Endel Tulving - Amnesia and Consciousness

Amnesia and Consciousness

Tulving's research has emphasized the importance of episodic memory for our experience of consciousness and our understanding of time. For example, he conducted studies with the amnesic patient KC, who had relatively normal semantic memory but severely impaired episodic memory due to brain damage from a motorcycle accident. Tulving's work with KC highlighted the central importance of episodic memory for the subjective experience of one's self in time, an ability he dubbed "autonoetic consciousness." KC lacked this ability, failing to remember prior events and also failing to imagine or plan for the future.

Tulving also developed a cognitive task to measure different subective states in memory, called the "remember"/"know" procedure. This task has been used extensively in cognitive psychology and neuroscience.