Editorial

Memory Studies

Influences on memory 4(4) 355–359

© The Author(s) 2011
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DOI: 10.1177/1750698011414082
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John Sutton
Macquarie University, Australia

The study of remembering is both compelling and challenging, in part, because of the multiplicity
and the complexity of influences on memory. Whatever their interests, memory researchers are
always aware of the many different factors that can drive the processes they care about. A search
for the phrase ‘influences on memory’ confirms this daunting and exhilarating array of influences,
of many different kinds, operating at many different timescales, and presumably often interacting
in ways that we can’t yet imagine, let alone model. There are hormonal and neuromodulatory,
genetic and pharmacological, developmental and age-related influences; there are influences of
arousal, stress, gender, mood, emotion, sleep and personality; there are unconscious, schematic or
semantic influences, and there are influences of context, situation, task and environment. There are
many aspects of ‘media influence on memory’ (Loftus and Banaji, 1989; Strange and Garry, 2007),
and, of course, there are both ‘social influences on memory’ (Echterhoff and Hirst, 2009) and ‘cul-
tural influences on memory’ (Gutchess and Indeck, 2009). Notoriously, there are numerous ‘sug-
gestive influences’ on memory (Loftus, 2003): influences of misinformation (Seifert, 2002; Wright
and Loftus, 1998), or of ‘memory conformity’ (Gabbert et al., 2006) and ‘memory contagion’
(Roediger et al., 2002). People who know each other well, such as intimate couples, ‘may be well
practised in yielding to each other’s influence and incorporating their partner’s information into
their own memories of the past’ (French et al., 2008: 264).
This range of influences underpins the dramatic causal holism with which memory studies must
deal: many such influences are mutually modulatory, exhibiting forms of continuous reciprocal
causation across distinctive parts of dynamical systems (Clark, 1997:163). Such radical interactiv-
ity of influence poses tough methodological challenges to the experimental ideal of the cognitive
psychological traditions that I’ve cited so far, that of separating out distinct causal factors under
controlled experimental conditions so as to pinpoint the unique contributions of each. But that’s not
my topic here. I want to ask a simpler question about this pervasive language of influence in
memory studies, about what’s implied when we talk about the ways in which we, or our memories,
yield or are susceptible to influences of one kind or another. As we identify all these diverse and
pervasive influences on memory, what exactly is it that is being influenced? What lies there behind
or before influence? How do we theorize the separation that is tacitly assumed in such descriptions,
the separation between these influences and what they influence?
The language of influences on memory sits nicely with our modern consensus about the con-
structive nature of remembering. In a remarkably cross-disciplinary vision, historians, cultural

Corresponding author:
John Sutton, Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia.
Email: [email protected]
356 Memory Studies 4(4)

theorists, philosophers, clinicians and neuroscientists alike have converged, over perhaps the last
20 years, on the view that remembering is an active and multifaceted process, that either subtle or
dramatic changes in both the content and the significance of what is remembered can emerge at any
stage between experience and recollection, and in particular that memory retrieval is often a com-
pilation out of materials oriented to present goals and future plans, rather than a clean reproduction
of an untarnished original.
In worrying at the link between construction and influence, I’m continuing to deal with impli-
cations of the work of the Canadian philosopher Sue Campbell, who died in February 2011, aged 54.
Sue was a great supporter of this journal and its integrative aims or dreams, serving on its edito-
rial board and contributing a powerful paper, ‘The Second Voice’, to our first issue (Campbell,
2008). In Relational Remembering: Rethinking the Memory Wars (2003), Campbell rightly iden-
tified a tendency in memory literature across the disciplines simply to equate or conflate
construction and distortion. Theorists slip from describing memory’s plasticity or malleability to
warning of its unreliability. It is too easy to be entranced by the seductions of confusion, caught
up in the righteous rejection of misguided archival models of memory as extraction of untainted
materials from an inner storehouse. The cost, Campbell argued, was that in belabouring only the
inventive or fictional outcomes of constructive processes, and the negative contamination
resulting from external influence in particular, we can lose sight of the virtues of authenticity and
of fidelity to the past.
Sure, remembering is fallible, partial and imperfect, and we can ascribe these features to its
constructive nature. But what is the contrast? What would pure or uninfluenced memory ever be?
Certainly, psychologists officially remember that the mechanisms of memory distortion are also
the very means of generalization, abstraction, understanding, and creativity (McClelland, 1995;
Schacter, 1999). But, as Campbell demonstrated, discussion in the wake of the controversies over
recovered memory and false memory had the ‘disturbing feature’ that ‘the crucial selectivity to
memory, its usefulness, becomes redescribed as its tendency to distortion’ (Campbell, 2004: 131).
Despite our principled rejection of archival and storehouse models, we still tend to draw overly
sharp contrasts between our fallible condition, trapped in the present behind a veil of ideas or
traces, and an impossibly pristine alternative form of direct access to the past.
We might note, for example, that children come to grasp that ‘memories are representations
rather than veridical copies of past events’ (Fivush et al., 2008: 133, original emphasis). But while
this catches nicely the selectivity and perspectival nature of remembering, it neglects the possibility
that (fallible, partial, selective) representations can still be true. To be consistently constructivist
in a more thoroughgoing way, then, we must remember that not only false memories are multiply
influenced and reconstructed. If we constantly point only to the failures of remembering and the
contagion introduced by social or other forms of influence, we implicitly still assume a pure ideal
of what truth in memory would have to be. Likewise, we can query the generality of the forensic
fantasy that memory of specific events and experiences should be a direct connection between two
well-defined (past and present) moments of consciousness. To be consistently constructivist,
again, we can acknowledge that personal or experiential memories are operating perfectly well
even when they ‘smooth over the boundaries between the different moments in our lives’
(Schechtman, 1994: 13). References to extended and recurring events, or more or less schematized
abstractions that incorporate or pull together all kinds of materials from semantic memory or from
other people’s related experiences, may be effective means of thematizing, finding perspective on,
and renegotiating the significance of one’s own personal or shared past experience (Goldie,
forthcoming; Shore, 2009).
Editorial 357

So even as we acknowledge the multiplicity of social and directive functions of, for example,
autobiographical remembering in everyday life, we are also exporting from legal contexts a
pervasive scepticism about memory reports. The expectation that a listener will and should
challenge such reports is alien to the ordinary sociality of our practices of remembering together,
and as Campbell showed can be exploited, often implicitly, by dominant groups or institutions so
as to discredit the memorial testimony of particular individuals or peoples. We need to hold on to
the possibility of authentic, ‘good remembering’ (Campbell 2006), while accepting its complexity
and difficulty. Respectful challenges to memory are appropriate within a shared ‘attempt to
capture the significance of the past to the present’ (Campbell 2008: 45), precisely because we care
about integrating narrative truth with historical truth, rather than happily holding them apart. In
developing a positive picture of good remembering, Campbell asked us to see the influences of
others as potentially enabling, as beneficial for our individual and shared capacities to track the
past and its themes and meanings. Building on work in moral psychology and feminist philosophy
on self and autonomy as ‘relational’ (Mackenzie and Stoljar 2000), she argued that in certain
circumstances bodily, social and interactional influences can build and maintain the integrity of
remembering, rather than compromising it. Remembering is ‘relational’ not only in its development
but in its ongoing active role in the weave of our lives. Sharing memories is more than a process
of triggering and cueing, more than the external uptake of fully formed contents. It is often
exactly by incorporating, working through, and transforming the influences on our own memory
that we come more effectively to renegotiate, thematize and own our past: influence is not
intrinsically malign. Personal and shared remembering is so complex and multicausal that it
demands a constant ‘methodological interrogation of boundaries – of the individual, of the
collective, and of the disciplinary preoccupations that have delivered them to us intact’: for
Campbell, the work of memory studies is to acknowledge that ‘somehow the integrity of the self
as a record of its own history has given way and is giving way all the time and in ways that we
cannot even track’ (2008: 43). Her own trajectory led to the study of forms of resistance to
dominant narratives in communal remembering as resistance, or as the performance of oppositional
memory in Canada and Argentina (Campbell, 2006, 2009), and into ordinary activities of
collective archiving and of the multiple uses of memory objects (2004). Most recently, in sustained
interventions in applied memory, Campbell wrote two discussion papers for the Indian Residential
Schools Resolution Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Canada, covering topics such as
reparation, suspicions about narrative contagion, the devaluing of oral history, forward-looking
conceptions of remembering, and the intergenerational transmission of skills and practices as
well as stories in rich relational networks.
It is not enough, then, to acknowledge that there’s no single, unified, unsullied ‘memory’ that is
so strikingly open to influence. Among all the interconnected component processes and activities
of personal and shared remembering, the successful coordination of disparate resources – neural,
affective, bodily, technological, interpersonal, environmental, political, and so on – positively
requires influence. Rather than thinking of an intrinsic vulnerability or susceptibility to influence,
we might imagine an alternative account. Good remembering itself is the shifting and fragile
resultant or vector of multiple inner and outer influences operating and interacting at distinct levels
and timescales. There need be no user or consumer of these influences: it could be influences all
the way down (cf. Clark, 2002; Dennett, 2000, 2003). Different cognitive ecologies of memory
distribute and balance distinctive influences in characteristic, context-dependent ways. An enduring
message of Sue Campbell’s work on memory is that to acknowledge this complexity of influence
is not to give up on the difficult task of achieving fidelity to the past.
358 Memory Studies 4(4)

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Editorial 359

Author biography
John Sutton is Professor of Cognitive Science at Macquarie University in Sydney, where he was
previously Head of the Department of Philosophy. He is author of Philosophy and Memory Traces:
Descartes to Connectionism (Cambridge University Press). His current research addresses collab-
orative remembering; group cognition; embodied memory and skilled movement; cognitive history;
and perspective in autobiographical remembering.