Dear xmca-community,
I have mainly been "participating" in your interesting discourse
on chat-related topics as a kind of distant observer.
However, I would like to put forward a question now that is
closely related to my work on organizational memory ...
It's a very specific question, not connected to the threads
actually going on here.
So please make up your mind, if you want to read on ;-)
This is definitely more than one screen.
As most of you will surely know, Zinchenko (1983) put forward
a very convincing differentiation between voluntary and
involuntary memory (rejecting the dualists' typology of
mechanical/ physiologically mediated memory on the one hand and
ideal/ "purely cognitive" mediated memory on the other hand).
[cf. Zinchenko, P.I. (1983). The problem of involuntary memory.
Soviet Psychology, 22 (22), 55-111.]
His definition of involuntary memory/ remembering goes like this:
"involuntary remembering (..) is characterized by the fact
that remembering occurs within an action of a different nature,
an action that has a definite task, goal, and motive and a
definite significance for the subject, but that is not
directly oriented toward the task of remembering." (Zinchenko, 1983, 77)
whereas
"Voluntary remembering is a special action devoted to remembering.
Here, remembering is not just a feature of the action, but constitutes
the very content of a special task." (ibid.)
So far so good.
Now to the discription of my problems with Zinchenko,
my own point of view and my questions:
From my (English) reading, Zinchenko does not systematically
differentiate between the concepts of memory and remembering.
He both speaks of involuntary memory and remembering as if
they were synonymous.
In the research he presents in the same paper, the empirical
setting only provides information on the more or less successful
reproduction of items, which were dealt with in a specific
activity realizing a clearly defined task NOT including the
instruction to remember these very items
(ordering pictures and/ or numbers on a table).
After the accomplishment of the (systematically varied) tasks,
subjects were asked to reproduce as many items as possible.
NOW:
Do we not have to distinguish between phenomena that should
be referred to as unvoluntary MEMORY in terms of
- aquiring a specific (maybe implicit) knowledge about the world
while realizing a specific task that is not explicitly related to
remembering
(though we may - as not only Zinchenko's outcomes show - by no means
"prevent"
our memory from learning "by the way")
and phenomena that should be referred to as unvoluntary REMEMBERING
in terms of
- a situation in which an action of remembering is
unvoluntaryly triggered that makes us try to actively
remember a certain event, situation, feeling, ...
(i.e. to RE-CONSTRUCT past events starting off from our
present situatedness, due to whatever: an unexpected event,
an emerging need state due to the awareness of tensions, ...)
And to go one last step further ...
Does not CHAT supplies us with conceptual means
(due to the differentiation between
the action and the operational level)
to make it clear that
- unvoluntary MEMORY would belong to the OPERATIONEL level in an
overall activity (acquiring knowledge about the world WITHOUT
pursueing the specific GOAL to actually remember)???
- unvoluntary REMEMBERING would refer to TWO DIFFERENT kinds of processes
- unvoluntary REMEMBERING I as I would like to call it would
refer to phenomena when we experience to remember a certain
situation, event, etc. without being instructed to do so
(by ourselves or by others)???
- unvoluntary REMEMBERING II as I would like to call it would
refer to phenomena of TRANSITION between the operational
and the action level: the ACTION to remember would in this case
be triggered unvoluntarily (or unconsciously), and lead to a
specific awareness or a need state triggering the goal-directed
action to remember (maybe in more detail ...)???
Does anyone of you know whether Zinchenko did actually
(maybe in his Russian writings) differentiate between
memory and remembering?
What do you think about the conceptual propositions
I put forward?
Looking forward to your comments.
Thanks to all of you who followed me so far ...
Best regards,
Christoph
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-
Dipl.-Psych. Christoph Clases
Institut für Arbeitspsychologie
Institute of Work Psychology
ETH Zürich - Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
ETH Zentrum - Nelkenstrasse 11
CH - 8092 Zürich
http://www.ifap.bepr.ethz.ch/~clases/
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