The history of episodic memory

Over the course of his research, Endel Tulving offered a number of somewhat different characterizations of episodic memory. Do they indicate that he changed his mind over time as to what episodic memory is, or did his core understanding of the nature of episodic memory stay the same? In this article, we offer some support for the latter claim, and in particular for thinking that, throughout his life, Tulving took as a defining feature of episodic memory the distinctive awareness of the self in time it involves. We argue that it is easier to see the continuities rather than the discontinuities in Tulving's writings once their historical context is taken into account, where this involves both the authors who influenced his thinking, as well as the intellectual climate at the different times he was writing. We also discuss two recent bodies of work on episodic memory that take aspects of Tulving's writings as their point of departure, but try to factor out into separate ingredients what he arguably saw as a unitary phenomenon. Considering aspects of the dialectic between them and Tulving's view might shed further light on some of the motivations behind the latter.This article is part of the theme issue 'Elements of episodic memory: lessons from 40 years of research'.