuts the distinction between semantic and episodic memory. I can have many memories that involve only general knowledge about my past—being born in London, for example, or growing up alongside three siblings. Such autobiographical memories (Williams et al., 2008) can include both episodic and semantic information. Similarly, I can have memory of specific events without remembering what the experience of those events was like. I can remember that I once touched stinging nettle on a hike, and that it hurt, without remembering how the pain of doing so felt at the time or which hike it was. Such event memories are often highly particular, but do not involve experiential or subjective details (Rubin & Umanath 2015).
Of course, there are also other important features of EM—such as that they are often negative in valence or appear unbidden (Boyer, 2008). However, from an evolutionary biological perspective, the ones cited in the text are central (though see also Sect. 5 below).
Note that, as with EM, we (of course) do not assume that these representations necessarily need to be accurate: humans cannot see in the future, and what they think will happen is subject to (more or less) systematic biases.
We also note that the many ways of spelling out the details of autonoetic representations are compatible with our proposal.
Note that our point here is not one of semantics or definitions. It is entirely possible to use the term “episodic memory” in a broader way to refer to first-personal, what-where-when, event-memories that may or may not have an autonoetic quality. It is just that this is not how we are using the term here: what we are interested in is investigating the evolution specifically of autonoetic memories. While we think our usage is quite in line with the literature, we are happy for readers to substitute the term “autonoetic memory” wherever we use “EM.”.
A terminological point: in the biological literature, it is common to use the term “adaptive” to refer to traits that are under selection: these are traits that increase the expected reproductive success of their bearers. However, in the literature on EM, it has become common to use the term “adaptive” to refer to the general usefulness of EM—independently of whether this usefulness has biological value. To avoid confusion, we therefore frame the discussion here without using the term “adaptive.”.
It is possible that there are some indirect implications though: given the fact that these two systems require some of the same psychological competences, the evolution of one can be expected to make the evolution of the second slightly more likely (see also Schulz, 2018, chap. 6). However, this does not mean that the evolution of one of them brings with it the evolution of the other, as on the other scenarios below.
The debate surrounding the nature of consciousness is famously complex and without a resolution. Here, though, we do not take any position on this debate, and just note that the idea that EM and SFP might be aspects of a generally non-selectively advantageous form of consciousness is a possibility to consider—independently of exactly what consciousness is.
This point is independent of the controversy surrounding the existence of basic emotions (Ekman, 1989; Izard, 2011, Fridlund, 1994), or of the nature of emotions (LeDoux, 2012). Whatever exactly emotions are and exactly how much they are impacted by cultural factors, selection for emotions is widely thought to, at a minimum, flag to the organism which situations to avoid or approach (the valence part of the emotion) and—perhaps—also how to approach them (the affect program or content part of the emotion). This is all that matters here.
Relatedly, our argument does not imply that loss of the EM is not at all detrimental for humans now. That said, the issues here are complex. It is true that persons with various forms of dementia often experience significant reductions in their autonomy and quality of life. However, it is not clear what this means for the issues at stake here, as it is far from clear to what extent these cases involve selective loss of the EM specifically, rather than loss of memory abilities or SFP more generally.
Note that the individuation of biological and psychological traits is difficult theoretically, too (Baum, 2013). Fortunately—and for the same reasons set out in the text—settling this is not necessary here either.
References
Addis, D.R., A.T. Wong, and D.L. Schacter. 2007. Remembering the past and imagining the future: Common and distinct neural substrates during event construction and elaboration. Neuropsychologia 45: 1363–1377.
Allen, T.A., and N.J. Fortin. 2013. The evolution of episodic memory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110: 10379–10386.
Al-Shawaf, L., Conroy-Beam, D., Asao, K., & Buss, D. M. (2015). Human Emotions: An Evolutionary Psychological Perspective. Emotion Review.
DA Baum 2013 Developmental Causation and the Problem of Homology Philosophy and Theory in Biology 5 https://doi.org/10.3998/ptb.6959004.0005.003
Beaty, R.E., Q. Chen, A. Christensen, Q. Jiang, P. Silvia, and D.L. Schacter. 2018. Brain networks of the imaginative mind: Dynamic functional connectivity of default and cognitive control networks relates to openness to experience. Human Brain Mapping 39: 811–821.
Beaty, R.E., P. Seli, and D.L. Schacter. 2019. Thinking about the past and future in daily life: An experience sampling study of individual differences in mental time travel. Psychological Research Psychologische Forschung 83: 805–816.
Benoit, R.G., and D.L. Schacter. 2015. Specifying the core network supporting episodic simulation and episodic memory by activation likelihood estimation. Neuropsychologia 75: 450–457.
Boyer, P. 2008. Evolutionary economics of mental time travel? Trends in Cognitive Science 12: 219–224.
Boyle, A. 2019. Learning from the past: Epistemic generativity and the function of episodic memory. Journal of Consciousness Studies 26: 242–251.
Whiten, A., and R.W. Byrne, eds. 1997. Machiavellian Intelligence II: Extensions and Evaluations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Carvalho, F.M. 2018. Situating mental time travel in the broad context of temporal cognitive: A neural systems approach. Filosfia Unisinos 19: 81–88.
Cheng, S., and M. Werning. 2016. What is episodic memory if it is a natural kind? Synthese 193: 1345–1385.
Chua, E.F., D.E. Hannula, and C. Ranganath. 2012. Distinguishing highly confident accurate and inaccurate memory: Insights about relevant and irrelevant influences on memory confidence. Memory 20: 48–62.
Conway, M.A., Q. Wang, Z. Hanyu, and S. Haque. 2005. A cross-cultural investigation of autobiographical memory: On the universality and cultural variation of the reminiscence bump. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 36: 739–749.
Craver, C.F. 2020. Remembering: Epistemic and empirical. Review of Philosophy of Psychology 11: 261–281.
De Brigard, F. 2014. Is memory for remembering? Recollection as a form of episodic hypothetical thinking. Synthese 191 (2): 155–185.
De Brigard, F., D. Addis, J.H. Ford, D.L. Schacter, and K.S. Giovanello. 2013. Remembering what could have happened: Neural correlates of episodic counterfactual thinking. Neuropsychologia 51: 2401–2414.
Dewhurst, S., and P. Farrand. 2004. Investigating the phenomenological characteristics of false recognition for categorized words. European Journal of Cognitive Psychology 16: 403–416.
Dokic, J. 2014. Feeling the past: A two-tiered account of episodic memory. Review of Philosophy and Psychology 5: 413–426.
Ekman, P. 1989. The Argument and Evidence About Universals in Facial Expressions of Emotion. In Handbook of Social Psychophysiology, ed. H. Wagner and A. Manstead, 143–164. New York: Wiley.
Fernandez, J. 2020. Self-referential memory and mental time travel. Review of Philosophy and Psychology 11: 283–300.
Fessler, D.M.T. 2010. Madmen: An Evolutionary Perspective on Anger and Men’s Violent Responses to Transgression. In International Handbook of Anger, ed. M. Potegal, G. Stemmler, and C. Spielberger, 361–381. New York: Springer.
Fridlund, A.J. 1994. Human Facial Expression: An Evolutionary View. San Diego: Academic Press.
Gallo, D.A. 2006. Associative Illusions of Memory: False Memory Research in DRM and Related Tasks. New York, NY: Taylor & Francis.
Gigerenzer, G., and R. Selten, eds. 2001. Bounded Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Glimcher, P.W., M.C. Dorris, and H.M. Bayer. 2005. Physiological utility theory and the neuroeconomics of choice. Games Econ Behav 52 (2): 213–256.
Gluck, J., and S. Bluck. 2007. Looking back across the life span: A life story account of the reminiscence bump. Memory & Cognition 35: 1928–1939.
Godfrey-Smith, P. 2001. Three kinds of adaptationism. In Adaptationism and Optimality, ed. S.H. Orzack and E. Sober, 335–357. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Harvey, J.P. 2013. Sensory perception: Lessons from synesthesia. Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine 86: 203–216.
Hasker, W. 1999. The Emergent Self. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Hasselmo, M.E. (2012). How We Remember: Brain Mechanisms of Episodic Memory. MIT Press.
Henrich, J. 2015. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Hoerl, C. (2001). The phenomenology of episodic recall. In Time and memory. Issues in
philosophy and psychology, eds. Hoerl, C., and T. McCormack, 315–335. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hopkins, R. 2014. Episodic memory as representing the past to oneself. Review of Philosophy and Psychology 5: 313–331.
Izard, C. 2011. Forms and Functions of Emotions: Matters of Emotion-Cognition Interactions. Emotion Review 3 (4): 371–378.
Kwan, D., Craver, C.F., Green, L., Myerson, J., Rosenbaum, S. R. (2013). Dissociations in
Future Thinking Following Hippocampal Damage: Evidence from Discounting and Time Perspective in Episodic Amnesia. Journal of Experimental Psychology, General. 142: 1355.
Kwan, D., C.F. Craver, L. Green, J. Myerson, P. Boyer, and R.S. Rosenbaum. 2012. Future Decision-Making without Mental Time Travel. Hippocampus 22: 1215–1219.
LeDoux, J.E. 2012. Evolution of human emotion: A view through fear. Progress in Brain Research 195: 431–442.
Loftus, E.F. 1997. Creating false memories. Scientific American 277: 70–75.
Loftus, E.F., and J.E. Pickrell. 1995. The formation of false memories. Psychiatric Annals 25: 720–725.
Madore, K.P., K.K. Szpunar, and D.L. Schacter. 2016. Divergent creative thinking in young and older adults: Extending the effects of an episodic specificity induction. Memory & Cognition 44: 974–988.
Mahr, J.B. & Csibra, G. (2018). Why do we remember? The communicative function of episodic memory, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 41, e1.
McCarroll, C.J. 2019. Navigating intertemporal choices: Mental time travel, perspectival imagery, and prudent decision-making. Psychology of Consciousness, Theory, Research, and Practice 6: 200–213.
Michaelian, K. 2016. Mental Time Travel: Episodic Memory and our knowledge of the personal past. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Michaelian, K. 2020. Confabulating as Unreliable Imagining. In Defence of the Simulationist Account of Unsuccessful Remembering. Topoi 39: 133–148.
Millikan, R. 1984. Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Niccolai, V., J. Jennes, P. Stoerig, and T.M. Van Leeuwen. 2012. Modality and Variability of Synesthetic Experience. American Journal of Psychology 125: 81–94.
Nichols, S., & Stich, S. (2003). Mindreading. An Integrated Account of Pretence, Self-Awareness, and Understanding Other Minds (Vol. 114): Oxford University Press.
Peretz, I., D. Vuvan, M.-É. Lagrois, and J.L. Armony. 2015. Neural overlap in processing music and speech. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences 370 (1664): 20140090–20140090.
Pertseva, M. 1991. The evolution of hormonal signalling systems. Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology Part A: Physiology 100 (4): 775–787.
Picciuto, E., and P. Carruthers. 2016. Imagination and Pretense. In Knowledge Through Imagination, ed. A. Kind and P. Kung, 314–325. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
L Renoult MD Rugg 2020 An historical perspective on Endel Tulving’s episodic-semantic distinction Neuropsychologia 139 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2020.107366
Robins, S.K. 2016. Misremembering. Philosophical Psychology 29: 432–447.
Robins, S.K. (2018). Confabulation and Epistemic Authority. Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
Robins, S.K. 2019. Confabulation and Constructive Memory. Synthese 196: 2135–2151.
Roediger, H.L., and K.B. McDermott. 1995. Creating false memories: Remembering words that were not presented in lists. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 21: 803–814.
Rubin, D.C., and S. Umanath. 2015. Event memory: A theory of memory for laboratory, autobiographical, and fictional events. Psychological Review 122: 1–23.
Sant’Anna, A. 2020. The hybrid contents of memory. Synthese 197: 1263–1290.
Schacter, D.L., and D.R. Addis. 2007. On the constructive episodic simulation of past and future events. Behavioral & Brain Sciences 30: 299–351.
Schacter, D.L., D.R. Addis, D. Hassabis, V.C. Martin, R.N. Spreng, and K.K. Szpunar. 2012. The future of memory: Remembering, imagining, and the brain. Neuron 76: 677–694.
Schacter, D.L., Benoit, R.G., De Brigard, F., & Szpunar, K.K. (2015). Episodic future thinking and episodic counterfactual thinking: Intersections between memory and decisions. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory.
Schulz, A. 2011. Simulation, simplicity, and selection: An evolutionary perspective on high-level mindreading. Philosophical Studies 152 (2): 271–285.
Schulz, A. 2018. Efficient Cognition: The Evolution of Representational Decision Making. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Schulz, A. 2020. Enhancing Thoughts: Culture, Technology, and the Evolution of Human Cognitive Uniqueness. Mind & Language. https://doi.org/10.1111/mila.12320.
Schwartz, A. 2020. Simulationism and the Function(s) of Episodic Memory. Review of Philosophy and Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-020-00461-1.
Soman, D., G. Ainslie, S. Frederick, X. Li, J. Lynch, P. Moreau, and G. Zauberman. 2005. The Psychology of Intertemporal Discounting: Why are Distant Events Valued Differently from Proximal Ones? Marketing Letters 16 (3): 347–360.
Sterelny, K. 2003. Thought in a Hostile World: The Evolution of Human Cognition. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Szpunar, K.K., Shrikanth, S., & Schacter, D.L. (2018). Varieties of future thinking. In G. Oettingen, A.T. Sevincer, & P.M. Gollwitzer (eds.) The Psychology of Thinking About the Future. New York: Guilford Press.
Szpunar, K.K., R.N. Spreng, and D.L. Schacter. 2014. A taxonomy of prospection: Introducing an organizational framework for future-oriented cognition. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 111: 18414–18421.
Szpunar, K.K., J.M. Watson, and K.B. McDermott. 2007. Neural Substrates of Envisioning the Future. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104: 642–647.
Suddendorf, T., and M.C. Corballis. 2007. The evolution of foresight: What is mental time travel and is it unique to humans? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 30: 299–313.
Tooby, J., and L. Cosmides. 2008. The Evolutionary Psychology of the Emotions and Their Relationship to Internal Regulatory Variables. In Handbook of Emotions, ed. M. Lewis, J.M. Haviland-Jones, and L.F. Barrett, 114–137. New York: The Guilford Press.
Tulving, E. 1972. Episodic and semantic memory. In Organization of Memory, ed. E. Tulving and W. Donaldson, 381–403. New York: Academic Press.
Tulving, E. 1983. Elements of Episodic Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tulving, E. 1986. What kind of hypothesis is the distinction between episodic and semantic memory? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition 12: 307–311.
Tulving, E. 2002. Episodic memory: From mind to brain. Annual Review of Psychology 53: 1–25.
Williams, H.L., M.A. Conway, and G. Cohen. 2008. Autobiographical memory. In Memory in the real world, 3rd ed., ed. G. Cohen and M.A. Conway, 21–90. Hove: Psychology Press.
Acknowledgements
We thank the members of the “Memory Mayhem” group, the audience of the GEM 2021 conference in Bochum, Germany, and the anonymous referees for this journal for helpful comments on prior versions of this article.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of Interest
None.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
W. Schulz, A., Robins, S. Episodic Memory, Simulated Future Planning, and their Evolution. Rev.Phil.Psych. 14, 811–832 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-021-00601-1
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-021-00601-1