Endel Tulving

Endel Tulving is University Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Toronto, where he taught for 35 years and chaired the Department of Psychology from 1974 to 1980. He also held the Tanenbaum Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience at the Rotman Research Institute of the Baycrest Centre in Toronto, where he is now a Scientist Emeritus, and the Clark Way Distinguished Visiting Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience at Washington University in St. Louis. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of London and the Royal Society of Canada, an Officer of the Order of Canada, and a foreign associate of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. For nearly half a century, Tulving's seminal ideas and findings have had a major impact on psychological and neurobiological studies of human memory, including his research on the importance of retrieval processes during the 1960s, proposal of the encoding specificity principle and the distinction between episodic and semantic memory during the 1970s, and observations concerning the brain substrates of memory systems in the 1980s and 1990s. Tulving is best known for his experimental studies of human memory, and the conceptual distinctions he has introduced. He found techniques to demonstrate the presence of stored information - accessible by special tests - that could not be revealed by other tests, and to show the internal organization of memory material within the person. From these results, he deduced the importance of the particular code created by the person during original experience, and of the access to that code provided by the conditions of recall or recognition. He also distinguished memory for individual events or 'episodes' from that for lasting 'semantic' relationships. His methods and distinctions are increasingly finding application, not only to theories of memory, but to the analysis of the effects of brain injury. His work has been recognized by many awards and honors, including the Warren Medal from the Society of Experimental Psychologists (1982), Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association (1983), Killam Prize in Health Sciences (1994), and the Gairdner International Award (2005). He received the B.A. (1953) and M.A. (1954) degrees from the University of Toronto, and the Ph.D. (1957) from Harvard University, all in psychology.