Abstract

The foundations of cognition and cognitive behaviour are consistently proposed to be built upon the capability to predict (at various levels of abstraction). For autonomous cognitive agents, this implicitly assumes a foundational role for memory, as a mechanism by which prior experience can be brought to bear in the service of present and future behaviour. In this contribution, this idea is extended to propose that an active process of memory provides the substrate for cognitive processing, particularly when considering it as fundamentally associative and from a developmental perspective. It is in this context that the claim is made that in order to solve the question of cognition, the role and function of memory must be fully resolved.