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Glite Dictionary
🧠 Remembering life events 🤖 AI event recall
episodic memory

episodic memory

1 6.3
The ability to remember specific events from your own life with their details
  • noun
  • /ˌɛpɪˈsɒdɪk ˈmɛməri/
  • Specialized
: memoria episódica
  • In general, older participants with better episodic memory, working memory, and attention abilities performed better on the comprehension task for the Good Dog Carl and Picnic stories.

You know, I, I have some vague episodic memory of this.

Examples

  • Whereas episodic memory deals with your memories of past events.

    Remember Me (2022)

  • It becomes an episodic memory that all of us can exactly remember what we were thinking, what we were doing when we saw it.

  • To a large extent, surveys of sexual behavior require respondents to tap into episodic memories of prior sexual experiences.

    Academic text (2003)

  • Episodic memory is cued by time, and semantic memory is cued by "what."

    Academic text (1997)

  • My episodic memory allows me to vividly recall my family's vacation to the beach last summer.

  • During the therapy session, she shared an episodic memory of her childhood birthday party.

  • Researchers study episodic memory to understand how people remember personal experiences and their contexts.

Synonyms

personal memory
vsepisodic memory
2 3.8

An event from a person's life that they can remember

includes surrounding context and detailed aspects of those events

How Exact

episodic memory
  • Specialized
1 6.3
recollection
116 3.8
reconstructive memory
  • Specialized
8.9
semantic memory
  • Specialized
5.8

Surface Forms

episodic memory singular
episodic memories plural

Morphology

episodic + memory

The phrase combines 'episodic' (relating to discrete episodes or events) with 'memory' (the ability to store and retrieve information), so its meaning — memory for specific episodes or events — is directly compositional. This construction follows a common adjective+noun pattern and is cross-linguistically transparent, so a B1 learner who knows both constituents can infer the MWE's meaning.

Etymology

Episodic memory comes from thinking of life as a series of small episodes—like short scenes or photos of things that happened to you. So episodic memory means remembering those 'specific events' and their details.