Abstract:

An important issue of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience is the taxonomic redundancy of memory systems supported by psychological experimental tasks dissociations and clinical data. We will adress the issue of the neurocognitive specificity as a necessary condition for validating a memory system. We will also argue that the recent neuroscientific data about the plasticity of different brain structures, especially the medial temporal lobe and neocortex, suggest that there is a single episodic memory system. The model we propose here argues that the episodic encoding is a necessary condition for explicit retrieval.

Keywords: memory systems, consciousness, neuropsychology of memory