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Psychological
Bulletin
1997,
Vol. 121,
No. 3,
331-354
Copyright
1997
by the
American
Psychological
Association,
Inc.
0033-2909/97/$3.00
Toward
a
Theory
of
Episodic Memory:
The
Frontal Lobes
and
Autonoetic
Consciousness
Mark
A.
Wheeler, Donald
T.
Stuss,
and
Endel
Tulving
Rotman
Research Institute
of
Baycrest Centre
and
University
of
Toronto
Adult humans
are
capable
of
remembering
prior
events
by
mentally
traveling
back
in
time
to re-
experience
those
events.
In
this
review,
the
authors
discuss
this
and
other
related
capabilities,
consider-
ing
evidence
from such
diverse
sources
as
brain
imaging,
neuropsychological
experiments,
clinical
observations,
and
developmental
psychology.
The
evidence
supports
a
preliminary
theory
of
episodic
remembering,
which
holds
that
the
prefrontal
cortex
plays
a
critical,
supervisory
role
in
empowering
healthy
adults
with
autonoetic
consciousness—the
capacity
to
mentally
represent
and
become
aware
of
subjective
experiences
in the
past,
present,
and
future.
When
a
rememberer
mentally
travels
back
in
subjective
time
to
re-experience
his or her
personal
past,
the
result
is an act of
retrieval
from
episodic
memory.
One of the
most fascinating achievements
of the
human mind
is the
ability
to
mentally travel through time.
It is
somehow
possible
for a
person
to
relive experiences
by
thinking back
to
previous situations
and
happenings
in the
past
and to
mentally
project
oneself into
the
anticipated
future
through imagination,
daydreams,
and
fantasies.
In the
everyday world,
the
most com-
mon
manifestation
of
this ability
can be
referred
to as '
'remem-
bering
past
happenings."
Everyone knows what this phrase
means
and
what
it is
like
to
reflect
on
personal experiences,
past
or
future,
that
are not
part
of the
present.
Although
mental time travel
is
clearly related
to
memory,
it
is
interesting that
in
very
few of the
countless articles, chapters,
and
books that have been written
on the
topic
of
memory have
researchers
paid attention
to the
conscious
act of
remembering
personal experiences.
Of
course, there have been some notable
exceptions
to
this claim.
In
general, most models
and
theories
of
memory
focus
on the
structures
or
processes
by
which
infor-
mation
is
encoded, stored,
or
retrieved, with little interest
to the
actual experience
of
remembering.
We
propose that
the
ability
to
mentally travel through time
is
an
expression
of the
episodic memory system
of the
brain
and
that this ability
is not
shared
by
other systems
of
memory.
In
what
follows,
we
intend
to
show that episodic memory,
and
Mark
A.
Wheeler
and
Endel
Tulving,
Rotman
Research
Institute
of
Baycrest
Centre,
and
Department
of
Psychology,
University
of
Toronto,
Toronto,
Ontario,
Canada;
Donald
T.
Stuss,
Rotman
Research
Institute
of
Baycrest
Centre,
and
Departments
of
Psychology
and of
Medicine
(Neurology),
University
of
Toronto,
Toronto,
Ontario,
Canada.
Research
was
funded
by the
Anne
and Max
Tanenbaum
Chair
in
Cognitive
Neuroscience,
the
National
Sciences
and
Engineering
Re-
search
Council
of
Canada
(NSERC),
the
Ontario
Mental
Health
Founda-
tion,
and the
Medical
Research
Council
of
Canada.
We
thank
Gus
Craik,
Terry
Picton,
Morris
Moscovitch,
and
Philip
D.
Zelazo
for
helpful
com-
ments
on
this
article.
Correspondence
concerning
this
article
should
be
addressed
to
Mark
A.
Wheeler,
Department
of
Psychology,
University
of
Toronto, Toronto,
Ontario,
Canada
M5S
1A1.
Electronic
mail
may be
sent
via
Internet
to
markw
@
psych.toronto.edu.
therefore
the act of
remembering through mental time travel,
is
a
special kind
of
mind-brain
achievement that bears only
a
superficial
resemblance
to
other things that
can be
classified
under
the
rubric
of
memory
and
that
it can be
studied
on its
own
and in its
interaction
with
other mental faculties.
The
theory
of
episodic memory that
we
eventually propose
here would
not
have been possible,
or at
least could
not
have
been readily defended,
a few
years
ago.
The timing of the
pro-
posal
is
rendered more reasonable now, largely because
of
recent
findings
in
psychology
and
cognitive neuroscience, especially
those provided
by the
functional
neuroimaging
of
remembering.
In
the
last several years, researchers have shown
an
increasing
amount
of
evidence that links
the
operations
of
episodic memory
to the
frontal
lobes
of the
brain
(Schacter,
1987; Tulving,
1985).
Squire
(1987)
associated
frontal
pathology with
a
loss
of
"per-
sonal familiarity
and
connectedness"
to
recent events. More
recently,
in a
series
of
articles
on findings
from
positron emis-
sion
tomography (PET) studies,
Tulving,
Kapur,
Craik, Mosco-
vitch,
and
Houle
(1994)
linked
the
left
prefrontal cortex with
episodic encoding
and the right
prefrontal cortex with episodic
retrieval. Since then,
the
overall pattern
has
been
further
corrob-
orated
in a
number
of PET
studies
(reviewed
by
Nyberg,
Ca-
beza,
&
Tulving,
1996),
suggesting that, despite early skepticism
(Roskies,
1994),
this relation between episodic memory
and
the
frontal
lobes represents
a
reliable
fact
of the
neuroanatomy
of
remembering.
The PET findings
were
the
prime inspiration
for
this review
in
which
we
consider research
from
other scientific approaches
that bear
on the
neuroanatomical
correlates
of
episodic remem-
bering
and on the
cognitive
and
behavioral abilities subserved
by
the
frontal
lobes.
The
research
has
resulted
in a
preliminary
theory
of
episodic memory.
The
theory holds that
the
frontal
lobes
underlie
a
special kind
of
consciousness called autonoetic
consciousness, which allows healthy human adults
to
both men-
tally
represent
and
become aware
of
their subjective experiences
in
the
past, present,
and
future.
Autonoetic consciousness
is
important
for
many
of the
most complex abilities, including
the
ability
to
perform mental time travel
in the
personal, subjective
way
that
is the
hallmark
of
retrieval
from
episodic
memory.
It
331
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