The active construction of past episodes

Episodic memories – declarative memories of past events, characterized by rich spatiotemporal context – play a central role in guiding perception and behaviour. Here, we advance a model that integrates episodic memories within the active inference framework. We describe how episodic memories are incorporated into the generative models used in active inference to support the re-construction, replay and communication of past events. In doing so, we foreground two foundational themes. The first is the message passing in deep temporal models that allow one to actively construct memories of episodes. The second is the communicative aspect of declarative memories, and the way in which one might recount something from one’s autobiography. In effect, this means that the message passing that supports episodic memory propagates information about what we have done – or what we would do – given past circumstances to draw inferences about how to communicate those beliefs. Together, these themes emphasise that we are not passive recorders of the things that happen to us. We are active participants in the events we recall and in the telling of stories about them.