Memory reveals itself as a landscape far more dynamic than we once imagined. Where earlier researchers viewed our mental archives as static filing cabinets, contemporary neuroscience illuminates memory as a living, generative process—constantly reshaping itself through complex interactions between experience and knowledge.
Our understanding of how humans store and retrieve information continues to evolve dramatically. Emerging research suggests semantic memory—our repository of conceptual knowledge—might operate more like a creative reconstruction than a fixed archive. This challenges fundamental assumptions about how we organize and access information, potentially transforming perspectives on learning, cognition, and human perception.
The implications stretch far beyond academic curiosity. If semantic memories are indeed constructed rather than retrieved intact, we gain profound insights into how individuals make meaning, adapt to new contexts, and integrate knowledge across different domains. Understanding these intricate cognitive mechanisms could unlock innovative approaches to education, therapeutic interventions, and our comprehension of human intellectual flexibility.
Abstract
What is the nature of semantic memory? Philosophers and cognitive scientists have long held that semantic memory stores invariant knowledge structures to be retrieved as such. In this paper, I argue that this conception of semantic memory is likely false. In particular, I argue that if episodic and semantic memory share causal mechanisms, and episodic memory is (re)constructive, then semantic memory is likely constructive too. I review evidence that suggests that episodic and semantic memory are subserved by a domain-general system that supports representing and navigating relations among various kinds of stimuli, including space, time, events, and semantic relations. I then review the supposed hallmark properties of constructivism in episodic memory and show that they appear in semantic memory as well. To increase the inductive support for my proposal, I show how the view predicts some of the evidence others have marshaled in favor of a constructivist semantic memory system. Finally, I close by providing a proof of concept for the view on offer, the semantic pointer architecture.