Endel Tulving
Remembering an event and knowing a fact are not the same.
Estonian-Canadian cognitive psychologist known for distinguishing episodic and semantic memory.
Memory is not one system; different kinds of knowing depend on different processes.
Who they were
Endel Tulving showed that memory is not one thing. Recalling a particular morning is a different kind of knowing than knowing the capital of a country. He named these episodic and semantic memory, and described the mental time travel that lets us re-enter our past and imagine our future.
Famous books
What they left on the shelf
Terms they cared about
Ideas worth knowing
Their techniques
How the work was done
Best known as a theorist — their ideas shaped the techniques of those who followed.
Their big idea
Memory Systems
Endel Tulving proposed that human memory is made of distinct systems — episodic memory for personally experienced events and semantic memory for general knowledge — with retrieval shaped by the match between encoding and recall cues.
Questions in their spirit
What they’d ask you
Sit with one. Answer online, or in the app.
Carry the idea forward
Tulving — What they’d ask you
Psipas asks you one small, honest question at a time — and builds the picture from your answers.