ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that the existence of an episodic memory of that experience allows the organism to reflect on the experience, and act accordingly; The understanding of consciousness is clearly a fascinating and difficult question, and the proposal that it is somehow linked to working memory goes back at least to the modal model of Atkinson and Shiffrin. The increase in flexibility granted by such a memory mechanism gives it considerable potential advantages over a simpler learning mechanism that produces a more automatic response. The classic amnesic syndrome is typically associated with damage to the temporal lobes and/or hippocampus and limbic system. A system such as working memory could be extremely useful in such an enterprise, and it seems likely that laboratory-based tasks like mental rotation are ways of measuring the manipulative capacities of working memory, in this case the visuo-spatial sketchpad.
