Séminaire 13 septembre 2024

Nous aurons le plaisir d'accueillir Louis Renoult, professeur à l'Université d'East Anglia (UEA, Norwich, Royaume-Uni) et professeur invité de DysCo pour l'année 2024.
Son intervention est intitulée : Réflexions sur le statut de la distinction entre mémoires sémantique et épisodique

Résumé :
One of the most common distinctions in long-term memory is that between semantic (i.e., one’s general knowledge of the world) and episodic (i.e., recollection of contextually specific events from one’s personal past). However, emerging cognitive neuroscience data suggest a surprisingly large overlap between the neural correlates of semantic and episodic memory. Moreover, personal semantic memories (such as knowledge of personal facts or memory for repeated events) have been little studied and do not easily fit into the standard semantic-episodic dichotomy. In this presentation, I will discuss various approaches that my lab used in recent years to investigate these questions, such as creating new tests and scoring procedures for separating these types of memories and measuring their respective neural correlates in event-related potential (ERP) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies. Taken together, these data are inconsistent with a strict separation of semantic and episodic memory. Rather, they are compatible with a component process model, in which semantic, personal semantic, and episodic memory may rely on different weightings of elementary processes, such as sensory-perceptual imagery, spatial and temporal features, and self-reflection.