The Episodic Nature of Experience: A Dynamical Systems Analysis
Vishnu Sreekumar1, Simon Dennis2, Isidoros Doxas3
1Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University.
Cognitive Science
|July 25, 2016
Summary
This study reveals that personal experience, like emails, has a predictable, hierarchical structure, not a scale-free one. This episodic nature, with distinct within-context and between-context scales, informs memory and cognition theories.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Science
- Dynamical Systems Theory
- Computational Linguistics
Background:
- Context is crucial for learning, memory, and emotion.
- Previous research indicates reading and visual experiences exhibit a two-scaled structure.
- Understanding the structure of personal experience is key to cognitive theories.
Purpose of the Study:
- To demonstrate the episodic nature of experience using dynamical systems methods.
- To analyze the scale separation between within-context and between-context relationships in personal discourse.
- To investigate the predictability and hierarchy of experience.
Main Methods:
- Representing five years of personal emails in a high-dimensional semantic space.
- Computing dimensionalities of subspaces occupied by emails to reveal geometric structure.
- Utilizing recurrence plots to analyze the temporal dynamics and predictability of experience.
Main Results:
- Personal discourse exhibits a two-scaled geometry, with distinct dimensionalities for within-context and between-context relationships.
- Experience demonstrates a predictable and hierarchical structure, not a scale-free one.
- Findings align with influential theories of memory and cognition.
Conclusions:
- Experience is not scale-free but possesses an episodic, two-scaled structure.
- This structure provides insights into how experience shapes cognitive processes like memory.
- The study offers a quantifiable framework for understanding personal experience in cognition.
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