ABSTRACT

The word memory is commonly used to denote the faculty to use any type of acquired information. It’s easy to see, though, that this polysemous term is used to refer to at least two substantially different phenomena. Indeed, memory refers both to the act of recalling episodes and personal events as well as to the capacity of using acquired information that has no personal or temporal connotations (see this volume’s chapters by Düzel and Gardiner). For example, the idea of memory refers both to the memory of your last holiday and to the knowledge of the chemical formula for water. The term memory is therefore ambiguous because of the substantial difference in the meanings it is used to express. In this chapter, we will consider only one aspect of memory—episodic memory (Tulving, 1972, 1983), that is the conscious recollection of one’s own past experience.