Remembering what you did: Episodic memory for self-actions

Episodic memory stores not only passively experienced events, but also one's own past actions and decisions. Despite their critical role for learning about the world and about the self, little is known about how such memories for self-actions are stored and retrieved. We argue that memory for self-actions plays three key roles in the cognitive economy: it scaffolds memory for environmental events, enables learning from delayed feedback, and allows individuals to learn about their own abilities and preferences. A synthesis of evidence from behaviour and psychopathology is consistent with an organizing framework: memory for self-actions draws on a generative self-model - a simplified schema of one's own cognition. This framework helps explain why memory for habitual actions is particularly vulnerable to memory distortions, manifesting as confabulations in amnesic patients and obsessive doubt in individuals with OCD. We further propose that an accurate self-model may partially compensate for hippocampal memory loss in Alzheimer's disease. We suggest that much can be learned from studying the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying the ability to remember one's own decisions and actions, and identify critical questions for advancing our understanding of this important but neglected aspect of human memory.