People-focused knowledge management

Conceptual Memory
Conceptual memory is considered to consist of both episodic and
semantic memories as shown schematically in Figure 4-2. Everything
we remember of what has happened and of things that mean some-
thing takes the form of concepts. Concepts are considered to be 
language-free, highly abstracted, and partly codified to fit into our
mental organization and be used as our mental and associative 
building blocks.
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People-Focused Knowledge Management
Episodic Memory
Episodic memory stores recollections of personally experienced
episodes and events as they occurred without further analysis or inte-
gration into what we know. Tulving (1972) proposed that the mental
objects we store in episodic memory are not yet knowledge. Tulving
suggested that objects in episodic memory are contrasted with knowl-
edge since they are not “tied down” and connected and integrated
with the main knowledge in our brains. Later, Tulving and Schacter
(1990) provided additional insights into other memory systems,
including priming memory, which typically includes mental models
and may represent complex episodes that depict images and verbal
communications of a chain of events, including what we thought and
felt at the time.
Tulving’s position that episodic memory contains information
about an event, rather than knowledge about the event, is founded
on the premise that this version of the event has not been analyzed
and internalized, although it has been represented in a concise and
efficient form. Since it has not been abstracted and nothing has 
been learned about it or from it, it is information, not knowledge.
To become knowledge, whatever is abstracted and learned from the
event will be re-represented and stored in semantic memory. Episodes
that we observe and remember, our experiences, are highly subjec-
tive. We are not good observers. In all situations, we narrow our
focus according to a particular perspective and only seem to remem-
ber that aspect to the exclusion of everything else.