This article examines the effects of memory loss on a patient's ability to remember the past and imagine the future. We present the case of D.B., who, as a result of hypoxic brain damage, suffered severe amnesia for the personally experienced past. By contrast, his knowledge of the nonpersonal past was relatively preserved. A similar pattern was evidenced in his ability to anticipate future events. Although D.B. had great difficulty imagining what his experiences might be like in the future, his capacity to anticipate issues and events in the public domain was comparable to that of neurologically healthy, age-matched controls. These findings suggest that neuropsychological dissociations between episodic and semantic memory for the past also may extend to the ability to anticipate the future.

Summary Practice improves discrimination of many basic visual features, such as contrast, orientation, positional offset, etc. [1–7]. Perceptual learning of many of these tasks is found to be retinal location specific, in that learning transfers little to an untrained retinal location [1, 6–8]. In most perceptual learning models, this location specificity is interpreted as a pointer to a retinotopic early visual cortical locus of learning [1, 6–11]. Alternatively, an untested hypothesis is that learning could occur in a central site, but it consists of two separate aspects: learning to discriminate a specific stimulus feature (“feature learning”), and learning to deal with stimulus non-specific factors like local noise at the stimulus location (“location learning”) [12]. Therefore, learning is not transferable to a new location that has never been location-trained. To test this hypothesis we developed a novel double-training paradigm that employed conventional feature training (e.g., contrast) at one location, and additional training with an irrelevant feature/task (e.g. orientation) at a second location, either simultaneously or at a different time. Our results showed that this additional location training enabled a complete transfer of feature learning (e.g., contrast) to the second location. This finding challenges location specificity and its inferred cortical retinotopy as central concepts to many perceptual learning models, and suggests perceptual learning involves higher non-retinotopic brain areas that enable location transfer.

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Memory evolved to supply useful, timely information to the organism's decision-making systems. Therefore, decision rules, multiple memory systems, and the search engines that link them should have coevolved to mesh in a coadapted, functionally interlocking way. This adaptationist perspective suggested the scope hypothesis: When a generalization is retrieved from semantic memory, episodic memories that are inconsistent with it should be retrieved in tandem to place boundary conditions on the scope of the generalization. Using a priming paradigm and a decision task involving person memory, the authors tested and confirmed this hypothesis. The results support the view that priming is an evolved adaptation. They further show that dissociations between memory systems are not-and should not be-absolute: Independence exists for some tasks but not others.Memory is a gift of nature, the ability of living organisms to retain and to utilize acquired information or knowledge. . . . Owners of biological memory systems are capable of behaving more appropriately at a later time because of their experiences at an earlier time, a feat not possible for organisms without memory. (Tulving, 1995a, p. 751) If there is one proposition on which all psychologists seem to agree, it is that memory is useful. Memory allows organisms to adjust their behavior on the basis of information they acquire ontogenetically, through their experiences with the world.This connection between personal experience, memory, and behavior implies a close relationship between learning and memory: "Memory in biological systems always entails learning (the acquisition of information) and . . . learning implies retention (memory) of such information" (Tulving, 1995a, p. 751). Recognizing this, psychologists have long exploited learning paradigms to study the properties of memory (e.g., by list learning to probe free recall, cued recall, and recognition).The same connection also implies a close relationship between decision rules 1 and memory. An organism cannot behave "more appropriately"-that is, more adaptively-at a later time because of experiences at an earlier time unless it is equipped with rules that use ontogenetically acquired information to make decisions. Indeed, memory systems must have evolved their structure in response to the informational needs of the decision rules guiding behavior. This is because memory properties that have no impact on an organism's decisions will not be visible to-and hence will not be shaped by-selection. Moreover, because decision rules often differ in what information they require, different sets of decision rules may activate different retrieval processes or search engines and may access different memory systems or sets of memory systems. Without engines that can search for and retrieve the right information, supplying it to the right decision rule at the right time, an organ designed to store ontogenetically acquired information-that is, a memory system-would be a pointless appendage. Hence, adaptive behavior over tim...

Relating information to the self (self-referent encoding) has been shown to produce better recall than purely semantic encoding. This finding has been interpreted as demonstrating that self-reference produces a more elaborate memory trace than semantic encoding, and it has been cited frequently as evidence that the self is one of the most highly elaborated structures in memory. The experiments reported in this article challenge this interpretation of the self-reference effect by demonstrating that self-referent and semantic encodings produce virtually identical free recall levels if they are first equated for the amount of organization they encourage. On the basis of our findings we conclude the following: (a) Organization, not elaboration, is responsible for the superior recall performance obtained when information is encoded self-referentially, and (b) organization is not a necessary component of selfreferent encoding and can be orthogonally varied within self-referent and semantic encoding tasks. Finally, we discuss how a single-factor theory based on organization can account for many of the selfreferent recall findings reported in the literature. One of the most influential approaches to the study of human memory has been the Depth of Processing (DOP) framework proposed by Craik and Lockhart (1972). These investigators suggested that retention of a memory trace is determined by the nature of encoding operations carried out on stimulus material. Deep, meaningful analyses such as those prompted by semantic encoding tasks allow formation of a more durable trace than do shallow, structural analyses of the sound or appearance of stimuli. Until 1977, semantic encoding was commonly considered the optimal way of achieving good retention (e.g.

A number of investigators have demonstrated that relating information to the self (self-referent encoding) produces better recall than structural or semantic encoding of the same material. The mechanisms responsible for this self-referent recall advantage, however, still are not well understood. Some have proposed an elaborative processing explanation (e.g., Rogers, Kuiper, & Kirker, 1977), whereas others have argued for an organizational processing interpretation (e.g., Klein & KJhlstrom, 1986). We present a paradigm for clarifying the respective contributions of these two processes to the recall of material encoded self-referentially. Our findings suggest that both elaborative and organizational processes are involved, but which process plays the larger role in recall depends on the material being judged. We discuss the implications of a dual-processing explanation of self-referent encoding.Psychologists long have speculated that the self plays an important part in the memory of personal experiences (e.g., Koflka, 1935; Talland, 1964). It has been only in the last 10 years, however, as theoretical concepts and research paradigms from cognitive psychology became available to psychologists interested in the self, that the relation between the self and memory has been treated experimentally. The work of Rogers and his colleagues (e.g., Kuiper & Rogers, 1979;Rogers, Kuiper, & Kirker, 1977) has been particularly influential. In an extension of the depth-of-processing methodology used by Craik and Tulving (1975) to explore the effects of various encoding strategies on recall, Rogers demonstrated that judging stimulus words for their personal descriptiveness (e.g., "Describes you?") produced higher levels of incidental recall than structural (e.g., "Printed in big letters?") or semantic (e.g., "Means the same as XXXX?") encoding of the same material. The superior memory for words judged in reference to the self (self-referent encoding) generated considerable interest, partly because semantic encoding commonly had been considered the optimal way of achieving good retention (e.g., Craik & Tulving, 1975;Hyde & Jenkins, 1973), and the phenomenon (the self-reference effect [SRE]) soon was replicated in a number of studies (for reviews, We would like to express our appreciation to

Visual perceptual learning models, as constrained by orientation and location specificities, propose that learning either reflects changes in V1 neuronal tuning or reweighting specific V1 inputs in either the visual cortex or higher areas. Here we demonstrate that, with a training-plus-exposure procedure, in which observers are trained at one orientation and either simultaneously or subsequently passively exposed to a second transfer orientation, perceptual learning can completely transfer to the second orientation in tasks known to be orientation-specific. However, transfer fails if exposure precedes the training. These results challenge the existing specific perceptual learning models by suggesting a more general perceptual learning process. We propose a rule-based learning model to explain perceptual learning and its specificity and transfer. In this model, a decision unit in high-level brain areas learns the rules of reweighting the V1 inputs through training. However, these rules cannot be applied to a new orientation/location because the decision unit cannot functionally connect to the new V1 inputs that are unattended or even suppressed after training at a different orientation/location, which leads to specificity. Repeated orientation exposure or location training reactivates these inputs to establish the functional connections and enable the transfer of learning.