Episodic and Semantic Memory

This chapter revisits and builds on Tulving's distinction between episodic and semantic memory, with a focus on their differences, similarities, and interactions, informed by cognitive, neuropsychological, and neuroimaging studies.

Abstract

Much of the richness in human life derives from episodic memory, mental representations of detailed experiences from our personal pasts. To make sense of those experiences, knowledge about the world and oneself must also exist in a form that is free of context – known as semantic memory. This chapter revisits and builds on Tulving's distinction between episodic and semantic memory, with a focus on their differences, similarities, and interactions, informed by cognitive, neuropsychological, and neuroimaging studies. Extensions of this distinction into spatial memory, and beyond memory into future thinking, are considered in the context of process views of memory organization.