The Essence of Human Memory: The Active Use of Signs

With the development of artificial intelligence, one strand of the debate on education holds that we no longer need to keep knowledge in the human brain: knowledge can be stored by computers and retrieved whenever it is needed. This view presupposes that learning is the memorization of knowledge.

What is the effect of memory itself on the human psyche? When children begin to use "signs" to help themselves remember, what change in psychological functioning does this behavior signify?

Human memory takes two forms. One is natural memory, that is, direct memory. The other is mediated memory (Cultural memory), in which humans use external tools to help themselves exceed the limits of their psychological functions. For example, primitive people recorded quantities by tying knots in cords; after the invention of writing, we recorded the experience of human civilization through written characters; and today we can remember through images and video.

Natural memory refers to the fact that a person can respond only upon encountering the stimulus itself; the person reacts passively, as a product of the environment. The emergence of mediated memory, by contrast, marks the point at which humans actively create "stimuli" in order to control their own responses. The former is "something gets remembered"; the latter is "humans set out to remember something."

‍ ‍Animal: stimulus → response
Human: stimulus → symbolization → response

When confronted with stimuli in the environment, the higher psychological functions of human beings actively employ signs, inhibit the impulse toward direct response, and perform operations of symbolization upon the stimulus in order to control and regulate their own behavior.

Humans, however, are not born with the capacity for this second form of memory. Vygotsky's experiments identified three stages through which humans come to master the use of external tools in remembering:

Preschool stage：At the age of 5–6, even when "external cues" are introduced into the activity to help children complete the task, their level of cognitive development does not allow them to use this external tool to regulate their own behavior. On the contrary, the "external cue" becomes a distraction, because they respond to it as a direct stimulus rather than using it to regulate their behavior in pursuit of the ultimate goal.

In my own teaching experience, too, I have observed that preschool children find it very difficult to follow complex game rules, because their level of cognition leads them to respond to direct stimuli rather than to use a "mediator" to attain their aims.

School-age stage：Children aged 8–9 are able to use external tools to assist them in accomplishing the task. At this stage, test results differ greatly depending on whether "external cues" are present or absent; children depend heavily on the aid of "external stimuli," and external signs occupy the dominant position.

Adult stage：In this task, adults show only a small difference in test results between the presence and absence of "external cues." The external signs that school-age children need, that is, the auxiliary stimuli, have been "internalized" from an external form into the internal signs of the adult, and have become the adult's dominant mode of remembering.

That human memory passes through these three stages is not because children possess an innate "psychological schema" that allows them to arrive at an "insight" into how to use "tools." Vygotsky's educational psychology consistently acknowledges the biological basis of development while at the same time emphasizing sociocultural factors. Thus, through the use of signs, human psychological processes are no longer based solely on their biological foundation but come to be culturally based psychological processes. The various signs we use all belong, in essence, to a culture that we share. This parallels his account of the core concept of "intelligence," which he explains as the meeting point of practical intelligence (the biological basis) and pure intelligence (the use of language). Between biological endowment and cultural acquisition there lies a transitional period, which Vygotsky termed the period of the "natural history of the sign."

Vygotsky's experiments explain to us the concrete manifestations of children at the initial stage of the formation of memory as a psychological function:
Even though children of five or six have begun to be able to use external cues to help them remember, so that they can recall "A" through the external cue "B" without directly seeing A (that is, A ←→ B ←→ A), at this stage they impose a special requirement on the "external cue": cue "B" must resemble "A" in outward form. If there is no evident similarity between A and B, the child will refuse to use the external cue. For example, if we want a child to remember a bucket, we can give him an inverted trapezoid, which looks like a bucket and can help him remember; but if we give him a triangle, he will hardly be able to turn it into an external auxiliary tool. This reflects the fact that, in the early stage of the memory function, the external cue shares the characteristics of the actual object and is a form of direct representation. Likewise, the primitive scripts of different civilizations were signs resembling drawings rather than the highly abstract signs of modern language, and children's pre-writing also originates in scribbling. If the gap between sign and object is too great, children are unable to use the sign as an aid to memory.

‍ ‍Child: stimulus → search for direct representation → response

‍ ‍Only when children pass beyond this stage and become able to remember by means of external cues that have no direct connection to the object does this mark their capacity for "higher-order sign operations." In adulthood, by contrast, people for the most part no longer need external cues at all.

Therefore, the importance of human memory lies not in its content, that is, "what has been remembered by us," but in the qualitative effect that "memory," as a psychological function, exerts on our cognitive activity, that is, "what we are able to remember and what we choose to remember." It also lies in the relation between memory and thinking, to be discussed next, that is, "how we use our memory."

‍ ‍ Vygotsky held that the thinking of very young children is in many respects determined by their memory: for them, to think is to retrieve memories. For example, when we ask a child to explain a concept, such as what a snail is, the answer is often a description of a concrete image drawn from recollection. The content of the child's thinking is determined to a large extent not by the logical structure of the concept itself but by the child's concrete recollections. That is, thinking is based on facts held in memory. Our earlier discussion also noted that children's use of external cues rests on similarity to direct representation. Hence it is memory, rather than abstract thinking, that is the decisive characteristic of cognitive development at the early stage. For adolescents, however, to recall is to think: memory becomes an experience that has been processed by language into meaningful experience; because it is logical, regular, and connected, it is remembered and becomes memory, whereas unimportant experiences fade.

Writing this essay brought back to me a memory from my primary school years, when my mom would have me recite every literary passage that appeared in my textbooks, and I always felt under great pressure. Once my maternal uncle, the first university student in our family, suddenly said that when you "memorize" something, you must come up with some "interesting" and "unique" "ideas" to help you remember, because this will make you remember things faster. I later found that this was indeed the case: when we memorize, we are always actively seeking strategies to remember more efficiently, rather than remembering directly.

Thus, the question raised at the outset can be answered: even if knowledge can be stored in computers and retrieved on demand, memory still matters in education, because as a psychological function it is central to children's development. The process of education is not a process of memorizing knowledge, but a process in which psychological functions continually develop and mature, and in which modes and capacities of cognition are transformed in an orderly way. Understanding the different stages of memory development helps us understand children's behavior and ways of thinking, and can inform how we teach effectively.