Abstract
With this provocative statement, Tulving opened his book on episodic—in contrast to semantic—memory. It is a position that has provoked a number of demurrers, and Tulving himself seems to have at least half backed away from it (Tulving, 1984). Nonetheless, I believe there is considerable truth to this position, although not all of the phenomena that Tulving attempted to include in the notion of episodic memory can be emcompassed within it. Rather I believe that a close study of the ontogeny of memory in infancy and early childhood can lead to an understanding of just which aspects of the human memory system are unique to our species and which are not. The question, then, is whether there is some sense in which Tulving’s claim is true in ontogeny as well as phylogeny.
Remembering past events is a universally familiar experience. It is also a uniquely human one. As far as we know, members of no other species possess quite the same ability to experience again now, in a different situation and perhaps in a different form, happenings from the past, and know that the experience refers to an event that occurred in another time and in another place. Other members of the animal kingdom … cannot travel back into the past in their own minds. (Tulving, 1983, p.l).
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Nelson, K. (1989). Remembering: A Functional Developmental Perspective. In: Solomon, P.R., Goethals, G.R., Kelley, C.M., Stephens, B.R. (eds) Memory: Interdisciplinary Approaches. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-3500-2_7
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