Episodic Memory: New Directions In Research

The term 'episodic memory' refers to our memory for unique, personal experiences, that we can date at some point in our past - our first day at school, the day we got married. It has again become a topic of great importance and interest to psychologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers. How are such memories stored in the brain, why do certain memories disappear (especially those from early in childhood), and what causes false memories (memories of events we erroneously believe have really taken place)? Since Endel Tulving's classic book 'Episodic memory' (OUP, 1983), very few books have been published on this topic. In recent years however, many of the assumptions made about episodic memory have had to be reconsidered as a result of new techniques, which have allowed us a far deeper understanding of episodic memory. In 'Episodic memory: New Directions in Research' three of the worlds leading researchers in the topic of memory have brought together a stellar team of contributors from the fields of cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, and neuroscience, to present an account of what we now know about this fundamentally important topic. The list of contributors includes, amongst others, Daniel Schacter, Richard Morris, Fareneh Vargha-Khadem, and Endel Tulving. The work presented within this book will have a profound effect on the direction that future research in this topic will take. Review: ... it is a pleasure to read a collection of fifteen chapters whose quality is so consistently high ... this book provides an important summary of many results and current views relating to episodic memory. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Vol 6, No 11 Episodic Memory provides an excellent overview of the current state of memory research in general and episodic memory in particular, and offers the opportunity to update, in a very readable way, on the current state of play in a key area of British experimental psychology. The Psychologist Table of Contents: 1. The concept of episodic memory; 2. Episodic memory and autonoetic consciousness: a first-person approach; 3. Components of episodic memory: the contribution of recollection and familiarity; 4. Sensory-perceptual episodic memory and its context: autobiographical memory; 5. Misattribution, false recognition, and the sins of memory; 6. Theories of episodic memory; 7. The loss of episodic memories in retrograde amnesia: single-case and group studies; 8. Episodic memory: insights from semantic dementia; 9. Dissociations in cognitive memory: the syndrome of developmental amnesia; 10. Neuroimaging studies of autobiographical event memory; 11. Episodic-like memory in animals: psychological criteria, neural mechanisms and the value of episodic-like tasks to investigate animal models of neurodegenerative disease; 12. Neural systems underlying episodic memory: insights from animal research; 13. Elements of episodic-like memory in animals; 14. Memory for events and their spatial context: models and experiments; 15. Episodic memory and common sense: how far apart?