Numerous theoretical accounts of memory have differentiated memory for facts and memory for context. Psychologist Endel Tulving (1972; 1983) further defined these two declarative memory conceptions of explicit memory (in which information is consciously registered and recalled) into semantic memory wherein general world knowledge not tied to specific events is stored and episodic memory involving the storage of context-specific information about personal experiences (i.e. time, location, and surroundings of personal knowledge). Conversely, implicit memory (non declarative) involves perhaps unconscious registration (lack of awareness during encoding), yet definite unconscious recollection. Skills and habits, priming, and classical conditioning all utilize implicit memory.
An essential aspect of episodic memory includes date and time encoding in the subject's past. For such processing, the details surrounding the memory (where, when, and with whom the experience took place) must be preserved and are necessary for an episodic memory to form, otherwise the memory would be semantic. For instance, one may possess an episodic memory of John F. Kennedy's assassination, including the fact that he was watching Walter Cronkite announce that Kennedy had been murdered. However, if the contextual details of this event were lost, remaining would be a semantic memory that John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The ability to recall episodic information concerning a memory has been termed source monitoring, and is subject to distortion that may lead to source amnesia.
Famous quotes containing the words human, memory and/or process:
“The secret of heaven is kept from age to age. No imprudent, no sociable angel ever dropt an early syllable to answer the longings of saints, the fears of mortals. We should have listened on our knees to any favorite, who, by stricter obedience, had brought his thoughts into parallelism with the celestial currents, and could hint to human ears the scenery and circumstance of the newly parted soul.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“No memory of having starred
Atones for later disregard,
Or keeps the end from being hard.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“It is part of the nature of consciousness, of how the mental apparatus works, that free reason is only a very occasional function of people’s “thinking” and that much of the process is made of reactions as standardized as those of the keys on a typewriter.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)