The Role of Consciousness in Memorization: Asymmetric Functioning of Consciousness in Memory Encoding and Decoding

摘要

One can see each individual's daily life as a sequence of events, each of which should be associated with his/her conscious and deliberate activities of decision-making, and unconscious and automatic activities of action selection. In continuation of the discussion we provided in [5] concerning event memory creation and utilization on the basis of the architecture model the authors have developed for simulating human beings’ in situ action selection, Model Human Processor with Realtime Constraints (MHP/RT), this paper provides a deeper understanding of the role of consciousness in memorization, or memory encoding, based on MHP/RT, with the supporting empirical evidence consistent with the following prediction. MHP/RT assumes that decision-making and action selection should be controlled by Two Minds in general, and Four-Processes in detail. Four-Processes distinguishes the functioning of System 1 and 2 before and after an event. Four-Processes predicts that deliberate reflection of the past event using System 2 would create a memory encoding of the event that would be recallable in the future; on the other hand when the event is processed solely by System 1, it would create a memory encoding that is not consciously recallable via System 2 in the future. This paper provides evidence of the asymmetric functioning of consciousness in memory encoding and decoding that is consistent with this prediction from an experiment at a movie theater where the participants encoded the movies into their memories as they usually would do, and asked to decode them afterwords.