Matthew Watts

Semantic memory is often conceptualized as a storage space for an extensive assortment of explicit knowledge structures, formed as the result of a chronic, unconscious mechanism of abstraction and generalization. Against that, I argue that it is not the product of a dedicated system in which content is abstracted from experiences and stored, rather it’s best understood as split between what can be called mnemonic efforts and mnemonic habits. Mnemonic efforts are the effortful expression of semantic knowledge and often take the form of the determination of similarities among multiple episodic memory traces activated in parallel. Mnemonic habits on the other hand form as a result of fluency of constructive memory processes that can be broadly understood as embodied, or enacted.