Memories of our personal past are the building blocks of our narrative identity. So, when we depend on objects and other people to remember and construct our personal past, our narrative identity is distributed across our embodied brains and an ecology of environmental resources. This paper uses a cognitive niche construction approach to conceptualise how we engineer our memory ecology and construct our distributed narrative identities. It does so by identifying three types of niche construction processes that govern how we interact with our memory ecology, namely creating, editing, and using resources in our memory ecology. It also conceptualises how identity-relevant information in objects and (family) stories is transmitted vertically, i.e., across generations of people. Identifying these processes allows us to better understand the cultural information trajectories that constitute our memory ecologies. In short, what I’ll argue is that our memory ecology scaffolds our narrative identity and that engineering our memory ecology is a form of narrative niche construction.

中文翻译：

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叙事利基构建：记忆生态和分布式叙事身份

我们个人过去的记忆是我们叙事身份的基石。因此，当我们依靠物体和其他人来记住和构建我们个人的过去时，我们的叙事身份分布在我们的具身大脑和环境资源生态中。本文使用认知利基构建方法来概念化我们如何设计我们的记忆生态并构建我们的分布式叙事身份。它通过确定三种类型的生态位构建过程来实现，这些过程控制我们如何与我们的记忆生态互动，即在我们的记忆生态中创建、编辑和使用资源。它还概念化了物体和（家庭）故事中与身份相关的信息如何垂直传播，即跨代人。识别这些过程使我们能够更好地理解构成我们记忆生态的文化信息轨迹。简而言之，我要论证的是，我们的记忆生态为我们的叙事身份提供了支架，而设计我们的记忆生态是叙事生态位构建的一种形式。