Workstreams

The Centre for the Sciences of Place and Memory aims to advance knowledge of relations between place and memory, this is given focus through six workstreams. These are designed as vertical slices through disparate disciplines, integrating research in arts and humanities, social sciences, philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. Importantly, the Centre’s research is highly interdisciplinary, celebrating and embracing multiple disciplines and traditions to connect previously disparate research.

• Memory, truth and the past
• Place knowledge and place memory
• Collaborative wayfinding
• Technologies of navigation and memory
• Disorientation and difficult pasts
• Cognitive ecologies of the city

Memory, truth and the past

How can we know the past if memory is entirely constructive?

This foundational workstream addresses key problems in calibrating cognitive neuroscience and philosophy. Remembering is a constructive or imaginative process. Does this rule it out as a reliable channel of access to the past? Further, consensus in neuroscience suggests that the same neural mechanisms operate whether memories are true or false. So what factors determine that some event representations are attributed to past experience, while others are assigned to imagination or testimony? Troubling consequences in psychology, politics, and the law flow from over-reactions to the fragility of memory: this workstream integrates theory and data on relations between remembering, imagining, and testimony from many fields across arts and sciences.

Place knowledge and place memory

What is deep place knowledge, the embodied certainty some people gain in inhabiting deeply familiar terrain? What kind of knowledge is it, and how does displacement disrupt it?

This workstream develops new accounts of ‘belonging’ and ‘place attachment’, spanning cognitive neuroscience, the social sciences, and the arts. Integrating these fields and methods, it aims at better understanding of the active embodied monitoring and attentive sensing of salient changes that local experts deploy in tapping information distributed across multiple resources, and in flexibly adopting distinct visuospatial perspectives in spatial cognition and memory to gain a firmer objective grip on place and time.

Collaborative wayfinding

How do people find their way together? What drives effective collaboration in spatial cognition?

Individuals are the primary focus of navigation science and studies of wayfinding technologies. But conflict during collaborative wayfinding is familiar to most people, as is failure at it. This workstream builds on studies of collaboration in team cognition and memory, examining communication among small groups with shared history, adding collaborative conditions to studies of individual wayfinding, and working in depth and across cultures with real communities who navigate complex environments together, aiming to do justice to the social dimensions of contemporary cognitive ecologies.

Technologies of navigation and memory

Does using our devices erode our cognitive skills? Typically, wayfinding involves not just people but also technologies like GPS. How do people actually use navigation technologies together in social practice? Are such devices intrinsically disruptive, or can design innovations foster better spatial learning and counteract the passivity of simply outsourcing our wayfinding capacities?

This workstream expands the unit of analysis to consider navigation technologies in particular place-people-ecosystems across cultures, expert communities, and art-science collaborations.

Disorientation and difficult pasts

How can we manage current crises of commemoration?

This workstream examines spatial and temporal disorientation in both individuals and groups. Integrating research on dementia and place across many fields, it builds a new theory of bodily, affective, and spatial disorientation. At a larger scale, it addresses modes of engagement with the challenging legacies of painful places, in Scotland and elsewhere, connecting philosophy and cognitive theory with debates in social science, politics, and memory studies. Attending to real ecologies of commemoration, the research studies what people actually care about when they visit places with challenging histories, or remember difficult pasts: it brings neurocognitive theory into contact with aesthetics, museum practice, and the arts.

Cognitive ecologies of the city

What practices and feelings promote urban belonging and engagement?

City-based researchers often study rural communities: reversing the place-based lens, this workstream adopts a regional viewpoint to ask how urban communities in Scotland and across the UK engage with the past. It develops and tests cognitive theory in architecture and urban design. Much research in ‘neuroarchitecture’ is individualistic, probing isolated causal interactions between buildings and brains: this work in contrast integrates cognition and culture to study urban emotion, place-making, and memory practices, for example in migrant communities finding ways to integrate past and present in new home cities.

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