Abstract
Since the cognitive revolution of the 1950s, the cognitive paradigm has been accepted by the great majority of researchers, especially in the domain of memory. Connectionism has come to question its modular organization by emphasizing its emergent character. However, the question of reference remained posed in the sense it was based on the existence of internal representations of a world external to the subject. The enactivist paradigm, that takes up the principles of constructivism, proposes that cognition should no longer be seen as the representation of a pre-existing world but as the product of our sensorimotor experiences. In this work, we present ATHENA: an enactivist model of memory without representations inspired by MINERVA2, but taking into account the contributions of the Act-In model. Memory is built by a fractal contextualization of sensorimotor covariances. A series of experimental simulations allows us to account for many memory phenomena in a more effective way than what is possible within representationalism: the emergence, learning and manipulation of abstractions without representations; but also other cognitive phenomena such as a subjective time construction (without temporal representations learned).