rom nonsense syllables learned to a metronome to engrams tagged in a mouse brain: how memory went from a store to be measured to a reconstruction to be explained. Dates are of publication.

in the tour: the red room has a placard called "Tulving: episodic memory" ···

1885	Ebbinghaus, Über das Gedächtnis (Ebbinghaus, 1885): nonsense syllables, savings and the forgetting curve.
1894	Müller & Schumann describe the memory drum, which paces presentation mechanically.
1900	Müller & Pilzecker: new learning can disrupt recent memories; they name the process of settling consolidation.
1932	Bartlett, Remembering (Bartlett, 1932): serial reproduction and the schema. Archive page.
1956	Miller: the span of immediate memory is limited, and chunking stretches it.
1957	Scoville & Milner report the patient H.M., whose new long-term memories failed after hippocampal surgery; Squire (2009) reviews the legacy.
1959	Peterson & Peterson: single items are forgotten within seconds when rehearsal is blocked.
1960	Sperling: partial report reveals a brief, rich visual store. Archive page.
1967	Neisser, Cognitive Psychology, names iconic memory.
1972	Tulving distinguishes episodic from semantic memory.
1974	Loftus & Palmer: the verb in a question ("smashed" or "hit") changes speed estimates and later reports of broken glass.
1977	Brown & Kulik name flashbulb memories.
1992	Neisser & Harsch: students' accounts of hearing about the Challenger disaster, tested the next day and again years later, often changed completely, while confidence stayed high.
1993	Loftus, "The reality of repressed memories", opens the scientific side of the memory wars.
1994	Yonelinas uses the shape of recognition ROC curves to argue for two processes, recollection and familiarity.
1995	Roediger & McDermott: lists of related words produce confident memories of a word never shown.
1999	Schacter, "The seven sins of memory".
2000	Nader, Schafe & LeDoux: in rats, blocking protein synthesis after a fear memory is recalled weakens it: reconsolidation.
2003	Talarico & Rubin: flashbulb memories are marked by confidence, not consistency.
2007	Schacter & Addis: the same constructive system remembers the past and imagines the future.
2009	Hirst et al. follow memories of September 11 across years.
2010	Schiller et al. report preventing the return of fear in humans with a reconsolidation-based procedure.
2015	Murre & Dros replicate Ebbinghaus's forgetting curve.
2016	Hardwicke et al. fail to find reliable reconsolidation-based updating of human memory in a series of experiments.
2018	Wixted, Mickes & Fisher argue that eyewitness memory is reliable when first tested properly, and contaminated by later testing.
2019	Otgaar et al. review the persistence of claims about long-repressed trauma.
2020	Josselyn & Tonegawa review memory engrams: cell populations that can be tagged, silenced and reactivated in animals.

what is contested

Store or reconstruction. The timeline runs from Ebbinghaus's measurement of retention to Bartlett's reconstruction, and the two traditions still pull apart. The reconstruction view now dominates textbooks, but Wixted and colleagues (2018) argue that the emphasis on malleability has been overdone for eyewitness memory: initial, uncontaminated tests are informative [paraphrase, not a quotation].

Reconsolidation in people. The animal findings (Nader, Schafe & Le Doux, 2000) are strong; the human ones are mixed. A celebrated positive result (Schiller et al., 2010) sits beside a careful series of non-replications (Hardwicke, Taqi & Shanks, 2016), and the boundary conditions are argued over [paraphrase, not a quotation].

Repressed memories. Whether traumatic memories can be blocked for years and accurately recovered. Loftus (1993) and Otgaar et al. (2019) argue the evidence is weak and that recovered-memory techniques can create false memories [paraphrase, not a quotation]; clinical writers have disputed this, and the argument has legal stakes.

One recognition process or two. Yonelinas (1994) reads curved ROCs as evidence of a separate recollection process; signal-detection theorists such as Wixted (2007) argue one continuous strength variable fits the same data [paraphrase, not a quotation].

methodological critiques

Ebbinghaus tested himself, with material chosen to have no meaning; Bartlett tested others informally, with meaningful stories. Each method has been charged with losing what the other kept. Laboratory false-memory paradigms such as word lists (Roediger & McDermott, 1995) are easy to run but distant from the autobiographical memories that matter in court. Flashbulb studies depend on when the first report is taken, since a "baseline" collected a day later is already a memory (Talarico & Rubin, 2003). And engram studies in mice show sufficiency under artificial stimulation, which is not the same as showing how memories are normally stored.

later reception

The constructive view has travelled: into courtroom procedures for eyewitness identification, into the clinic, and, by analogy, into how people talk about language models that produce fluent, confident and wrong accounts of the past. See hallucination and calibration for where the analogy helps and where it misleads.

Sources

1. Ebbinghaus (1885). Über das Gedächtnis. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot. English translation by H. A. Ruger & C. E. Bussenius, Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1913; transcribed at Classics in the History of Psychology. psychclassics.yorku.ca/Ebbinghaus/index.htm
2. Müller & Schumann (1894). Experimentelle Beiträge zur Untersuchung des Gedächtnisses. Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane.
3. Müller & Pilzecker (1900). Experimentelle Beiträge zur Lehre vom Gedächtniss. Zeitschrift für Psychologie, Ergänzungsband 1.
4. Bartlett (1932). Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (No free stable copy that we could verify; the scanned copies we found are lending-only.)
5. Miller (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review. doi:10.1037/h0043158
6. Scoville & Milner (1957). Loss of recent memory after bilateral hippocampal lesions. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry. doi:10.1136/jnnp.20.1.11
7. Squire (2009). The Legacy of Patient H.M. for Neuroscience. Neuron. doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2008.12.023
8. Peterson & Peterson (1959). Short-term retention of individual verbal items. Journal of Experimental Psychology. doi:10.1037/h0049234
9. Sperling (1960). The information available in brief visual presentations. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied. doi:10.1037/h0093759
10. Neisser (1967). Cognitive Psychology. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
11. Tulving (1972). Episodic and semantic memory. In E. Tulving & W. Donaldson (eds), Organization of Memory. New York: Academic Press.
12. Loftus & Palmer (1974). Reconstruction of automobile destruction: An example of the interaction between language and memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior. doi:10.1016/S0022-5371(74)80011-3
13. Brown & Kulik (1977). Flashbulb memories. Cognition. doi:10.1016/0010-0277(77)90018-X
14. Neisser & Harsch (1992). Phantom flashbulbs: false recollections of hearing the news about Challenger. in E. Winograd & U. Neisser (eds), Affect and Accuracy in Recall, Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/cbo9780511664069.003
15. Loftus (1993). The reality of repressed memories. American Psychologist. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.48.5.518
16. Yonelinas (1994). Receiver-operating characteristics in recognition memory: Evidence for a dual-process model. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. doi:10.1037/0278-7393.20.6.1341
17. Roediger & McDermott (1995). Creating false memories: Remembering words not presented in lists. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. doi:10.1037/0278-7393.21.4.803
18. Schacter (1999). The seven sins of memory: Insights from psychology and cognitive neuroscience. American Psychologist. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.54.3.182
19. Nader, Schafe & Le Doux (2000). Fear memories require protein synthesis in the amygdala for reconsolidation after retrieval. Nature. doi:10.1038/35021052
20. Talarico & Rubin (2003). Confidence, Not Consistency, Characterizes Flashbulb Memories. Psychological Science. doi:10.1111/1467-9280.02453
21. Schacter & Addis (2007). The cognitive neuroscience of constructive memory: remembering the past and imagining the future. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. doi:10.1098/rstb.2007.2087
22. Hirst et al. (2009). Long-term memory for the terrorist attack of September 11: Flashbulb memories, event memories, and the factors that influence their retention. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. doi:10.1037/a0015527
23. Schiller et al. (2010). Preventing the return of fear in humans using reconsolidation update mechanisms. Nature. doi:10.1038/nature08637
24. Murre & Dros (2015). Replication and Analysis of Ebbinghaus’ Forgetting Curve. PLOS ONE. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0120644
25. Hardwicke, Taqi & Shanks (2016). Postretrieval new learning does not reliably induce human memory updating via reconsolidation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. doi:10.1073/pnas.1601440113
26. Wixted, Mickes & Fisher (2018). Rethinking the Reliability of Eyewitness Memory. Perspectives on Psychological Science. doi:10.1177/1745691617734878
27. Otgaar et al. (2019). The Return of the Repressed: The Persistent and Problematic Claims of Long-Forgotten Trauma. Perspectives on Psychological Science. doi:10.1177/1745691619862306
28. Josselyn & Tonegawa (2020). Memory engrams: Recalling the past and imagining the future. Science. doi:10.1126/science.aaw4325
29. Wixted (2007). Dual-process theory and signal-detection theory of recognition memory. Psychological Review. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.114.1.152

see also