Publications

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• 2026.09.15Remembering the Future: Episodic Simulation, Mental Time Travel and the Affective Basis of Prospection

  Episodic memory has traditionally been characterised as a system for retaining the past. Converging neuropsychological, neuroimaging and behavioural evidence has recast it as a system whose primary function may be prospective: supplying the materials from which possible…

• 2026.08.28Emotional Memory Across the Lifespan: Positivity Effects, Reminiscence and Preservation in Dementia

  Does emotional memory decline with age as episodic memory does, or does it follow a distinct trajectory? The present review examines three bodies of evidence. First, socioemotional selectivity theory and the age-related positivity effect indicate that older adults…

• 2026.08.10External Memory Systems: Cognitive Offloading, Transactive Memory and What Records Fail to Encode

  Humans have delegated memory to external supports since the invention of writing, and the concern that such delegation weakens internal memory is at least as old as Plato’s Phaedrus. The present review asks what contemporary evidence says about the cognitive consequences of…

• 2026.07.23Why Preserve Emotions? A Cognitive Science Case for Treating Affective Experience as Perishable Data

  Human societies have never produced more durable records of their members’ lives, yet almost none document what those lives felt like from the inside. This position paper asks whether affective experience is a category of information systematically lost by conventional…

• 2026.07.05Reconsolidation and the Reconstructive Nature of Memory: Implications for the Stability of Emotional Memories

  Consolidation theory long held that a memory trace, once stabilised by protein-synthesis-dependent processes, was resistant to disruption. The present review examines the evidence that retrieval returns consolidated memories to a labile state from which they must be…

• 2026.06.17Emotional Modulation of Memory: Consolidation, Amygdala–Hippocampal Interactions and the Reliability of Vivid Recall

  Emotionally arousing experiences are remembered longer and more vividly than neutral ones, yet vividness is a poor guide to accuracy. This review examines the mechanisms behind both facts. The modulation hypothesis (McGaugh, 2004, 2015) holds that peripheral stress hormones,…

• 2026.05.30Forgetting as an Adaptive Process: Interference, Inhibition and the Costs of Total Recall

  Forgetting is commonly treated as a failure of the memory system, a passive loss of information through decay or interference. The present review examines the alternative position that forgetting is, in substantial part, adaptive and often active. Four bodies of evidence are…

• 2026.05.12The Architecture of Autobiographical Memory: Hierarchical Organisation and Sources of Fragility

  Autobiographical memory is often treated as a store of discrete personal episodes that can be retrieved and copied. This review examines whether the evidence supports that assumption. We consider the hierarchical self-memory system of Conway and Pleydell-Pearce (2000),…

• 2026.04.24Self-Defining Memories: Structure, Function and Measurement

  Self-defining memories are a small subset of autobiographical memories that are vivid, affectively intense, repeatedly recalled and linked to enduring goals or unresolved conflicts. The present review asks what distinguishes these memories structurally, what functions they…

• 2026.04.06The Self as a Mnemonic Construction: Evidence from the Self-Memory System and Narrative Identity

  Does the sense of being one continuous person derive from memory, or does the self shape what is remembered? The present review examines this question through three bodies of work: the Self-Memory System of Conway and Pleydell-Pearce (2000) and its reformulation in terms of…