Chapter 37

Episodic Memory and Autonoetic Awareness

Mark A. Wheeler
Perhaps the most remarkable achievement of human memory is the ability
to think back and relive happenings from the past. In response to such a
simple cue as, say, high school graduation night, it is possible to
mentally transport oneself back many years or decades and to reexperience
parts of life that probably have not been considered in a long time. The
type of memory that allows people to reect upon personal experiences is
called episodic memory (Tulving, 1983, 1993).
Psychological writing on the topic of episodic memory began at least as
early as William James (1890). Because James's work was pioneering, he
had the opportunity to select and dene those psychological phenomena
that he considered to be important for the developing eld. It is interesting
to note the way that he dened memory. James took a much more
restrictive denition than do most contemporary researchers. Rather than
consider memory as encompassing such acts as motor learning, habit
formation, stimulus-response strengthening, and the acquisition and use of
knowledge, the concept to James was equivalent to what is now called
episodic memory. (These other phenomena, motor learning, etc., were all
readily apparent to James, and he devoted much discussion to them, but
they were not labeled as memory phenomena.) The conscious recollection
that accompanied memory retrieval was taken as the dening
characteristic of memory. Memory requires more than the mere dating of a
fact in the past. It must be dated in my past I must think that I directly
experienced its occurrence (p. 612).
Episodic memory also is dened by the nature of conscious awareness that
accompanies retrieval, a type of awareness now called autonoetic (self-
knowing) awareness. The retrieval of episodic information, such as the
recollection of a particular time that one drove one's rst automobile, is not
merely an objective account of what has happened or what has been seen
or heard. Its contents are infused with the idiosyncratic perspectives,
emotions, and thoughts of the person doing the remembering. It
necessarily involves the feeling that the present recollection is a
reexperience of something that has happened before.
The primary goals of this chapter are to discuss and support two theoretical
propositions about episodic memory and autonoetic awareness. Because
episodic remembering necessarily entails a conscious reexperience of the
personal past, it is possible to conclude the following:
1. Episodic memory is critically dierent from all other varieties of
memory (e.g., stimulus-response strengthening, general knowledge
acquisition), and can be dissociated from them. An experimental
dissociation occurs when one particular

variable selectively aects a certain test or class of tests, while having

little or no eect on dierent classes of tests. There now exist at least
three populations of subjects who show selective losses of episodic
remembering along with spared performance on other memory
measures. These subjects are described in detail later in the chapter.
Such individuals show many types of memory, learning, and
conditioning, yet they cannot mentally relive past experiences. The
presence of these dissociations is important; without them, there would
be little justication for the argument that episodic memory is a special
kind of memory.
2. Episodic remembering is closely related to other higher order mental
achievements that are not typically considered to be acts of memory.
Individuals with autonoetic awareness are capable of reecting upon
their own experiences in the past, present, and future. Reecting back
on past happenings is episodic memory. Related behaviors are the
ability to introspect upon present experiences, and also to anticipate or
imagine future experiences through imagination, daydreams, and
fantasies. All of these autonoetic capabilities share the fact that they
require an organism to withdraw attention from the immediate sensory
environment, and to reect upon their own past, present, or future. The
act of dwelling upon one's past is cognitively similar to the act of
imagining one's future, although only the former is commonly labeled
as memory. For at least two, and perhaps all three, of the populations
that have selective losses of episodic memory, there is a corresponding
loss of the abilities to introspect upon the present, and to anticipate the
future. For a description of a patient with a total loss of autonoetic
awareness extending through the past, present, and future, see Tulving
(1985).
Episodic and Semantic Memory
It is pretty easy to make the case that episodic remembering is distinct
from procedural, or nondeclarative, or implicit kinds of memory; probably
no one, layperson or cognitive psychologist, would confuse episodic
recollection with motor learning, or perceptual priming, or classical
conditioning. These manifestations of memory have little surface similarity
with acts of recollection.
Another form of memory, semantic memory, is more closely related to
episodic remembering. Semantic memory handles knowledge about the
world. When an individual reports that he was born in Chicago, or that
Sacramento is the capital of California, he is almost surely retrieving the
information from semantic, and not episodic, memory. It is through
semantic memory that individuals are capable of knowing thingsany
information that can be expressed in terms of impersonal knowledge can
be encoded, stored, retrieved, and used through semantic memory.
Although there are many proposed dierences between episodic and
semantic memory (Tulving, 1983), there is one attribute that best
discriminates between them: the conscious awareness that occurs during
retrieval. Only episodic retrieval involves autonoetic awareness and the
mental reexperience of a previous moment in the past. Semantic memory,
by contrast, is characterized by noetic (knowing) awareness only. There is
no feeling of reliving any previous episode, and it does not correspond to
William James's ideas about memory. There are many situations, in both the
laboratory and everyday life, when it can be very dicult to draw
distinctions between episodic and semantic memory. As an example,
consider a student's performance on an exam. When an undergraduate
correctly reports information on a test, is it the case that she can
autonoetically recollect a previous moment that she spent studying the
material, or did she simply recall the correct response from semantic
memory, or both? Either of these possibilities could be true; without
interviewing the student, there is no way to know the answer to this
question (see Conway, Gardiner, Perfect, Anderson, & Cohen, 1997, for an
investigation of this very issue). The dierence between episodic
remembering and semantic knowing is of little immediate use to a test-
taker. What matters is that the correct response can be recalled at all.

Dissociating Varieties of Memory and Conscious

Awareness Semantic and episodic memory have
many similaritiesthey are both conscious,
declarative
varieties of memory that are commonly used to
guide behaviorand it is therefore theoretically
important to document cases in which they can
be experimentally dissociated. In other words, it
is important to nd situations in which a
particular variable (e.g., experimental
manipulation, neurological injury) aects only
one of the two kinds of memory.
Many very dierent lines of research have documented dissociations
between episodic and semantic memory. Using functional brain imaging, it
is possible to show that dierent brain areas are involved when healthy
human adults retrieve information from these two kinds of memory
(reviewed by Buckner & Tulving, 1995; Nyberg, Cabeza, & Tulving, 1996;
Nyberg & Cabeza, chapter 31). Also, using the remember/know technique,
researchers have identied several independent variables that selectively
inuence either the amount of information that research subjects claim to
autonoetically remember or the amount that they say they semantically
know (reviewed by Gardiner, chapter 15; Gardiner & Java, 1993). In
addition, pharmacological studies have shown that certain drugs will
impair episodic, but not other varieties of memory (Curran, chapter 33).
Most of the remainder of this chapter will be a summary of one particular
kind of dissociation between episodic and semantic memory, and also
between autonoetic and noetic awareness. There now exist at least three
populations of subjects who show selective losses, or absences, of
autonoetic episodic remembering, along with spared semantic memory. The
presence of the dissociations is important because it lends further evidence
to the proposition that these varieties of memory and conscious awareness
have important dierences.
Based upon the ideas about episodic memory and autonoetic awareness
that have been detailed so far, it is possible to imagine the type of prole
that individuals with selective losses of autonoetic, episodic memory would
have. Such individuals would be able to learn new information, skills, and
facts, and also be able to apply that knowledge exibly and condently,
albeit noetically. The individuals could also report about things and
situations that have been encountered, yet without mentally reliving the
experiences upon which the knowledge is based. They would have
knowledge about the world, including things that have happened in the
past, and things that could occur in the future, yet their subjective
experiences will not actually extend back into the past, or project into the
future.
Groups that t this general description are (1) patients who have sustained
injuries that are restricted to the prefrontal cortical region; (2) children
between the approximate ages of 2 and 5; and (3) a subset of amnesic
patients who have selective damage to the hippocampus, with spared
surrounding tissue. It is only fair to acknowledge at the outset that some of
the relevant data are open to diering interpretations, and other people
will have dierent ideas about how they want to think about the evidence.
This review was conducted with the goal of showing dissociations between
episodic autonoetic thought and noetic semantic knowledge and, with that
goal in mind, there is good evidence that each of the three populations can
be fairly described as selectively lacking in the former variety of memory
and awareness.
Frontal Lobes and Episodic Memory
The prefrontal cortex is, in many ways, the most intriguing area of the
brain. Comprising the cortical tissue in front of the motor and premotor
areas, it is well accepted that this area of the brain is important for some of
the most sophisticated types of cognitive functioning. The fact that the
human brain diers from nonhuman animals most noticeably in the
prefrontal cortex is also convergent with the general idea that this most
anterior area likely plays an important role in higher order varieties of
memory and conscious awareness.
Patients with frontal lobe damage seem to have an impoverished ability to
consciously recollect their past, even when they know about their past. This
is, of course, the distinction between autonoetic remembering and noetic
knowing. A growing body of literature attests to the reality of this
dissociation. Some of the best evidence comes from a phenomenon known
as source amnesia (Schacter, Harbluk, & McLachlan, 1984). The
phenomenon is said to occur when an individual can show the successful
learning of some new fact, yet without the ability to recollect where, or
how, the fact was learned. Dened this way, source amnesia is extremely
common. All of us know hundreds of thousands of facts and, for the vast
majority of them, we have no recollection of the origin of our knowledge. As
an example, while it is commonly known that Paris is the capital of France,
it is extremely dicult and usually impossible for any person to reect

back upon the instance in which the fact was originally learned. Therefore,
source amnesia is a compelling phenomenon only when it occurs after
recent learning episodes.
Brain lesions in the prefrontal cortex have been associated with source
amnesia. In the most direct demonstration, Janowsky, Shimamura, and
Squire (1989) asked both patients and control subjects to learn a series of
facts (e.g., the name of the dog on the Cracker Jack box was Bingo).
Following a delay of about one week, all participants returned and were
asked questions that were based on either the facts they had seen the
week before (e.g., What was the name of the dog on the Cracker Jack box?)
or new facts that had not been studied but were potentially known. The
patients had no trouble retrieving the learned information, as they recalled
as many facts as the control group. Where the groups diverged was on a
followup question that probed about the source of the recalled facts.
Patients were strikingly more likely to claim that the experimentally
learned facts had actually been learned at some other time, before the
experiment. They were also more likely to guess that a pre-experimentally
learned fact had been encountered during the study phase of the
experiment when in reality it had not.
The Janowsky et al. (1989) data represent an example of a dissociation
between episodic and semantic memory. Despite the presence of
pathology, patients updated their semantic knowledge at levels that, at
least in this experiment, were equivalent to that of healthy controls. On the
fact-recall measures, they showed unimpaired noetic awareness of recently
studied items. When faced with questions about source, however, there
were striking diculties. For most healthy adults, the source questions
were not dicult. To answer the question, one must simply remember
studying the fact one week before. Results imply that the prefrontal injuries
somehow prevented the episodic recollection of the study episode, even
when semantic memory was successfully updated during the episode.
Relations between frontal dysfunction and source amnesia have also been
demonstrated in elderly populations, through correlational measures.
Because the neurobiological changes that occur with aging occur primarily
in the prefrontal cortex (Haug et al., 1983), it is possible to apply ndings
from research in cognitive aging to questions about frontal-lobe
functioning, and vice versa (West, 1996). Of course, such applications must
be made carefully.
Older adults are especially prone to source amnesia (M clntyre & Craik,
1987; Schacter, Kaszniak, Kihlstrom, & Valdiserri, 1991). Even when fact
recall is equated between the two age groups, elderly subjects are much
more likely to make source errors. Also, the ability to remember the source
of learned facts is correlated with performance on other, nonmemory
measures that are especially sensitive to frontal injury, such as the
Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, and word uency tests (Craik, Morris, Morris, &
Loewen, 1990). The simple ability to recall facts was not correlated with
these measures. Similar correlations have been discovered in patients with
anterograde amnesia that had varying degrees of pathology extending into
the prefrontal cortex (Schacter et al., 1984). Across these three
populations, there is converging evidence for a dissociation between
autonoetic episodic recollection and semantic learning, with only the
former dependent upon the frontal lobes.
There is another way to assess the extent to which recalled or recognized
items are being autonoetically recollected. The logic behind the
remember/know task is relatively simpleif one wants to determine
whether research participants are retrieving episodic memories, then one
can simply ask them (see Gardiner, 1988; Gardiner, Richardson-Klavehn,
chapter 15). Following retrieval of a previously studied item, test
instructions ask subjects to respond remember, or R, for those items on
the list whose prior experience they can consciously reexperience. Know,
or K, responses represent the acknowledgment that the test item was
encountered on the specied study list, but in the absence of any conscious
recollection of its occurrence. The very fact that participants are readily
willing to make know responses is evidence that people can make
judgments about single episodes from the recent past without relying upon
episodic memory.
In one comparison, Parkin and Walter (1992) required both elderly and
young adults to study a list of items before taking a recognition test,
followed by remember/know instructions. More recently, Wheeler and Stuss
(unpublished) had both patients with focal prefrontal injuries and also
healthy controls make living/ nonliving decisions about study words before
giving similar tests. In all of these experiments, there was some relatively
minor eect of prefrontal pathology (or age) on the recognition tests. The
eect reached statistical signicance in the Parkin and Walter (1992)
studies. There was a much larger discrepancy between

the groups with respect to the episodic, or R, component. Patients with

prefrontal injuries had a much more dicult time reecting back on the
learning experience, as their R scores were signicantly lower than the
matched control subjects (unpublished research). The elderly subjects of
Parkin and Walter showed similarly depressed R scores, even when their
recognition scores were matched with the younger subjects. There were
substantial, signicant correlations between the episodic memory measure
(here, the R score) and performance on the WCST. Results from both
studies resemble the prior work with source amnesia, in that frontal-related
decits do not strongly impair the ability to learn from the past, but do
interfere with the autonoetic reliving of those past moments.

Autonoetic Awareness of the Present and Future

It is easy to nd dissociations between episodic
recollection and semantic knowing in prefrontal
patients. When the denitions of these varieties
of memorial awareness are made clear, it is
relatively straightforward to make the case that
one is impaired much more than the other. But
these studies present an incomplete picture of
autonoetic awareness and its relation to episodic
remembering. Recent writings on autonoetic
awareness suggest that it is not limited to the
personal past; it encompasses the awareness of
the self's experiences in the past, present, and
future (Tulving, 1993; Wheeler, Stuss, & Tulving,
1997). It follows that any individuals who are
unable to recollect their past should additionally
have diculty introspecting upon their current
thoughts, perceptions, and feelings, and also be
unable to mentally project themselves into the
future.
Assessing the capacity for autonoetic awareness of the present and future
is not an easy task, and it is hardly surprising that traditional cognitive and
neuroscientic experiments have had little to say on the matter. Still, there
exists a large clinical neuropsychological literature that bears upon the
consequences of prefrontal cortical injuries. From these case reports and
reviews, there is evidence from multiple converging sources that prefrontal
damage leads to a disruption in patients' conscious awareness.
Several clinicians have noted that their patients are uninterested in
themselves as persons, especially in their mental lives. In an early
summary, Ackerley and Benton (1947) noticed that their patients with
frontal damage seemed unable to self-reect, and lacked the ability to
daydream or engage in introspection. Alexander Luria (1973; Luria &
Homskaya, 1964) observed a number of patients with large frontal lesions,
and also reviewed many relevant case reports before concluding that a
primary symptom, present in virtually every patient, was a disturbance in
the critical attitude toward their own problems. The patients, according to
Luria, seemed unwilling to evaluate themselves and address their cognitive
or behavioral decits appropriately. In one nine-teenth-century case study,
DeNobele (1835, cited in Blumer & Benson, 1975) described an open-head-
injury patient with both massive prefrontal damage and blindness. The
patient seemed remarkable unconcerned about the blindness. It appears
that the mental changes that accompany large prefrontal injuries
encompass the disturbed awareness of personal experiences across time,
including a general lack of interest in those experiences.
Perhaps the largest single source of prefrontal patients came as a result of
the prefrontal leucotomy procedure, a psychosurgery that was popular in
the early and middle decades of this century (Moniz, 1936). With the goal
of relieving various psychiatric symptoms, the technique involved severing
the connections between the prefrontal cortex and the thalamus, thereby
disconnecting the most anterior brain regions from more posterior areas
and rendering the frontal lobes essentially useless. The benets of the
various leucotomies were never universally accepted, although several
reviews reported positive benets in a number of cases (Freeman, 1953;
Sweet, 1973). Critics of the procedure considered it to be unnecessarily
cruel (Valenstein, 1986) and, with the advent of psychotropic drugs, it was
largely abandoned.
Freeman and Watts (1950) published a comprehensive survey, describing
hundreds of individual cases of leucotomies and also drawing a number of
conclusions across the cases. Although Freeman and Watts described a
diverse range of postsurgical symptoms, they concluded that there was one
primary characteristic lacking in their postsurgical patients, and it was a
characteristic that was in abundance before the procedure. Their
conclusions resemble the earlier writings of William James as he talked
about the stream of consciousness and, because they do not cite James,
there is

no way to know whether or not the similarity was deliberate, or if they

independently realized the same ideas from their own unique approach.
They write:

There is a characteristic possessed by most human

beings that is conspicuous by its comparative absence in
these [patients] an awareness of being in some sort
the person that one was yesterday and will be tomorrow,
a sense (not often clearly conscious) of one's own self-
continuity, of the duration of one's essential identity
through changing experiences. Such self-continuity is
basic to all personality development, making possible a
feeling of responsibility for one's past and future
behavior. [Leucotomy] frees the patient from the
tyranny of his own past, from the anxious self-searching
that had become too terrible to endure, and at the same
time renders him largely indierent to future problems
and the opinions of other people. We hypothesize, then,
that psychosurgery alters the structure of the self
through reducing self-continuity, (p. 316)

A recurrent theme throughout the publications (Freeman & Watts, 1950;

Robinson & Freeman, 1954) is that frontal leucotomies change patients so
that they are no longer interested in the sorts of past, present, and future
problems that were so absorbing and incapacitating before the operations.
Although the patients knew all of the personal facts (noetic awareness)
that they did before, the facts were experienced with a lack of warmth and
intimacy that William James had attributed to the way humans typically
think about their lives.
Similar themes have appeared more recently. The healthy adult's conscious
states have been attributed to the brain's ability to access, somehow
simultaneously, information concerning the personal past, present, and
future (Ingvar, 1985). After reviewing a number of case studies, Ingvar
went on to consider the prefrontal cortex as important for foresight,
initiative, and memories of the future. Also, Donald Stuss has remarked
that the highest level of self-awareness is the ability to reect upon one's
own essence across time, and is dependent upon the full operations of
prefrontal cortex (Stuss, 1991; Stuss, Picton, & Alexander, in press). It
appears that episodic recollection of the past is one component of these
sophisticated, reective abilities.
Episodic Memory in Young Children
Children between the ages of about 1 and 5 years resemble patients with
frontal lobe lesions in one important respect: they are able to report about,
and know about, both facts of the world and things that have happened to
them, often without being able to consciously recollect the episodes upon
which that knowledge is based.
One conclusion about the memory abilities of young children is
inescapable: they are voracious learners, and routinely take in and retrieve
vast amounts of knowledge. It is during the rst several years that children
learn massive amounts of new information. They learn the meanings of
words and how to use those words in conversation. They also learn about
the identity of people, animals, and things, and how they are expected to
interact with those things. Because they are constantly updating and
extending their knowledge, children above the age of 1 year must have, at
a minimum, a functioning semantic memory that can be expressed through
noetic awareness.
The semantic memory skills of young children are not limited to general,
timeless concepts such as the meaning of the word bench or the way to
behave around a houseguest. Infants as young as 8 months have shown
impressive recall of information that was tied to a single event in their
past. Evidence comes largely from a line of research called deferred
imitation. In a common variant of the task, the child is an observer as an
adult performs a series of actions with props. After a delay, the child is
handed the props and given the chance to actively imitate what has been
seen. Infants as young as 9 months are capable of imitating single actions
(e.g., pressing a button on a box) that they had witnessed the previous day
(Meltzo, 1988). Performance on deferred imitation tasks becomes
gradually more sophisticated throughout the next several months. Infants
between the ages of 13 and 20 months at encoding later showed aspects of
nonverbal and verbal recall of witnessed event sequences at retention
intervals of up to 12 months (Bauer & Wewerka, 1995). Delayed recall
resembles knowledge-based semantic memory much more than simple
procedural, or motor, learning (McDonough, Mandler, McKee, & Squire,
1995).
Based on deferred imitation studies, it is tempting to attribute healthy
infants with the

operations of episodic memory. By the middle of the second year, a child

can recognize and recall things that occurred several weeks before. The
child has also learned to answer questions about things that he has
encountered, although responses are typically limited to single words
(Howe & Courage, 1993) or to short phrases that were identical or highly
similar to those used by the experimenter at the time of study. It is safe to
attribute the infants with event memory.
But event memory and event recall cannot be equated with episodic
memory. Although a young child's verbal or nonverbal recall of a particular
event seems like compelling proof of episodic memory, evidence from other
sources suggests that for a period of at least several more months, young
children are without the capacity to recollect their past in the rich,
personal way that comprises episodic retrieval.
The most ideal tests of episodic remembering involve measures that
require individuals to consciously reexperience some prior episode in order
to complete the task. In practice, it is often dicult to design such a task
and, with children, the enterprise becomes even more complicated. One
example of a test that likely cannot be used with children is the
remember/know test. If a child is truly preepisodic and has not yet
developed the capacity to experience her past autonoetically, it will not
make any sense to ask her to distinguish between remembering and
knowing. Evidence that such terms are problematic for young children was
reported by Johnson and Wellman (1980). (It is interesting that this study
appeared many years before the formal cognitive distinction between
remembering and knowing.) They concluded that 4-year-olds were oblivious
to dierences between cases of remembering, knowing, and guessing,
although in some cases they could distinguish their mental state from an
externally perceived state. Five-year-olds showed some ability to
dierentiate these mental states, while a group of rst graders had a very
good understanding of these terms. It is unlikely that this is a simple
vocabulary problem, as kids at that age are fully capable of acquiring and
using words and concepts that are much more sophisticated than words
like know and guess. Diculties with these words likely stems from the
inability to monitor one's own mental life.
Much of the relevant episodic-memory data derives from experiments that
are analogous to the studies of source memory previously discussed with
respect to patients with prefrontal lesions. Once again, the evidence
strongly implies that young children are able to report about learned
information before they can reect back upon the learning episode. One of
the most striking examples of source amnesia in children comes from
experiments by Gopnik and Graf (1988). They asked 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old
children to learn about the contents of a drawer in one of three dierent
ways. On some trials, children saw things that were in the drawer, in other
cases they were simply told what was there, while other times they were
given enough information to accurately infer what was in the drawer.
Memory for both item (What is inside this drawer?) and source
information (How do you know what is insidedid you see it, did I tell you
about it, or did you gure it out?) was assessed both immediately after
learning and also following a brief delay. There were no age dierences in
item recall; even at the longer retention interval, the recall of 3-year-olds
was virtually indistinguishable from that of 5-year-olds.
On the test for source, older children had little diculty and made very few
mistakes. The majority of 3-year-olds were unable to answer the questions
at levels much higher than chance, although one-third of them made no
errors at all. The authors took the additional step of giving some of the
children explicit training to ensure that they understood the dierences
among seeing, inferring, and being told about something. Even the
additional instructions could not help the children travel back in their own
minds to relive the learning event. Very similar results were obtained in
other reports (Wimmer, Hogrefe, & Perner, 1988; O'Neill & Gopnik, 1991).
Findings suggest that young children do not, or cannot, represent their
knowledge as deriving from a particular time in the personal past (e.g., I
saw that there are crayons in that box), but rather as detached,
impersonal knowledge (e.g., There are crayons in the box).
The studies just described may even overestimate children's abilities to
understand how they learned information. The critical test questions used
by Gopnik and Graf (1988) and the others only asked the children to
discriminate between dierent intraexperimental sources (seeing, hearing,
inferring). Many children cannot acknowledge the simple fact that a
recently learned bit of information has been acquired recently (Taylor,
Esbensen, & Bennett, 1994).

In one experiment, 4-and 5-year-old children were taught unfamiliar color

names (e.g., chartreuse, taupe). All children learned the colors easily, and
were soon able to select items from an array according to color. They were
then questioned about when they had learned the color names. Incredibly,
a large majority of the 4-year-olds claimed to have always known the
names, and very few could acknowledge that they had been taught the
colors that day. The 5-year-olds performed markedly better, although a few
of them consistently made this same source error. Across several
experiments, the authors showed that young children typically are unaware
of recent learning events, and claim that they have known recently learned
information for a long time.
It is instructive to contrast the kinds of memory tasks that young children
can and cannot perform. Recall that on deferred imitation tasks children
younger than age 3 can reproduce complex, previously witnessed events in
the correct temporal order after lengthy retention intervals (Bauer, 1996).
Yet children the same age and even older cannot answer simple questions
about recent study episodes. The dierence between these tasks is surely
not one of complexity or diculty; to a healthy adult, it would seem much
easier to answer source questions of the type posed by Gopnik and Graf
(1988) than to reconstruct action sequences that had been witnessed
weeks earlier. The dierence must involve some conceptual limitation on
the part of 3and 4-year-old children; although they can learn complex
actions from single events, they cannot reect on their experience of the
events by mentally traveling back in time to relive them.
Conscious Awareness in Young Children
Individuals are said to possess autonoetic awareness when they are able to
reect upon their past, introspect on their current thoughts, and actively
anticipate their future. It is not dicult to show that these acts gradually
develop through childhood. Unfortunately, simply proving that autonoetic
behaviors gradually emerge with increasing age would not make for a very
compelling argument for the distinctiveness of these behaviors. That is
because all complex mental and behavioral repertoires, autonoetic and
otherwise, surely become more sophisticated throughout childhood.
The way to make the case for the relatively late emergence of autonoetic,
as opposed to noetic, behaviors is to nd situations in which young children
show impressive amounts of knowledge that can be expressed noetically,
yet seem unable to reect upon the fact that they have the knowledge (i.e.,
attend to their mental states directly). Problems with autonoetic awareness
of the past have already been described in the section on memory. Perner
(chapter 19) relates many of the episodic memory phenomena to other
changes in children's awareness between the ages of about 2 and 6 years.
There are several themes running through the developmental literature
that strongly imply that young children achieve sophisticated levels of
knowledge well before they are capable of attending directly to their
experiences in the past, present, and future. Three-and 4-year-old children
know many things, but cannot solve problems that require them to
introspect!very inspect their own minds (Gopnik & Slaughter, 1991). As
an example, below the age of 5, children cannot reect upon recently
learned knowledge to overcome prepotent response tendencies in card-
sorting tasks (Zelazo, Frye, & Rapus, 1996). Similarly, it has been
suggested that preschoolers are not even aware of the continuous stream
of consciousness that is their own mental life, and they therefore lack the
ability to reect upon their own conscious states (Flavell, 1993). These are
good descriptions of the kinds of things that an autonoetic organism should
be able to do.
With respect to planning and anticipating the future, it is accepted that
there are marked changes between the ages of 3 and 5 in children's ability
and inclination to make plans (see Zelazo, Carter, Reznick, & Frye, 1997).
Unfortunately, it is dicult to know the extent to which those changes
reect the emergence of autonoetic awareness, or if they involve mainly
the learning of new strategies and coping skills.
Medial Temporal Lobe Patients
Very recently, published reports describe another population that
demonstrates a variant of the episodic-semantic dissociation. A group led
by Faraneh Vargha-Khadem (Vargha-Khadem et al., 1997)

has identied a few patients with anterograde amnesia; the patients had
anoxic episodes as children (one virtually at birth, another at age 4, and
the other at age 9), and have bilateral pathology that is restricted almost
completely to the hippocampus. All suered their trauma over 10 years
prior to the study. They were brought to the attention of the researchers
because of their severe problems whenever they attempt to remember
events. None of the three was capable of taking on the types of
responsibilities that are commensurate with other young adults. Formal
neuropsychological testing was consistent with these observations, as all
three were found to be severely impaired whenever they attempted to
recall information that had been presented more than a few minutes
earlier.
From the description so far, the patients' proles match those of typical
anterograde amnesics: profound losses in the ability to remember things
that have occurred since the traumatic episode. But these three share one
capability that sets them apart from the majority of patients with damage
in the medial temporal regions: all of them have fared very well in
mainstream education. Despite a seemingly complete loss of the ability to
remember posttraumatic events, they are fully competent in speech and
language, and have acquired seemingly normal levels of factual knowledge
about the world. All three are within the normal range on the vocabulary,
information, and comprehension subtests of the Intelligence Quotient scale
(Vargha-Khadem et al., 1997). These retained bits of knowledge are
expressed condently and exibly, with noetic awareness only; both
anecdotal reports and formal testing strongly imply that the patients know
many things and remember nothing.
These patients show a dierent pattern of learning and memory decits
than previously reported amnesics. The classic patient HM, for example,
who had bilateral surgical excision of much of his medial temporal cortex
(Scoville & Milner, 1957), exhibits clear losses in the learning of both new
semantic knowledge (Cohen & Eichenbaum, 1994; Gabrieli, Cohen, &
Corkin, 1988) and the recollection of postsurgical episodes (Milner, Corkin,
& Teuber, 1968). Ostergaard (1987) studied a patient who, like the Vargha-
Khadem et al. patients, became amnesic during childhood; after assessing
the patient's progression for the next several years, the conclusion was that
both episodic and semantic memory were severely disrupted.
Discrepancies between dierent outcomes are probably related to the
specics of the underlying pathology. A recent magnetic resonance imaging
study with patient HM showed that the surgical excision had removed the
rostral portion of both hippocampi, and also much of the surrounding
entorhinal and perirhinal cortices (Corkin, Amaral, Gonzalez, Johnson, &
Hyman, 1997). Similarly, Ostergaard's patient's lesion included the entire
left hippocampus as well as the parahippocampal cortical areas. By
contrast, the Vargha-Khadem patients all had bilateral lesions in the
hippocampus proper with very little or no damage to the surrounding
cortices. It was suggested that the integrity of these surrounding cortices is
sucient to allow for the entry of information into semantic memory, while
additional processing from the hippocampus is necessary for episodic
encoding (Mishkin, Suzuki, Gadian, & Vargha-Khadem, 1997).
Because these ndings have been reported so recently, many questions
remain unanswered. For example, although the patients clearly fail to show
autonoetic awareness of the past, there is currently no way to know about
their ability to reect upon the personal present and future through such
acts as introspection, planning, and anticipation. Therefore, it remains a
possibility that the relation between these acts and episodic remembering
is not evident in all populations. The further examination of these three
patients and other similar patients is sure to provide new information about
the neural substrates of the dierent varieties of memory and conscious
awareness.
Conclusions
Episodic memory is the system of memory that allows us to experience the
world autonoetically. It is this dimensionthe ability to mentally travel
through timethat is not shared by any other system or variety of memory.
Other kinds of memory (semantic knowledge, stimulus-response
strengthening, perceptual priming) are tied to the present momentthat
is, one need not have any conscious awareness of the past or future to
utilize these nonepisodic varieties of memory. Episodic memory and
autonoetic awareness are not obligatory for an organism to recall,
recognize, report, or otherwise use information that was acquired in a
recent, single episode. Indeed, the evidence reported in this

chapter implies this point more strongly than any other. Although the
verbal recall or recognition of a recently studied fact, or the deferred
imitation of witnessed behaviors, may appear to an observer to be
compelling evidence for an operational episodic memory system, a number
of clever experiments have suggested otherwise. Individuals may know
many things about the world, including the personal past, but be unable to
mentally travel back in time to recollect the experiences upon which the
knowledge is based.
Episodic remembering bears a close family resemblance to other higher
order mental achievements (e.g., introspecting, daydreaming, anticipating)
that are not typically considered to be acts of memory. The patients with
large prefrontal lesions show these relations the most clearly, although
children between the ages of about 1 and 5 years demonstrate many
analogous symptoms. While neither population is amnesic, several dierent
researchers have independently remarked that both groups do not seem to
have the same kind of mental life as healthy, adult humans. They do not
merely show a dissociation between semantic and episodic memory of the
past; they appear to be more generally unable or unwilling to reect upon
their subjective experiences in the past, present, or future (see Wheeler et
al., 1997, for a longer discussion of these populations). It is too early to
know whether or not these relations will be evident in the amnesic patients
reported by Vargha-Khadem and colleagues (1997).