Types of long-term memory Flashcards
Long term memory
- Tulving (1985) - Cognitive psychologist
- MSM= “too simplisticm and inflexible”
- Proposed that there 3 LTM stores: episodic, semantic and procedural memory
Episodic memory
stores events from our lives e.g a diary and a record of daily personal experiences
* These memories are time-stamped (you remember when they happened)
* Involve several elements- people, places, objects and behaviours stored into one memory
* Have to make a conscious effort to recall them
Semantic memory
stores our knowledge of the world
* memories are not time stamped, e.g. we dont remember where we learnt what an apple meant
* less personal and more about facts we all share
Procedural memory
stores memories for actions and skills
* memories of how we do things
* recall occurs without conscious effort or awareness
* e.g. driving, doing shoelaces, swimming, riding a bike
* might find hard to explain to someone else
Evaluation
+ Clive Wearing
+ Henry Malaison
- Case studies
+ Support from brain scans
- Cohen and Squire
Clive Wearing
An accomplished musician who contracted a virus that attacked the hippocampus in his brain, 1985
* Unable to form lasting new memories
* Memory only lasts 7 and 30 seconds
* He remembers his children from his early marriage, remembers his second wife Deborah but believe he hasn’t seen her in ages
* He can still play the piano
* Supportive evidence for Tulving’s theory because it shows that there are different LTM stores. His procedural memory was left intact after the virus, e.g he can play the piano but his semantic and episodic memory stores were damamged e.g. can’t remember where his children are and believes he hasnt seen his wife in ages
Henry Malaison (H.M)
HM lost his memory at 27 due to suffering from severe epilieptic seizures
* Scoville, a neurosurgeon, operated on H.M and removed the hippocampus (temporal lobe in brain)
* Operation reduced the seizures, but left him with memory loss
* He couldn’t learn new words. age or faces, and couldn’t remember when he last ate
* Suffered this memory loss for an 11 year period after surgery
* He could learn new skills e.g. drawing
* Supports Tulving’s view as it suggests there are seperate LTM stores
* Evidence suggests that his procedural was unaffected e.g. he remembers how to draw + developed new drawinf skills but his semantic store was damaged because he couldn’t remember his age and his episodic store was damaged because he couldn’t reall past events
Case studies
There is a problem with the use of case studies ,e.g Clive Wearing and HM, in the support of Tulvings view
* Case studies are unrepresentative of the wider population
* It only uses rare cases that occur to individuals
* Case studies lack population validity because their results cannot be generalised
Cohen and Squire
- Disagree with Tuliving’s view
- Accept that procedural memory represents one type of LTM
- However, they argue that episodic and semantic memories are stored together in a LTM store
- This is known as declarative memories, e.g. memories that can be continuously recalled
- Procedural memories are non-declaritive
Support from brain scans
Evidence from brain scans suggest that different types of memory are stored in different parts of the brain
* Tulving et al carried out memory tests on his ppts using a PET scanner
* They found that the left-prefrontal cortex was involved in recalling semantic memories and the right prefrontal cortex was involved in recalling episodic memories
* Procedural memories were associated with the motor area of the brain
* Supportive evidence that there is a physical reality to the different types of LTM within the brain, and this evidence is scientific and reliable
