Endel Tulving (born May 26, 1927) is an Estonian-born Canadian experimental psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist. In his research on human
memory
Memory is the faculty of the mind by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. It is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action. If past events could not be remembered, ...
he proposed the distinction between
semantic
Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and comput ...
and
episodic memory
Episodic memory is the memory of everyday events (such as times, location geography, associated emotions, and other contextual information) that can be explicitly stated or conjured. It is the collection of past personal experiences that occurred ...
. Tulving is a professor
emeritus
''Emeritus'' (; female: ''emerita'') is an adjective used to designate a retired chair, professor, pastor, bishop, pope, director, president, prime minister, rabbi, emperor, or other person who has been "permitted to retain as an honorary title ...
at the
University of Toronto
The University of Toronto (UToronto or U of T) is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution ...
. He joined the Rotman Research Institute at
Baycrest Health Sciences
Baycrest Health Sciences is a research and teaching hospital for the elderly in the North York district of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is fully affiliated with the University of Toronto. Baycrest was originally founded in 1918 as the Toronto J ...
in 1992 as the first Anne and Max Tanenbaum Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience and remained there until his retirement in 2010. In 2006, he was named an Officer of the
Order of Canada
The Order of Canada (french: Ordre du Canada; abbreviated as OC) is a Canadian state order and the second-highest honour for merit in the system of orders, decorations, and medals of Canada, after the Order of Merit.
To coincide with the ...
, Canada's highest civilian honour.
Biography
Tulving was born in
Petseri
Pechory (russian: Печо́ры; Estonian and Seto: ') is a town and the administrative centre of Pechorsky District in the Pskov Oblast, Russia. Its population in the 2010 Census was 11,195, having fallen from 13,056 recorded in ...
, Estonia, in 1927. In 1944, following the Soviet re-occupation of Estonia, Tulving (then 17 years old) and his younger brother Hannes were separated from their family and sent to live in Germany. In Germany, he finished high school and worked as a teacher and interpreter for the U.S. army. He briefly studied medicine at
Heidelberg University
}
Heidelberg University, officially the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg, (german: Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg; la, Universitas Ruperto Carola Heidelbergensis) is a public research university in Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg, ...
before he immigrated to Canada in 1949. In 1950, he married Ruth Mikkelsaar, a fellow Estonian from
Tartu
Tartu is the second largest city in Estonia after the Northern European country's political and financial capital, Tallinn. Tartu has a population of 91,407 (as of 2021). It is southeast of Tallinn and 245 kilometres (152 miles) northeast of ...
whom he had met at a refugee camp in Germany. They had three daughters: Elo Ann, Ruth, and Linda.
Tulving completed a bachelor's (1953) and master's degree (1954) from the
University of Toronto
The University of Toronto (UToronto or U of T) is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution ...
, and earned a PhD in experimental psychology (1957) from
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...
. His doctoral dissertation was on the topic of oculomotor adjustments and visual acuity.
In 1956, Tulving accepted a lectureship at the University of Toronto as a lecturer, where he would remain for the rest of his career. He served as Chair of the Department of Psychology from 1974 to 1980, and became a Professor in 1985. As of 2019, he holds the titles of Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto and Visiting Professor of Psychology at
Washington University in St. Louis
Washington University in St. Louis (WashU or WUSTL) is a private research university with its main campus in St. Louis County, and Clayton, Missouri. Founded in 1853, the university is named after George Washington. Washington University is r ...
.
Research
Tulving has published at least 200 research articles and chapters, and he is widely cited, with an
h-index
The ''h''-index is an author-level metric that measures both the productivity and citation impact of the publications, initially used for an individual scientist or scholar. The ''h''-index correlates with obvious success indicators such as winn ...
of 69 (as of April, 2010), and in a ''
Review of General Psychology
''Review of General Psychology'' is the quarterly scientific journal of the American Psychological Association Division 1: The Society for General Psychology. The journal publishes cross-disciplinary psychological articles that are conceptual, th ...
'' survey, published in 2002, he ranked as the 36th most cited psychologist of the 20th century. His published works in 1970s were particularly notable because it coincided with the new determination by many cognitive psychologists to confirm their theories in neuroscience using brain-imaging techniques. During this period, Tulving mapped the areas of the brain, which are considered active during the encoding and retrieval of memory, effectively associating the medial temporal lobe and the hippocampus with episodic memory. Tulving has published work on a variety of other topics, including the importance of mental organization of information in memory, a model of brain hemisphere specialization for episodic memory, and discovery of the Tulving-Wiseman function.
Episodic and semantic memory
Tulving first made the distinction between episodic and
semantic memory
Semantic memory refers to general world knowledge that humans have accumulated throughout their lives. This general knowledge (word meanings, concepts, facts, and ideas) is intertwined in experience and dependent on culture. We can learn about n ...
in a 1972 book chapter. Episodic memory is the ability to consciously recollect previous experiences from memory (e.g., recalling a recent family trip to Disney World), whereas semantic memory is the ability to store more general knowledge in memory (e.g., the fact that Disney World is in Florida). This distinction was based on theoretical grounds and experimental psychology findings, and subsequently was linked to different neural systems in the brain by studies of brain damage and neuroimaging techniques. At the time, this type of theorizing represented a major departure from many contemporary theories of human learning and memory, which did not emphasize different kinds of subjective experience or brain systems. Tulving's 1983 book ''Elements of Episodic Memory'' elaborated on these concepts, and has been cited over 3000 times. According to Tulving, the ability to travel back and forward in time mentally is unique to humans and this is made possible by the autonoetic consciousness and is the essence of episodic memory.
Encoding specificity principle
Tulving's theory of "encoding specificity" emphasizes the importance of retrieval cues in accessing episodic memories. The theory states that effective retrieval cues must overlap with the to-be-retrieved memory trace. Because the contents of the memory trace are primarily established during the initial encoding of the experience, retrieval cues will be maximally effective if they are similar to this encoded information. Tulving has dubbed the process through which a retrieval cue activates a stored memory "synergistic ecphory".
One implication of the encoding specificity principle is that forgetting may be caused by the lack of appropriate retrieval cues, as opposed to decay of a memory trace over time or interference from other memories. Another implication is that there is more information stored in memory relative to what can be retrieved at any given point (i.e., availability vs. accessibility).
Amnesia and consciousness
Tulving's research has emphasized the importance of episodic memory for our experience of consciousness and our understanding of time. For example, he conducted studies with the amnesic patient KC, who had relatively normal semantic memory but severely impaired episodic memory due to brain damage from a motorcycle accident. Tulving's work with KC highlighted the central importance of episodic memory for the subjective experience of one's self in time, an ability he dubbed "autonoetic consciousness". KC lacked this ability, failing to remember prior events and also failing to imagine or plan for the future. Tulving also developed a cognitive task to measure different subjective states in memory, called the "remember"/"know" procedure. This task has been used extensively in cognitive psychology and neuroscience.
Implicit memory and priming
Tulving made a distinction between conscious or
explicit memory
Explicit memory (or declarative memory) is one of the two main types of long-term human memory, the other of which is implicit memory. Explicit memory is the conscious, intentional recollection of factual information, previous experiences, and con ...
(such as episodic memory) and more automatic forms of
implicit memory
In psychology, implicit memory is one of the two main types of long-term human memory. It is acquired and used unconsciously, and can affect thoughts and behaviours. One of its most common forms is procedural memory, which allows people to perfo ...
(such as
priming
Priming may refer to:
* Priming (agriculture), a form of seed planting preparation, in which seeds are soaked before planting
* Priming (immunology), a process occurring when a specific antigen is presented to naive lymphocytes causing them to di ...
). Along with one of his students,
Daniel Schacter
Daniel Lawrence Schacter (born June 17, 1952) is an American psychologist. He is a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. His research has focused on psychological and biological aspects of human memory and amnesia, with a particular empha ...
, Tulving provided several key experimental findings regarding implicit memory. The distinction between implicit and explicit memory was a topic of debate in the 1980s and 1990s. Tulving and colleagues proposed that these different memory phenomena reflected different brain systems. Others argued that these different memory phenomena reflected different psychological processes, rather than different memory systems. These processes would be instantiated in the brain, but they might reflect different aspects of performance from the same memory system, triggered by different task conditions. More recently, theorists have come to adopt components of each of these perspectives.
Estonian Studies Foundation
In 1982, architect
Elmar Tampõld
Elmar Tampõld (August 3, 1920 – March 7, 2013) was an
Olev Träss
Olev Träss (born 1931 in Tartu) is an Estonian chemist who lives in Canada. He is a promoter of Estonian community in Canada.
He has graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) i ...
. The three men made the initial presentation to the University of Toronto and Tampõld became the Chairman of the Board of Directors for the Chair of Estonian Studies Foundation.University of Toronto: Estonian Studies Programme Since 1999, Jüri Kivimäe, Professor of History and Chair of Estonian Studies has headed the University of Toronto's Elmar Tampõld Chair of Estonian Studies.
Honours and awards
Tulving is a member of seven distinguished societies: Fellow,
Royal Society of Canada
The Royal Society of Canada (RSC; french: Société royale du Canada, SRC), also known as the Academies of Arts, Humanities and Sciences of Canada (French: ''Académies des arts, des lettres et des sciences du Canada''), is the senior national, bil ...
; Foreign Member,
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences ( sv, Kungliga Vetenskapsakademien) is one of the Swedish Royal Academies, royal academies of Sweden. Founded on 2 June 1739, it is an independent, non-governmental scientific organization that takes special ...
; Fellow,
Royal Society of London
The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, re ...
; Foreign Honorary Member,
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and ...
; Foreign Associate,
National Academy of Sciences
The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nati ...
; Foreign Member,
Academia Europaea
The Academia Europaea is a pan-European Academy of Humanities, Letters, Law, and Sciences.
The Academia was founded in 1988 as a functioning Europe-wide Academy that encompasses all fields of scholarly inquiry. It acts as co-ordinator of Europea ...
; and Foreign Member,
Estonian Academy of Sciences
Founded in 1938, the Estonian Academy of Sciences ( et, Eesti Teaduste Akadeemia) is Estonia's national academy of science in Tallinn. As with other national academies, it is an independent group of well-known scientists whose stated aim is to ...
American Psychological Association
The American Psychological Association (APA) is the largest scientific and professional organization of psychologists in the United States, with over 133,000 members, including scientists, educators, clinicians, consultants, and students. It ha ...
Canadian Psychological Association
The Canadian Psychological Association (CPA) is the primary organization representing psychologists throughout Canada. It was organized in 1939 and incorporated under the Canada Corporations Act, Part II, in May 1950.
Its objectives are to imp ...
* 1994: Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in Psychological Science,
American Psychological Foundation
The American Psychological Foundation (abbreviated APF) is an American philanthropic organization dedicating to awarding research grants to psychologists in the early stages of their careers. It is affiliated with the American Psychological Associ ...
* 1994:
Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Prize
The Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Prize was established according to the will of Dorothy J. Killam to honour the memory of her husband Izaak Walton Killam.
Five Killam Prizes, each having a value of $100,000, are annually awarded by the Canada Cou ...
,
Canada Council
The Canada Council for the Arts (french: Conseil des arts du Canada), commonly called the Canada Council, is a Crown corporation established in 1957 as an arts council of the Government of Canada. It acts as the federal government's principal i ...
* 2005:
Canada Gairdner International Award
The Canada Gairdner International Award is given annually by the Gairdner Foundation at a special dinner to five individuals for outstanding discoveries or contributions to medical science. Receipt of the Gairdner is traditionally considered a p ...
,
Gairdner Foundation
The Gairdner Foundation is a non-profit organization devoted to the recognition of outstanding achievements in biomedical research worldwide. It was created in 1957 by James Arthur Gairdner to recognize and reward the achievements of medical resea ...
* 2006: Officer of the
Order of Canada
The Order of Canada (french: Ordre du Canada; abbreviated as OC) is a Canadian state order and the second-highest honour for merit in the system of orders, decorations, and medals of Canada, after the Order of Merit.
To coincide with the ...
* 2007: Inducted into the
Canadian Medical Hall of Fame __NOTOC__
The Canadian Medical Hall of Fame is a Canadian charitable organization, founded in 1994, that honours Canadians who have contributed to the understanding of disease and improving the health of people. It has an exhibit hall in London, O ...