  Storing knowledge of an agent's environment in the form of a probabilistic
generative model has been established as a crucial ingredient in a multitude of
cognitive tasks. Perception has been formalised as probabilistic inference over
the state of latent variables, whereas in decision making the model of the
environment is used to predict likely consequences of actions. Such generative
models have earlier been proposed to underlie semantic memory but it remained
unclear if this model also underlies the efficient storage of experiences in
episodic memory. We formalise the compression of episodes in the normative
framework of information theory and argue that semantic memory provides the
distortion function for compression of experiences. Recent advances and
insights from machine learning allow us to approximate semantic compression in
naturalistic domains and contrast the resulting deviations in compressed
episodes with memory errors observed in the experimental literature on human
memory.

Neurons and Cognition