Endel Tulving. 26 May 1927 — 11 September 2023

Abstract

Endel Tulving was an Estonian–Canadian cognitive psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist who transformed the study of human memory in the 50 years between 1960 and 2010. He was born in Estonia in 1927, and spent several years in post-war Europe before emigrating to Canada in the late 1940s. He obtained degrees at the University of Toronto and at Harvard University before returning to the University of Toronto as a faculty member in 1956. He was always an independent thinker, and rejected the dominant view of memory and learning in terms of associations in favour of a more cognitive approach in which the organization of remembered events played a major part. He also developed theories on how events are encoded and retrieved, first in terms of behaviour and then in terms of their underlying neural correlates in specific brain regions. His theoretical ideas on different memory systems and their relations to different types of consciousness, laid out in his 1983 book Elements of episodic memory (Oxford University Press), continue to play a major part in current work on human memory. As a person, he retained a somewhat European sense of propriety and formality, which often made him seem quite formidable to new acquaintances. Once someone's scientific seriousness was established, however, Endel was warmly supportive of his students and colleagues. He was much loved by his family, and held in high esteem by his fellow scientists.