4.1.2 Types of long-term memory

Question 1

Endel Tulving

Answer 1

Endel Tulving (1985) was one of the first cognitive psychologists who stated that the MSM’s view of long-term memory was too simplistic and lacked flexibility. Tulving proposed that there were 3 different long-term memory stores all containing different information.

Question 2

Clinical evidence - Clive Wearing

Answer 2

After his illness, Clive was unable to form new memories, so they lasted only 30 seconds.For example, Clive Wearing was able to play piano, which would be procedural memory, as it is the memory for his actions and skills. His skills such as piano playing aren’t as skilled, but this due to a lack of practice, however this skill is still there.
He still has his knowledge and intellect from his semantic memory from before his illness, but he is not able to add any new knowledge to it so he is not learning anything new. He could remember his semantic memory from before the illness, but as a result of this he was not able to add new semantic memories to this.
He lost the majority of his episodic memory, so he couldn’t remember any memories, but as an exception he was able to remember his wife, recognise her and how he loved her. This means that some of his episodic memory was lost, but there are still memories of his wife there.

Question 3

Clinical evidence counterpoint

Answer 3

Studying people with brain injuries help researchers look into memory
However, a major limitation is that they lack control of variables
Brain injuries are usually unexpected so the researcher has no way of controlling what happened to the participant before and during the brain injury – how their memory originally was
Therefore, how can they judge exactly how much memory has been affected

Question 4

Conflicting neuroimaging evidence

Answer 4

There is conflicting research linking types of LTM
Randy Buckner and Steven Peterson (1996) reviewed evidence of the location of semantic and episodic memory
They concluded that the semantic memory is located in the left side of the prefrontal cortex and episodic memory on the right
However, other research links the left prefrontal cortex with encoding of episodic memories and the right prefrontal cortex with episodic retrieval (Tulving et al. 1994)

Question 5

Real world application

Answer 5

Understanding the different types of LTM help with memory problems
As people age, they experience memory loss
Research has shown that its usually episodic memory that occurred recently that becomes harder to recall and those memories from the past remain intact
Sylvie Belleville et al. (2006) devised an intervention to improve episodic memories in older people. After ‘training’ – the participants performed better on a test of episodic memory than the control group
This shows that distinguishing between the different memory stores allows specific treatments to be developed