Talk:Episodic memory

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Hi. I'd love to discuss how best to deal with the competing theoretical approaches to episodic memory in the litterature. Please do let me know your thoughts.

[edit] Episodic memory converted to semantic

As episodes in human memory age, the temporal (time) information stored with them begins to fade and to be lost. Unless an episode is explicitly connected with a particular time, the time associated with it tends to become vague and non-specific. Two unconnected episodes that do not share a common element that would establish their particular order thus tend to become confused as to which came first. For example, a person might vividly remember certain experiences that happened long ago in college: going to the Junior Prom, and also going on a week-long bicycle/camping trip with some classmates. The year of the Junior Prom is easy to remember, because it was an explicit part of the episode. But perhaps not so with the bike trip. At some point, the person may not be able to remember whether the bike trip happened before or after the prom.

There is thus reason to believe, as is stated in the main article, that "episodic memories are refined into semantic memories over time. In this process, most of the episodic information about a particular event is generalized and the context of the specific events is lost."

--82.80.15.103 07:43, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Perception of the Passage of Time

Our perception of the passage of time (whether it passes "slowly" or "quickly") may be connected with the operation of episodic memory and its gradual conversion into semantic memory.

It is possibile that we do not store information about the passage of time separately from information about the occurrence of events, but only in connection with the events themselves. Furthermore, our perception of the passage of time depends in some way on the stimulation of the events that we are experiencing. As a suggestion for one type of this phenomenon, "rich" stimulation may tend to form more complex and connected episodes than "poor" stimulation, and thus in a given amount of time, "rich" stimulation results in fewer (but elaborate) episodes, whereas "poor" stimulation results in more (but plain) episodes. Thus in this model, a given amount of time that is highly stimulating would result in fewer episodes than the same amount of time that is deficient in stimulation, and thus an hour of highly stimulating activity would be perceived at the time of its occurrence as passing faster than an hour of boredom.

This suggests that all episodes are more-or-less equivalent in the amount of perceived time they represent. Furthermore, as less significant episodes are forgotten, and as episodic memory becomes converted to semantic memory, our direct perception of the passage of time tends to become lost. We may remember that, during a particular event, time seemed to drag on and on, but we are remembering a note about a perception rather than the pereption itself. Overall, the tendency is to perceive that time seems to be going by awfully fast. The older we get, the fewer are the episodes significant enough to remember and the less capable we are of forming memories anyway -- and thus the faster time seems to go.

--82.80.15.103 08:09, 1 Aug 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Episodic as part of declarative memo

I am a bit dustrustful of this classification. Declarative memo, by definition ('that can be declared') has propositional format, i.e. it exists as, or can readily and accurately be described in, sentences of language. Now, how about facts from my personal life that are much finer-grain, i.e. they contain primarily imagistic (perceptual/sensory/phenomenal) content. These are nonpropositional and can only very crudely be rendered in a post-factum lignuistic description, always with a lot of 'je ne sais quoi' (you can try to describe it, but you know it exists within you not as sentences, but as sensory data - images, scents, etc.). Is there a separate classification for such a subset of memories? Regards, Ariosto 23:17, 20 March 2006 (UTC)