Endel Tulving

Early life

Tulving was born in Petseri, Estonia (now, Pechory, Russia). At age 17, near the end of World War II, Tulving fled Estonia before it was occupied by the Soviet Union. He immigrated to Canada in 1949. After a short stint working as a farmhand and laborer near London, Ontario, he enrolled in Honours Psychology at the University of Toronto.

Episodic and semantic memory

Tulving first made the distinction between episodic and semantic memory in a 1972 book chapter. Episodic memory is the ability to consciously recollect previous experiences from memory (e.g., recalling a recent family trip to Disney World), whereas semantic memory is the ability to store more general knowledge in memory (e.g., the fact that Disney World is in Florida). This distinction was based on theoretical grounds and experimental psychology findings, and subsequently was linked to different neural systems in the brain by studies of brain damage and neuroimaging techniques. At the time, this type of theorizing represented a major departure from many contemporary theories of human learning and memory, which did not emphasize different kinds of subjective experience or brain systems. Tulving's 1983 book "Elements of Episodic Memory" elaborated on these concepts, and has been cited over 3000 times (see also ).

Encoding specificity principle

Tulving's theory of "encoding specificity" emphasizes the importance of retrieval cues in accessing episodic memories. The theory states that effective retrieval cues must overlap with the to-be-retrieved memory trace. Because the contents of the memory trace are primarily established during the initial encoding of the experience, retrieval cues will be maximally effective if they are similar to this encoded information. Tulving has dubbed the process through which a retrieval cue activates a stored memory "synergistic ecphory".

One implication of the encoding specificity principle is that forgetting may be caused by the lack of appropriate retrieval cues, as opposed to decay of a memory trace over time or interference from other memories. Another implication is that there is more information stored in memory relative to what can be retrieved at any given point (i.e., availability vs. accessibility).

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 subjective states in memory, called the "remember"/"know" procedure. This task has been used extensively in cognitive psychology and neuroscience.

Implicit memory and priming

Another area where Tulving has had an impact is the distinction between conscious or explicit memory (such as episodic memory) and more automatic forms of implicit memory (such as priming). Along with one of his students, Professor Daniel Schacter, Tulving provided several key experimental findings regarding implicit memory. The distinction between implicit and explicit memory was a topic of debate in the 1980s and 1990s. Tulving and colleagues proposed that these different memory phenomena reflected different brain systems. Others argued that these different memory phenomena reflected different psychological processes, rather than different memory systems. These processes would be instantiated in the brain, but they might reflect different aspects of performance from the same memory system, triggered by different task conditions. More recently, theorists have come to adopt components of each of these perspectives.

Other scientific contributions

Tulving has published work on a variety of other topics, such as the importance of mental organization of information in memory, a model of brain hemisphere specialization for episodic memory, and discovery of the Tulving-Wiseman function.

Estonian Studies Foundation

In 1982, architect Elmar Tampõld proposed the idea of reinvesting Tartu College's surplus revenues for the founding of a Chair of Estonian Studies at the University of Toronto. The university agreed and in 1983, he helped establish the Chair of Estonian Studies Foundation with fellow expatriate Estonian professors, Tulving and chemical engineer Olev Träss. The three men made the initial presentation to the University of Toronto and Tampõld became the Chairman of the Board of Directors for the Chair of Estonian Studies Foundation. Since 1999, Jüri Kivimäe, Professor of History and Chair of Estonian Studies has headed the University of Toronto's Elmar Tampõld Chair of Estonian Studies.