Dear Cristoph, and all
Having become active here again, I suddenly start feeling responsible for
the fact that nobody has responded to Christoph's thinking about memory and
remembering in Zinchenko. I don't have the professional competence for an
answer, so what I can do is mostly to pull this thread back up to the
surface, so that perhaps it will last until people come back from holidays
in offline country, etc.
Now, Cristoph, neither you nor I have English as our first language, so it
may look funny that what I do have to say to your posting is about your
choice of words. No, well, I guess not: the case carries over into our
respective languages as well.
The thing is: I would, for the phenomena you are trying to unravel
conceptually, I would not make a distinction between 'memory' and
'remembering' - I would try to map them in language as different forms of
remebering. And skip the noun.
So, in these terms, is the distinction between involuntary remembering and
involuntary memory, that you are suggesting, a distinction between the kind
of events where you (suddenly) remember an event or situation from the
past, and the kind of events where your competent action depends on things
you have learned in the past (and thus can be said to remember, even while
you don't THINK of the situations where you first learned these things). Or
am I misunderstanding?
Eva
At 12.35 +0200 01-07-31, Christoph Clases scrobe:
>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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