Science of episodic memory: New insights in memory research

Abstract

Remembering of episodic memory is characterized by autonoetic consciousness, which enables us to mentally re-experience the past events. It means that the system of episodic memory enables us to mentally travel into the temporally passed event. The orientation of mental time travel is not only for the past events, also for the future or counterfactual events. And then, the memory system could be interpreted as a system to recombine episodic details and construct events in various time frames. We introduce some research which is related to this memory system; episodic future thinking, details in autobiographical memory, cognitive offloading, intentional cognitive control and forgetting, and computational study on subjective meta-memory. Finally, we discuss the recent perspective of episodic memory or episodic sciences and future research directions.

Key words: