Episodic memory is a declarative long-term memory of a specific past experience. As such, it is multifaceted, encompassing both the objective and subjective components of that experience. These components can be flexibly represented at different levels of granularity, from precise, context-specific details to generalized, gistlike representations. In this review, we suggest that 1) multiple representations of an episodic memory at different levels of granularity are simultaneously encoded into a memory trace and 2) the relative weighting of these representations determines the extent to which a memory is reconstructed or reproduced at retrieval. We propose that this representational flexibility drives adaptive behavior by prioritizing reconstruction or reproduction depending on the age of the memory, its relationship to prior knowledge, current attentional goals or task demands, and individual differences. Drawing on research in humans and nonhuman animals, we show a close correspondence between psychological and neural representations of a memory across encoding, consolidation, and retrieval. Specifically, we discuss how hippocampal activity in humans and engram formation and activation in rodents support the reproduction of detailed memory representations, whereas schema formation across species, mediated by the medial prefrontal cortex, facilitates reconstruction and generalization to guide behavior. Finally, we consider how species- and individual-level differences shape episodic memory representations. By integrating findings across species, we illustrate how the correspondence between neural and psychological representations enables multiple memory representations to balance stability and flexibility, ultimately driving adaptive behavior.

Nicholas and Mattar found that people use episodic memory to make decisions when it is unclear what will be needed in the future. These findings reveal how the rich representational capacity of episod...

APS Fellow Stephan Lewandowsky and colleagues recently developed the Anti-Autocracy Handbook, designed to provide guidance to scholars navigating the growing global trend of democratic backsliding.

The locus coeruleus works like a “reset” button that separates the memory of one meaningful event from the next.

Nature Communications - The neural processes involved in memory formation for realistic experiences remain poorly understood. Here, the authors found that ripple-like activity in the human...

Our experience of the world is a continuous stream of events that must be segmented and organized at multiple timescales. The neural mechanisms underlying this process remain unknown. In this work, we...

Episodic memory and semantic knowledge can each exert strong influences on visual attention when we search through real-world scenes. However, there is debate surrounding how they interact when both are present; specifically, results conflict as to whether memory consistently improves visual search when semantic knowledge is available to guide search. These conflicting results could be driven by distinct effects of different types of episodic memory, but this possibility has not been examined. To test this, we tracked participants’ eyes while they searched for objects in semantically congruent and incongruent locations within scenes during a study and test phase. In the test phase containing studied and new scenes, participants gave confidence-based recognition memory judgments that indexed different types of episodic memory (i.e., recollection, familiarity, unconscious memory) for the background scenes, then they searched for the target. We found that semantic knowledge consistently influenced both early and late eye movements, but the influence of memory depended on the type of memory involved. Recollection improved first saccade accuracy in terms of heading towards the target in both congruent and incongruent scenes. In contrast, unconscious memory gradually improved scanpath efficiency over the course of search, but only when semantic knowledge was relatively ineffective (i.e., incongruent scenes). Together, these findings indicate that episodic memory and semantic knowledge are rationally integrated to optimize attentional guidance, such that the most precise or effective forms of information available – which depends on the type of episodic memory available – are prioritized.

Our memories do not simply keep time - they warp it, bending the past to fit the structure of our experiences. For example, people tend to remember items as occurring farther apart in time if they spa...

Sleep is an essential component of our daily life. A mutation in human salt induced kinase 3 (hSIK3), which is critical for regulating sleep durati...

This study examines how event boundaries affect recall of items in a decision-making task. Events structured recall, which was impaired for items after boundaries. A reinforcement learning model showe...

John H. Flavell is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Stanford University. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Flavell is a founder of social cognitive ...

Humans lack memories for specific events from the first few years of life. We investigated the mechanistic basis of this infantile amnesia by scanning the brains of awake infants with functional magne...