Recursivity: A Working Paper on Rhetoric and Mnesis

This essay proposes the genealogical study of remembering and forgetting as recursive rhetorical capacities that enable discourse to place itself in an ever-changing present. Mnesis is a meta-concept for the arrangements of remembering and forgetting that enable rhetoric to function. Most of the essay defines the materiality of mnesis, first noting the limitations of studying recursivity within dominant approaches remembering and forgetting in rhetorical studies, then describing mnesis as the performative necessity to fold the past into the present so as to provide “now” with a sense of place. After setting a foundation, the essay closes with a sketch of how to produce a genealogy of recursion.     

Teacher Education in Memory's Light and Shadow: Autobiographical Reflection and Multimodalities of Remembering and Forgetting

Though we are all inevitably familiar with the everyday effects of forgetting, we generally fail to ask about what its internal movements look like, or how we can talk about what they reveal. Despite its necessity as a structuring process of autobiographical inquiry, forgetting's invisible moves are always obscured by that which remains: the typically unquestioned and seemingly permanent products of remembrance. In this article, I think about how we may conceptualize the status of forgetting in the context of teacher education, and how we may encourage preservice teachers to acknowledge the enigmatic and incomplete status of their autobiographical texts. I begin by looking to theories of autobiography, memory and forgetting (with a particular emphasis on teacher education), and I then look closely at a number of psychoanalytic considerations of the mind and its inner workings, which help to conceptualize forgetting and remembering as in a psychically productive, dialectical relationship. I then turn my attention to 2 multimodal, textual examples, which emphasize the problems of representation in relation to remembering and narrative: a collage from Lynda Barry's One! Hundred! Demons!, and an autobiographical comic authored by an undergraduate student in teacher education. In the final section of this article, I argue that thinking about forgetting in relation to autobiographical remembrance can lead to an ethical stance of mutual opacity and shared ignorance in teacher education.     

Self-reports of forgetting and remembering childhood sexual abuse in a nationally representative sample of US women

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this article is to describe patterns of forgetting and remembering childhood sexual abuse (CSA) in a nationally representative sample of US adult women. METHOD: The respondents were a national probability sample of 711 women, aged 26 years to 54 years, residing in noninstitutional settings in the contiguous 48 states. In a 1996 face-to-face interview survey, trained female interviewers asked each respondent whether she had experienced any sexual coercion by family members or nonfamily members while growing up; whether she believed that she had been sexually abused (by family members or others); and whether she had ever forgotten the CSA experiences and, if so, how she had subsequently remembered them. RESULTS: Twenty-one and six-tenths percent of respondents reported having sexually coercive experiences while growing up; of these, 69.0% indicated that they felt they had been sexually abused. More than one-fourth of respondents who felt sexually abused reported that they had forgotten the abuse for some period of time but later remembered it on their own. Only 1.8% of women self-described as sexually abused reported remembering the abuse with the help of a therapist or other professional person. CONCLUSIONS: The findings indicate that, among women who report CSA, forgetting and subsequently remembering abuse experiences is not uncommon. According to the women surveyed, however, very few (1.8%) of those who felt abused recovered memories of CSA with help from therapists or other professionals. As one of the few studies of CSA memories in a nationally representative sample, this study suggests that therapist-assisted recall is not a major source of CSA memories among women in the US general population.     

Intentional forgetting,anxiety, and EFL listening comprehension among Chinese college students

Intentional forgetting refers to impaired memory arising from an instruction to forget unwanted material. Intentional forgetting yielded with a list-method task is often interpreted as evidence for retrieval inhibition. This paper presents a study on the relationships among intentional forgetting, anxiety, and EFL listening comprehension among Chinese college students. Two experiments were conducted in which participants with different anxiety levels and EFL listening comprehension abilities finished list-method tasks of intentional forgetting with different experimental designs. The results indicated that intentional forgetting was negatively related to anxiety, but it bore no direct relation with EFL listening comprehension when the confounding effects of intentional remembering and anxiety were controlled. It is argued that the role of intentional forgetting in different learning activities should be considered in a domain-specific way and that certain strategies might be used to control emotions triggered in SL/FL learning.     

Delayed discriminations in the pigeon: The role of within-trial location of conditional cues

Four pigeons were trained in a delayed conditional discrimination in which color and line cues jointly indicated trial outcome. These were either combined in advance of a retention interval (RI) or separately presented before and after the RI. The former procedure resulted in less forgetting over the RI, the difference increasing with longer RIs. In a second study, the line cue was presented redundantly before and after the RI, and then selectively omitted from either temporal location during probe tests. In general, the results indicated that the birds relied upon the line as a cue to a greater extent when it was compounded with the color in advance of the RI than when it was presented after the RI. The data support an interpretation based on anticipatory processing in working memory, which leads to better retention than retrospective remembering.     

Montaigne,Nietzsche, and the Mnemotechnics of Student Agency

This essay explores the educational implications of the thought of Michel de Montaigne and Friedrich Nietzsche on the subject of memory. It explores the sorts of cultural memory practices that Nietzsche has called ‘mnemotechnics’, that is, the aspects of memory use that allow human beings to live life more fully. Nietzsche and Montaigne's work is explored because their work offers a different, and much more philosophically oriented, perspective on memory than is commonly discussed when educators speak of memory. Nietzsche and Montaigne show how remembering and forgetting might be understood more thoroughly and deployed with more finesse. The case is made that such deployments, such mnemotechnics, have great relevance for enhancing the agency of students.     

The development of forgetting and reminiscence

Many theoretical positions on memory development anticipate that forgetting rates should vary substantially with age. The nature of these age variations is also relevant to many applied questions about child development that have major social policy implications, such as the veracity of children's eyewitness testimony and the long-term effectiveness of classroom instruction. Surprisingly, developmental studies of long-term retention have repeatedly produced the puzzling finding that forgetting rates are age invariant. It now seems, however, that these null age trends may have been artifacts of variables such as measurement insensitivity, floor effects, and stages-of-learning confounds. Assuming, as some later studies suggest, that forgetting rates vary with age when these factors are controlled, there are three overriding questions that must be dealt with in the developmental analysis of forgetting: the relative importance of storage failure versus retrieval failure, the relative importance of true forgetting processes versus test-induced processes, and the relative importance of storage-based reminiscence versus retrieval-based reminiscence. We describe a framework (disintegration/redintegation theory) that provides a conceptual environment within which research on these questions can progress. This framework, which evolved from fuzzy-trace theory, reinterprets processes such as storage failure, retrieval failure, restorage, and retrieval relearning in terms of levels of featural integration in traces (i.e., the extent to which contextual information is integrated with core semantic gist to produce a coherent representation). The theory is implemented in a mathematical model (the trace-integrity model) whose parameters deliver measurements of relevant memory processes on a common ratio scale. In a series of experiments, the model was used to study the theory's predictions about the contributions of these memory processes to long-term retention in subjects between the ages of 7 and 70. All the experiments were standard long-term retention designs (an initial acquisition session, followed by a 1-2-week forgetting interval, followed by a series of retention tests).(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)     

How hypertext reading sequences affect understanding of causal and temporal relations in story comprehension

The goal of this study is to examine the comprehension of global causal and temporal relations between events that are represented in single hypertext documents. In two experiments we examined how reading sequences of hypertext nodes affects the establishment of event relations and how this process can be supported by advanced organizers that provide either temporal or causal pre-information. In the first experiment we could show that discourse structure affected recall of temporal event sequences only when causal relations were absent. In a second experiment, the comprehension of either temporal or causal relations was facilitated by providing different types of pre-information (advanced organizer). Temporal pre-information facilitated recall of temporal event sequences without underlying causal relations. In contrast, causal pre-information facilitated recall of temporal event sequences with causal relations. The results demonstrate that readers use causal information to construct temporal event sequences.     

Hyperbolic discounting of delayed social interaction

The temporal discounting literature has demonstrated that the loss in value for delayed outcomes is most accurately modeled using a hyperbolic discounting equation. The hyperbolic-shaped function not only describes the shape of discounting for monetary outcomes, but also for other tangibles, such as alcohol, candy, CDs, erotica, cigarettes, cocaine, books, and DVDs. Furthermore, this hyperbolic shape has important theoretical implications. Despite the broad list of outcomes that are hyperbolically discounted, one class of outcomes has only recently received attention: social interactions. For the present study, we used standard binary-choice discounting procedures to explore the function that most accurately describes the change in value of delayed social interactions. The results from the present study suggest that, for 93 participants, the same equations (exponential, hyperbolic, and hyperboloid) used to describe the discounting of nonsocial commodities also describe the relation between delay and the value of social interaction. Similar to previous findings for nonsocial outcomes, the hyperbolic-shaped models provide a fit to the data superior to that of the exponential model.     

近二十年国内有意遗忘的研究综述简

通过文献资料对近二十年国内有意遗忘进行了综述.有意遗忘的编码理论、提取抑制理论、区分抑制理论对有意遗忘产生的机制进行解释.在有意遗忘的发展性研究中发现有意遗忘的认知抑制能力是后天发展而来的,并且随着年龄的增大而逐渐发展起来.在影响因素方面发现测验方式、测验难度以及测验的材料等都是影响被试测验成绩的因素.另外,随着有意遗忘研究的深入,有意遗忘研究范式可以作为一种新的研究方法运用到错误记忆、自我参照效应以及情绪等的研究中,研究范式和方法的创新,促进有意遗忘研究领域的不断拓展.     

Fostering Childish Tendencies in Teacher Education and Young Adult Literature: The Problem of Teaching Ideas You Love

In teaching young adult literature in a teacher education programme at the undergraduate level, I pose the question of how I can best introduce my personal theoretical stances into the formal curriculum and syllabi, without unintentionally conveying such theories to my students as necessary postures. I first outline the theoretical underpinnings that inform my own work: which include psychoanalytic theory, ideas of fantasy and loss in reading experience, the concept of adolescence as a psychic and cultural relation, and the dynamics of forgetting in teacher education. In theorizing part of the process of learning to teach as the productive activation of a person’s internal archive, I then describe the methodological choices I made while constructing my course in young adult literature, where, in reference to Lynda Barry’s One Hundred Demons, my students consider the ways to best approach their own adolescent ‘demons’.     

简述传记文学的功能

传记文学的功能十分广泛，它既是人类纪念本能的表现，又是自我完善的一种手段；它可通过效法传主的榜样，达到人格教育的目的；它可通过传主精神力量的张扬，实现国家民族的牢固凝聚与长期强盛。文章从记忆、教化和激励等三方面简述了传记文学的基本功能。     

小学中年级学生生字回生现象的转化策略初探

本文直面中年级学生生字回生现象严重的问题,并对此问题进行了全面的、理性的分析.针对中年级孩子的年龄特点,把握孩子学习能力提高的关键期,提出了实施自主识字的教学策略来激发学生主动认字,个性化地、有侧重点地分步记忆,触发识字过程中的多种积极效应,从而实现有效降低中年级学生生字回生率.     

Development of temporal-reconstructive abilities

In a study of the ability to reconstruct the times of past events, 86 children from 4 to 13 years recalled the times of 2 in-class demonstrations that had occurred 3 months earlier and judged the times of hypothetical events. Many of the abilities needed to reconstruct the times of events were present by 6 years, including the capacity to interpret many temporally relevant cues, but there were substantial changes well into middle childhood in the availability of temporally useful episodic information. Children were poor at remembering the events' proximity or order with respect to a major holiday, but the order of the 2 target events was well recalled by 6 years.     

Serial order anticipation learning in rats: Memory for multiple hedonic events and their order

Many characteristics of a series of discrete independent hedonic events may be remembered by rats in terms of, for example, how many events were rewarded and how many were nonre-warded. Such memory for multiple hedonic events, which has been shown to be a potent factor controlling instrumental responding, was examined here in five investigations employing serial anticipation learning in a runway. It was found that the ability of rats to remember the hedonic events reward and nonreward is highly developed, accurate, and quite resistant to forgetting and interference. Rats not only remembered a rewarded event and a nonrewarded event, but they also remembered the order in which the two events occurred. Rats remembered how many nonrewarded events there had been accurately enough to suggest that they were using some form of a counting mechanism. Rats exhibited little forgetting of eight prior discrete hedonic events, one rewarded followed by seven nonrewarded, even when these occurred over an interval of 20 min and involved considerable potential interference. In the serial learning situation employed here, marked primacy effects were obtained, earlier nonrewarded trials in a series being better anticipated than later ones. The primacy effect was found to depend upon the type of series employed. By assuming that stimulus generalizations occur between the multiple hedonic events remembered by rats, all anticipatory learning obtained here could be explained in considerable detail.     

Event temporal relation computation based on machine learning

Temporal relation computation is one of the tasks of the extraction of temporal arguments from event, and it is also the ultimate goal of temporal information processing. However, temporal relation computation based on machine learning requires a lot of hand-marked work, and exploring more features from discourse. A method of two-stage machine learning based on temporal relation computation (TSMLTRC) is proposed in this paper for the shortcomings of current temporal relation computation between two events. The first stage is to get the main temporal attributes of event based on classification learning. The second stage is to compute the event temporal relation in the discourse through employing the result of the first stage as the basic features, and also employing some new linguistic characteristics. Experiments show that, compared with the artificial golden rule, the computational efficiency in the first stage is much higher, and the F1-Score of event temporal relation which is computed through combining multi-features may be increased at 85.8% in the second stage.     

金代作家吴激生平与创作简论

吴激是金初由宋入金的重要作家.关于吴激生平,文献记载不多,根据其现存作品和同代留金作家的诗文,可察知部分行迹.吴激虽仕于金朝,却对北宋故土深切怀念,怀昔伤今、借景抒情是其创作的主要内容和常用手法.吴激可谓金代词人之冠,是北宋以来婉约词风的有力继承者,在宋金文学史上占有重要一席.     

Grounding development in cognitive processes

Developmentalists have made remarkable progress over the last several decades in detailing what children know at various points in development. Less progress has been made, however, in detailing the processes through which knowledge is realized in real-time tasks, or in detailing the processes of developmental change. We argue that the operating characteristics of perceiving and remembering provide a foundation for making progress on these issues in the next century. We include three examples applying these ideas to specific phenomena in early word learning. These examples illustrate how forming developmental hypotheses in terms of perceiving and remembering may bring new insights into specific phenomena as well as into how the ordinary operating characteristics of perceiving and remembering serve as bootstraps to more specialized and more abstract kinds of knowledge.     

Event duration memory: The effects of delay-interval illumination and instructional cuing

The effect of interference treatments on pigeons’ working memory for event duration was investigated, using a successive matching-to-sample procedure. In three experiments, birds were trained to match different keylight durations (2 or 6 sec) to different comparison colors (red or green) following delays of 0 to 12 sec. The interfering effect of delay-interval illumination and illumination change was assessed in Experiments 1 and 2. It was found that the absolute levels of houselight illumination influenced delayed matching accuracy. Birds trained with houselight illumination showed larger decrements in matching accuracy with increasing delays than did birds trained with darkened delay intervals. In addition, increases in delay-interval illumination relative to baseline produced greater interference with delayed matching accuracy than did decreases in houselight illumination relative to baseline. In Experiment 3, the effect of interpolated instructional cues to remember or forget was examined. As in other directed forgetting experiments employing conventional modality characteristics as the samples to be remembered, it was found that instructional cues to forget, presented during the delay interval, reduced matching accuracy compared to instructional cues to remember. It was concluded that these findings support models of temporal memory that assume temporal information is coded into categorical information onto some nontime dimension over models that assume temporal information is remembered amodally as specific time durations.