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Tulving, E. (1985). Memory and consciousness. Canadian Psychology,
26, 1-12.
Topic:
Consciousness.
The scientific understanding of consciousness requires the awareness that
there are different kinds of consciousness and that different kinds of
measurement addressing these different kinds of consciousness.
Varieties of consciousness: anoetic, noetic, and autonoetic, which
correspond to different memory systems – procedural, semantic and
episodic.
Outline:
1. the idea that different systems of memory are linked to different kinds
of consciousness.
2. clinical studies illustrating different kinds of consciousness are
introduced.
3. the concept of automatic consciousness is elaborated
4. automatic consciousness is associated with the “synergistic ecphory
model of recall and recognition
5. two demonstration experiments are described
6. the biological utility of episodic memory and autonoetic consciousness
is discussed
Varieties of memory and consciousness
3 memory systems and 3 kinds of consciousness
Three types of memory systems, episodic, semantic, and procedural
memory systems correspond to three different kinds of consciousness –
autonoetic (self-knowing), noetic (knowing), and anoetic (not-knowing).
Episodic   autonoetic (self-knowing)
Semantic   noetic (knowing)
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Procedural   anoetic (not-knowing).
Procedural   anoetic (not-knowing).
Bound to the current situation
Organisms possessing only anoetic consciousness are capable of
registering the current environment.
Semantic   noetic (knowing)
Noetic consciousness give ideas about the relationships among objects and
events
Episodic   autonoetic (self-knowing)
Autonoetic consciousness gives ideas about one’s personal experience.
A man without autonoetic consciousness: a case study
A amnesic patient N N:
He is normal in his ability to speak, write, and other intellectual activities.
But he cannot recall what happened yesterday to him, a week ago, or any
immediate memories.
But he also cannot imagine what he will be in the future.
When he thinks about his future, he feels he is just blank, as in when he
thinks about his immediate past.
Amnesia seems to disrupt the ability to think about oneself in his own
subjective time.
Autonoetic consciousness, subjective time, and episodic memory
Properties of autonoetic consciousness
1. it deals with personal time: past and future
An impairment of autonoetic consciousness disrupts the awareness of time
(both future and past)
2. it is a necessary component of remembering of events.
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Remembering something entails conscious awareness, and autonoetic
consciousness
3. appear late in development
infants do not have episodic memory as well as autonoetic consciousness
4. selectively impaired or lost due to brain damage
5. varies across individuals and situations
Recovery of knowledge about past events
Recollective experience is an amalgamation of both autonoetic
(episodic) and noetic (semantic) components.
Thus, retrieval of past experience arises from both autonoetic and noetic
components.
You can recollect events and things by means of your episodic process and
of semantic process (knowledge).
The phenomenal experience that accompanies the recovery of past events
can be characterized by “remember” and “know” judgment.
Measurement of autonoetic consciousness (2 studies)
Study 1
79 students
a list of 27 category names and category instances (musical instrument –
viola; a fruit – pear).
3 subsequent memory tests:
Test 1:
Free recall. Ss were asked to recall as many instances as they can.
Test 2: cued recall test (cued with category names)
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Given the category names as cues, Ss were asked to recall as many
instances as they can .
Test 3: cued recall test (cued with the first letters of category
instances and their category names)
Those items recalled in Test 3, but not in Test 2 and 1, those items recalled
Test 2, but not in Test 1, those items recalled in Test 1 will tell you the
emphasis of semantic cues relative to episodic cues
This is corroborated by subjects’ “remember” judgments (Ss were asked
whether they remember in occurance of the list.
The proportion of “remember” judgments was high in Test 1