Theory of mind is independent of episodic memory

Theory of mind (ToM) to infer other people's current mental states and episodic memory of personal happenings have been assumed to be closely related. We report two participants with severely impaired episodic memory who perform indistinguishably from healthy controls on objective ToM tests. These results suggest that ToM can function independently of episodic memory.     

Priming and human memory systems

Priming is a nonconscious form of human memory, which is concerned with perceptual identification of words and objects and which has only recently been recognized as separate from other forms of memory or memory systems. It is currently under intense experimental scrutiny. Evidence is converging for the proposition that priming is an expression of a perceptual representation system that operates at a pre-semantic level; it emerges early in development, and access to it lacks the kind of flexibility characteristic of other cognitive memory systems. Conceptual priming, however, seems to be based on the operations of semantic memory.     

Retrograde amnesia in free recall

Supervention of high-priority events in a series of events constituting a free-recall task interferes with postexposure processing of mnemonic information about immediately preceding events, with the result that recall of these preceding events is impaired. Recall of immediately following events is not affected. This retrograde interference is time dependent.