Incidence equivalence, a survey

This is a survey of results on incidence equivalence, a notion introduced by P.Griffiths around 1970 when trying to extend the classical properties of the Abel-Jacobi map for curves. Using the intermediate jacobians and the associated Abel-Jacobi maps in higher dimension, a natural question came up: is the geometrically defined incidence equivalence relation the same as Abel-Jacobi equivalence, which is of transcendental nature? I give an overview of results related to this question and to several classical conjectures that are far from resolved, such as Grothendieck's generalized Hodge conjecture. The motivation for writing this survey came from a recently observed unexpected connection of Griffiths' question to the asymptotic behaviour of the archimedean height pairing in a geometric setting.