Recently, doubts concerning the particularity of episodic memory have emerged within the philosophy of memory. Traditionally, episodic memory has been thought to pertain to specific events from the personal past, events that have a particular spatio-temporal context (e.g., Tulving, 1983). This “singularist thesis” (Andonoski, 2020), which can be found across the field, is now being challenged by the current focus on generalised episodic memories (Openshaw, forthcoming). Rejecting singularism is also seen as a way of connecting episodic memory to semantic memory, as the latter has always been considered general (Ibid.). The working hypothesis of this presentation is that generalised episodic memories also constitute a privileged space from which to explore the relationship between episodic and procedural or embodied forms of memory. The reason for this is that the repetition underlying the creation of procedural memory can also lead to the formation of a generalised episodic memory.

Some recent proposals, such as the sensorimotor approach to episodic memory, have highlighted that most of the information retrieved during remembering is motor in nature (Ianí, 2019). This claim makes sense within the accepted view that episodic memories are often related to present or future action (Glenberg, 1997). While habits and skills guide present action in a pre-reflexive way, creating a simulation of how things occurred in the past is useful for decision-making and deliberation. If we accept this hypothesis, it would not be unreasonable to think that memories with similar sensorimotor content will guide action in similar ways. Since generalised memories are grounded in the repetition of the same event, they are contractions of multiple particular events that convey the same motor information. Thus, having a generalised memory would reduce the cost of metacognitive processes without diminishing the practical utility of memory in guiding present action.

References:

Andonovski, N. (2020). Singularism about episodic memory. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 11(2), 335-365.

Glenberg, A. M. (1997). What memory is for. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 20, 1–19.

Ianì, F. (2019). Embodied memories: Reviewing the role of the body in memory processes. Psychonomic bulletin & review, 26(6), 1747-1766.

Openshaw, J. (forthcoming). Generalised remembering.

Tulving, E. (1983). Elements of episodic memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.