Neisser coined 'repisodic' memory in his 1981 John Dean paper, defining it as neither 'semantic' nor 'episodic' in Tulving's sense

cognitive-psychologymemorytestimonyreconstructive-memoryrepisodic-memoryneissertulving

In "John Dean's Memory: A Case Study" (Cognition 9(1):1-22, 1981), Ulric Neisser introduced the term "repisodic" to name a form of accurate recollection that fit neither category of Endel Tulving's then-standard memory taxonomy. The paper's abstract states the coinage directly: "His testimony was accurate at a level that is neither 'semantic' ... nor 'episodic' ... The term 'repisodic' is coined here to describe such memories: what seems to be a remembered episode actually represents a repeated series of events, and thus reflects a genuinely existing state of affairs."

The move is explicitly built against Tulving's 1972 episodic/semantic distinction (Tulving, "Episodic and semantic memory," in Tulving & Donaldson (eds.), Organization and Memory, Academic Press, 1972 — in Neisser's own reference list). Having shown that Dean's recollections were not cleanly "episodic" — not faithful records of single dated occasions — Neisser writes in the body: "Such memories might be called repisodic rather than episodic: what seems to be an episode actually represents a repetition." The coinage is thus a third term proposed where Tulving's dichotomy left a gap, not a synonym for either half.

This is the definitional/priority companion to the empirical finding of the case study (claim-neisser-john-dean-testimony-repisodic-memory) and to the mechanism by which repisodic memory operates (claim-neisser-repisodic-memory-blends-a-repeated-series-not-one-episodes-gist). It places Neisser in the reconstructive-memory lineage running back to Bartlett (question-bartlett-distortion-typology-maps-to-model-collapse-failure-modes).