Hunter College, CUNY, United States of America.
Cognition. 2021 Sep;214:104751. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104751. Epub 2021 May 3.
Gallistel (2020) argues that current research on the physical basis of memory assumes an associationistic approach and thus fails to provide an account of quantitative facts because quantitative facts cannot be sensed and have no qualia. But are these approaches any better suited for investigating how we store concepts of concrete things such as dogs, tables and sand, which clearly have qualia? Seven examples of the abstract quantitative and non-quantitative formal structure found in the conceptual representation of concrete things are used to show that Gallistel's critique clearly extends to the conceptual representations stored in semantic memory. Gallistel (2020) presents compelling arguments that the physical basis for quantitative facts will not be the synapse or cell assemblies, but the information-bearing molecules inside the neuron. Given that quantitative facts are intrinsic to even our simplest conceptual representations, we should expect the same for conceptual representations.
加利斯特尔（2020）认为，当前关于记忆的物理基础的研究假设了一种联想主义的方法，因此未能提供对定量事实的解释，因为定量事实无法被感知，也没有质。但是这些方法对于研究我们如何存储狗、桌子和沙子等具体事物的概念有什么帮助吗？这些概念显然有质。文中使用了七个具体事物概念表示中的抽象定量和非定量形式结构的例子，表明加利斯特尔的批判显然扩展到了语义记忆中存储的概念表示。加利斯特尔（2020）提出了令人信服的论点，即定量事实的物理基础将不是突触或细胞集合，而是神经元内携带信息的分子。鉴于定量事实甚至是我们最简单的概念表示的内在特征，我们应该期望概念表示也是如此。
