Episodic and Semantic Aspects of Memory for Prose

thematic, and distorted with the passage of time. That is, at long intervals, there is less recall of passage-specific information and more recall from the subjects' general knowledge of the topic. The present study deals with constructive remembering over time. We attempt to understand prose retention in terms that are compatible with Bartlett's conception of remembering. One problem for a constructive theory of remembering is that subjects do recall some of the exact words that they have experienced in an experiment (Cofer, 1973). A complete theory of prose retention, therefore, must contain mechanisms that account for both reproductive and constructive aspects of remembering. In the present study, we use Tulving's (1972) The research was supported in part by a summer research fellowship from Kent State University to the first author. We are grateful to Debra Shutts for her assistance in conducting the experiments. Requests for reprints should be sent to D. James Dooling, who is now at Bell Laboratories, Room 3D 529, Holmdel, New Jersey 07733. distinction between episodic and semantic memory as a framework for conceptualizing changes in remembering with the passage of time. Tulving observed that words from an experimental list are encoded contextually. They are represented in memory as episodes that occurred at a particular time and place in the life of the rememberer. Episodic memory is sharply distinguished from semantic memory, which is conceptually organized. It is the storehouse of the subjects' preexperimental knowledge. Tulving (1972) did not comment on prose retention, but remembering a prose passage surely involves both the episodic and semantic memory systems. Preexperimental knowledge is used in comprehension, but subjects also encode various aspects of the text episodically. With the passage of time, the retrieval of episodic information becomes increasingly difficult, so subjects supplement their memory performance with related knowledge. Constructive memory for prose, therefore, is seen as a filling in of episodic gaps with knowledge from semantic memory. The experiments reported here follow up on a study previously published by Sulin and Dooling (1974). In that experiment, the subjects' knowledge of a topic was manipulated by giving them a passage