A Cognitively-Based Constructivist Approach to Memory and Reasoning

This extended abstract introduces the foundational notions behind constructive memory. The work demonstrates these concepts through computational implementations. Memory in a computational system is usually taken to be a place filled with things called “memories". These places are indexed by either knowing its physical location or its content. For situated design agents, however, memory is a reflection of how the system has adapted to its environment. Recollection should be more than looking up records, it should be past experiences guiding active ones. The inspiration behind the constructivist approach is two phrases. The first is from Clancey (1997) paraphrasing Dewey: Sequences of acts are composed such that subsequent experiences categorize and hence give meaning to what was experienced before. The second is by Bartlett (1932): Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless and fragmentary traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction, or construction, built out of the relation of our attitude towards a whole active mass of organized past reactions or experience, and to a little outstanding detail which commonly appears in image or in language form. We give a contemporary interpretation of these experiential views of agent memory. We refer to “reconstruction” rather than “imaginative reconstruction”. We will hold on to the idea of a constructive memory inventively filling in partly recollected experiences but we refrain from calling such processes “imaginative”. The basis of our descriptions of constructive memory is the idea of experiences. Our ideas of experience often trace back to Dewey, although we now use more contemporary descriptions. We use Dewey and Bartlett as inspiration, not as a statement of requirements. Dewey (1932) described the quality of an experience as having two aspects: There is an immediate agreeableness or disagreeableness, and there is its influence upon later experiences. The first aspect he called continuity. Every experience enacted and undergone modifies the one who acts and undergoes. The principle of continuity of experience means that every experience both takes up something from those which have gone before and modifies in some way the quality of those which come after. The basic characteristic of habit is that every experience enacted and undergone modifies the one who acts and undergoes, while this modification affects, whether we wish it or not, the quality of subsequent experiences. The second aspect he called interaction. Experience does not simply go on inside a person. It does go on there ... but this is not the whole of the story. Every genuine experience has an active side which changes in some degree the objective conditions under which experiences are had. So an experience is an interplay of continuity and interaction. Taken together, or in an interplay of their interaction, they form what we call a situation. An experience is always what it is because of a transaction taking place between an individual and what, at the time, constitutes his environment. We develop what the Dewey (Clancey 1997) and Bartlett inspirations mean in contemporary, computational terms. We do this by delineating the computational behavior that a situated, constructivist agent should exhibit (Gero and Smith 2007; Smith and Gero 2005). We then go on to describe experiments in implementations of part of a constructive memory system (Peng and Gero 2006; 2008)