 Another challenge appeals to the nature of memory traces. Traces are discussed in more detail below, but two main conceptions of traces are available in the literature, with some theorists understanding traces as local, individually stored entities with explicit content, while others understand them as distributed, superpositionally stored entities with implicit content. The local conception, adopted by Martin and Deutscher (1966), is more straightforward, but the distributed conception, inspired by connectionist approaches to memory (McClelland &amp; Rumelhart 1986) and developed in detail by Sutton (1998), has gradually become the dominant view (Robins 2017). If the distributed conception is right, then individual experiences do not, strictly speaking, result in enduring individual traces but, instead, modify connection weights in networks of event features. Robins (2016b) has argued that, for this reason, a causal theory relying on distributed representations lacks any means of singling an individual event out as the one that is remembered. This would be an unfortunate implication, but the distributed conception may be able to avoid it. On standard distributed connectionist approaches (O’Brien 1991), transient activation patterns are discrete explicit representations, even though they are generated from information stored only holistically in connection weights: thus at retrieval, there can be a distinct representation of an individual remembered event.