Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-p9bg8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T19:44:41.924Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

In Search of Lost Time: An Economic Theory of Episodic Memory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 January 2015

Antoine Billot
Antoine Billot*
Affiliation:
LEM-Université Paris 2 and Institut universitaire de France
Get access

Summary

The model of memory process we propose is based on two assumptions. First, spatial or adresses network models in economics can be easily adapted to describe a significative part of the episodic memory mechanism as defined by Tulving (1983). Second, brain viewed as a network behaves as a decision-maker who arbitrates between two economic dimensions of recollection: the reward—i.e., the satisfaction for recovering old informations located in mnesic traces—and the cost—i.e., the price for stimulating the traces network. Indeed, the two results exhibited in the paper—and devoted to a formal and appealing characterization of true and false recollections—are directly derived from the idea of a rational brain. Finally, this paper aims at showing that it could be relevant to model memory processes in a pure symbolic way—contrary to most of the neuroeconomics contributions which are generally experimental—and also that such an attempt for an abstract and analogical representation of the episodic memory process based on a spatial microeconomics methodology seems to be specially efficient and illustrative of Hintzman (1986) and recent Doeller et al. (2010) intuitions and features.

Keywords

neuroeconomicsmemory processspatial networkC91D81
Type
I) Neurocellular Economics
Information
Recherches Économiques de Louvain/ Louvain Economic Review , Volume 78 , Issue 3-4 , December 2012 , pp. 30 - 45
Copyright
Copyright © Université catholique de Louvain, Institut de recherches économiques et sociales 2012 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

†

I thank Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde, Marianne Guille and Itzhak Gilboa for comments and suggestions

References

Camerer, C.F., Loewenstein, G. and Prelec, D. (2004). ‘Neuroeconomics: Why Economics Needs Brains,” Scandinavian Journal of Economics 106, 555–579.Google Scholar
Cermak, L.S. and Craik, F.I.M. (1979). Levels of processing in human memory. Lawrence Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ.Google Scholar
Damasio, A.R. (1990). ‘Category-related Recognition Defects as a Clue to the Neural Substrates of Knowlrecollection,” Trends in Neurosciences 13, 95–98.Google Scholar
Doeller, C.F., Barry, C. and Burgess, N. (2010). ‘Evidence for Grid Cells in a Human Memory Network,” Nature 463, 657–661.Google Scholar
Fink, G.R., Markowitsch, H.J., Reinkemeier, M., Bruckbauer, T., Kessler, J. and Heiss, W-D (1996). ‘Cerebral Representation of One's Own Past: Neural Networks Involved in Autobiographical Memory,” The Journal of Neuroscience 16, 4275–4282.Google Scholar
Fuster, J.M. (1999). Memory in the Cerebral Cortex. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.Google Scholar
Gilboa, I. and Schmeidler, D. (2001). A Theory of Case-Based Decisions. CU Press, Cambridge, MA.Google Scholar
Glimcher, O. (2002). Decisions, Uncertainty and the Brain: The Science of Neuroeconomics. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.Google Scholar
Gross, C.G. (1999). Brain, Vision, Memory: Tales in the History of Neuroscience. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.Google Scholar
Hafting, T., Fyhn, M., Molden, S., Moser, M.B. and Moser, E.I. (2005). ‘Microstructure of a Spatial Map in the Entorhinal Cortex,” Nature 436, 801–806.Google Scholar
Hamann, S. (2001). ‘Cognitive and Neural Mechanisms of Emotional Memory,” Trends in Neurosciences 5, 394–400.Google Scholar
Hintzman, D.L. (1986). ‘Schema Abstraction in a Multipletrace Memory Model,” Psychological Review 93, 411–428.Google Scholar
Leake, D.B. (1994). ‘Case-Based Reasoning,” The Knowlrecollection Engineering Review 9, 61–64.Google Scholar
Lipman, B.L. (1995). ‘Information Processing and Bounded Rationality: A Survey,” Canadian Journal of Economics 28, 42–67.Google Scholar
Tulving, E. (1972). ‘Episodic and Semantic Memory,” in Organization of Memory, Tuivingand, E. and Donaldson, W. Eds, Academic Press, New York.Google Scholar
Tulving, E. (1983). Elements of Episodic Memory. Clarendon Press, Oxford.Google Scholar
Tulving, E., Markowitsch, H.J., Kapur, S., Habib, R. and Houle, S. (1994). ‘Novelty Encoding Networks in the Human Brain: Data from Position Emission Tomography Studies,” Neuro Report 5, 2525–2528.Google Scholar
Wheeler, M.A., Stuss, D.T. and Tulving, E. (1997). ‘Toward a Theory of Episodic Memory: The Frontal Lobes and Autonoetic Consciousness,” Psychological Bulletin 121, 331–354.Google Scholar