We chose to present Endel Tulving, his career and his contributions in the fields of cognitive psychology and neuropsychology. Endel Tulving is a psychologist and neuroscientist, and has focused most of his work on understanding and theorizing human memory. He is one of the most important figures in neuropsychology, whose research on human memory has influenced generations of psychologists and scientists.
One of his most influential contributions to modern psychology has been to create the concept of episodic memory, which he described as a “marvel of nature”.
“I also suggest that episodic memory is a true, even if as yet generally unappreciated, marvel of nature.” (Tulving, 2002, p.1)
Endel Tulving, a few words about his life
Endel Tulving was born in 1927 in Estonia (so is now 93 years old !). Because of historical events in this part of the world in the 1940s, he emigrated and was separated from his family (he was 17 years old at this time). Then he moved to Canada where he studied experimental psychology, and spent his entire career as a professor. He also founded a scientific laboratory at the University of Toronto. However, due to the University’s limited budget, he was both a researcher and a guinea pig.
Episodic memory : the core of Endel Tulving’s work
Tulving first made the distinction between episodic and semantic memory in 1972. At this time, the distinction was centered on the nature of the information to be memorized : episodic memory relate personal events within a spatial and temporal context (for example : “Yesterday morning, we talked about Tulving’s theory, in cognitive psychology class…”), whereas semantic memory relate concepts and general facts outside any encoding context (for example : “Tulving is a psychologist and a well-known researcher who has done a lot of work on memory…”).
Later, Tulving associated these two memory systems with distinct states of consciousness. For him, semantic memory then refers to a “noetic consciousness” of the world, concepts, events. This level of consciousness involves generic knowledge without reviviscence feeling, which is specific to episodic memory. Episodic memory refers to an “autonoetic consciousness” which allows the conscious recollection of a previous subjective experience : the event itself but also feelings, emotions, and spatio-temporal details (where and when it occurred)… The autonoetic consciousness of episodic memory allows us to travel through time and to retrieve and relive our subjective experiences. Tulving no longer describes episodic memory in terms of stored information, but as the ability to mentally travel through subjective time and relive past experiences as if we were there.
This notion of distinct states of consciousness is a major contribution of Endel Tulving, because he does not consider anymore memory as a simple storage space, but as something very personal, very subjective, which is innovative at his time. Endel Tulving goes even further, saying that it is this reviviscence feeling that makes episodic memory specifically human.
“Animals […] have minds, they are conscious of their world, and they rely as much on learning and memory in acquiring the skills needed for survival as we do, but they do not seem to have the same kind of ability humans do to travel back in time in their own minds, probably because they do not need to. The clue suggests that one’s sense of subjective time is not a biological necessity. If humans have it, it is an evolutionary frill, necessary for mental time travel.” (Tulving, 2002, p.2)
Even if the heart of Endel Tulving’s work is the episodic memory system of which he is the inventor, one of his concerns has always been to propose a global vision of memory in the form of a “multi-system” concept. With the MNESIS model he developed, he seeks to maintain an overall vision of memory, insisting on the multiple relationships that govern its harmonious functioning. Other works by Endel Tulving could not be explained here : the notion of encoding specificity, the “Remember-Know” paradigm, the famous SPI model…
It is impossible to sum up Endel Tulving’s work in these few lines. Nevertheless, we hope that we have, at our level, contributed to recalling its importance in cognitive psychology and neuropsychology, and how his work has been (and still is) extremely foundational in our beautiful discipline.
Words we learnt :
- A guinea pig : un cobaye
- A marvel : une merveille
- A reviviscence feeling : un sentiment de reviviscence
- Theorizing : théoriser
- An overall vision of memory : une vision globale de la mémoire
- To seek : rechercher, viser, aspirer à
- A frill : un accessoire, une fioriture
Bibliography
- Tulving, E. (2002). Episodic memory: From mind to brain. Annual review of psychology, 53(1), 1-25.
- Desgranges, B., & Eustache, F. (2011). Les conceptions de la mémoire déclarative d’Endel Tulving et leurs conséquences actuelles. Revue de neuropsychologie, 3(2), 94-103.