The role of episodic memory in causal reasoning with counterfactuals: A perspective from predictive processing and trace minimalism

Over the past several years, there has been a shift in the researchers’ thinking about the functional role of episodic memory. Rather than focusing on how memory represents the past, recent literature often presents memory as ultimately dealing with the future–helping the organism to anticipate events and increase its adaptive success. However, the distinct contribution of episodic (as opposed to semantic) memory to future-oriented simulations remains unclear. We claim that episodic memory yields adaptive success because of its crucial role in singular counterfactual causal reasoning, which thus far has been mostly ignored in causal reasoning literature. Our paper presents a causal inference model based on the predictive processing framework and the minimal trace account of episodic memory. According to our model, evaluating the cause of an event involves (i) generating an episodic memory related to the said potential cause, (ii) constructing a counterfactual scenario through inhibition of the relevant part of the past episode, and (iii) temporal evolution followed by alternative model evaluation. We further discuss our approach in the developmental context.