Endel led a remarkable life. Born in Estonia in 1927, he was a teenager when the Russians drove the Germans out of Estonia. His entire high school class was impressed into the German army as it fled, but the students were never issued weapons and were never near the fighting. Endel wound up in a relocation camp in Germany after the war, translating among German, Estonian, and English for the Americans. During his time in the camp, he met Ruth Mikkelsaar when he was asked to tutor her in math. Endel told his friends that someday he would marry her and, in 1950, he did. He finished high school in Germany and had a brief stint at the University of Heidelberg before being offered the chance to emigrate to Canada as a railroad worker. While crossing the Atlantic, he was told that the need for railroad workers had evaporated, and he would become a farm worker in southern Ontario instead. This was fortunate, because the farmer for whom he worked realized his intelligence, released him from his duties, and facilitated his admittance to the University of Toronto. He majored in psychology and, after earning a master’s degree, he went on for his PhD to Harvard University where he was influenced by S.S. Stevens, E.G. Boring, and B.F. Skinner, among others. He returned to the University of Toronto in 1956 as an instructor and quickly rose through the ranks.
Because Toronto in those days had no real psychology laboratories, Tulving looked for something to study that needed little equipment. Verbal learning seemed to fulfill that requirement, and he began publishing on that topic. He eventually transformed the field into the study of human memory, using techniques quite different from ones standard in the field. This is not the place to summarize his work, but many of the concepts he researched are today standard in both introductory and more specialized textbooks in both psychology and cognitive neuroscience . These include the distinction between episodic and semantic memory, the encoding specificity principle, and many more. Suffice it to say that his influence on the field of human memory research continue to be foundational for memory researchers. See here and here for more details.
I first met Tulving in 1970 when he accepted a position at Yale. Six of us enrolled in his graduate seminar, where we wrote an essay every week on a topic he assigned. The first time we received feedback he read aloud one paper – mine – that he held up for criticism bordering on ridicule. I blushed and swore to myself this would not happen again. So began what became a close relationship that lasted for 53 years. Tulving loved to argue, as our class soon learned, and we had pitched discussions in nearly every meeting.
Tulving helped facilitate my coming to Washington University as chair of the psychology department in 1996. On an early visit, he met with me and Ed Macias, Dean of Arts and Sciences. During our discussion, Ed offered Endel the Clark Way Harrison professorship to facilitate his visiting for several months a year. This was not simply a honorary appointment for Endel to grace the premises and write, because he immersed himself in the life of the department, giving talks, attending colloquia, brown bags and lab meetings, and having an open-door policy for anyone who wanted to discuss science with him. As already noted, he taught two courses during his visits. One he taught solo to about ten graduate students, and the other he taught with Larry Jacoby (another leading memory researcher) and me. The latter course turned out to be less than successful, because when the three of us disagreed and we asked the students to chime in, we had few takers. On the course evaluations, one of the students wrote, “I wish there had been more opportunity for class discussion.”
The wine tasting party Tulving orchestrated was more of a competition and a way of quantifying individual differences in wine tasting. Under Endel’s direction, the host would buy bottles of several different types of red wine varying in price. There was always one bottle of expensive French wine and then other bottles from California, Australia, South Africa and often some eastern European country such as Romania. The bottles were sheathed in aluminum foil to hide their identities and the guests rated them on their goodness of taste on a 5-point scale. The winner of the contest was the person whose ratings correlated (yes, correlation coefficient was actually calculated by the host) most closely with the group average for each wine. (Dave Balota won several times over the years). The other feature of the wine tasting was to correlate price with taste. Usually the correlation was around zero, and often the $60 French wine was often ranked down with the $6 Romanian wine, which Endel predicted before the first tasting event.
Ruth Tulving, an acclaimed artist and member of the Royal Ontario Academy of Arts, accompanied Endel on his visits to St. Louis. She noticed that the walls in our new building were staid and bare. When Ruth came to me as chair, she made an offer I couldn’t refuse: If the department would buy her materials that were relatively inexpensive, she would create artworks for the building. Her many paintings are now spread throughout Somers Family Hall. Dean Macias appointed her as Artist in Residence. See here for more details on Ruth’s artwork.
Upon Endel’s passing, many students who had been at WU during that time wrote and said how much they enjoyed and profited from knowing him and taking his courses. He also mentored those of us on the faculty. His presence made a great difference to the cognitive psychologists in our department, and he also met many people in other areas. Endel was forced to stop his visits when his wife’s health deteriorated, but he stayed in touch with some of us until near his death. Tulving’s presence was an invaluable experience for many of us during those 10 years and continues today.