ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses what is known about successful storage of information in episodic memory. It focuses on basic cognitive and neuroscience research on the factors and mechanisms that contribute to good episodic memory in healthy participants. A key element of Bartlett’s approach to memory was his emphasis on how people actively and inevitably seek meaning in new experiences, and, in doing so, impose their own organization on the events they perceive in the world, often through schemas. Participants’ goal was to learn to recall as many words as they could, and to increase this amount over repetitions. Systems consolidation is thought to reflect the gradual elimination of the role of the hippocampus, and the progressive increase in importance of cortical representations in storing and retrieving an event, sometimes characterized as the transfer of memories to neocortex.
