Psychologists have been studying memory experimentally since Hermann Ebbinghaus's (1885) groundbreaking work more than a hundred years ago, but only in the late twentieth century were questions raised about exactly what has been and is being studied in memory experiments. As a result of the pursuit of these questions it became widely if not universally accepted that there exist different kinds of memory. Episodic memory is one of these kinds.

The term episodic memory is used in several senses. One of these has to do with episodic memory as a particular class of laboratory tasks or experiments (Lockhart, 2000); another concerns episodic memory as a kind of mental capacity, or a neurocognitive system (Schacter and Tulving, 1994), that allows people to remember past experiences. Although closely related, the two senses (episodic tasks and the episodic system) should not be confused. This entry will consider the two senses in turn...