Types Of Long Term Memory Flashcards
What are the 3 types of long term memory
- episodic memory
- semantic memory
- procedural memory
What is episodic memory
- Ability to recall events from our personal lives.
- these memories contain what happened, when, who was there
Eg: birthdays or a wedding - these memories may also contain emotions that are associated with the event
- We have to make conscious effort to recall these memories as they are declarative
What is semantic memory
- it is our knowledge of the world, facts which are shared by everyone rather than personal knowledge
- begin as episodic memories, over time the memory loses its association with the personal experience and becomes a semantic memory
- also declarative memories
What is procedural memory
- memory concerned with skills. How to do things
- can recall these memories automatically with very little effort
- memories are acquired through practice + repetition
- don’t require conscious thought so we can perform other cognitive tasks at the same time
- non declarative memories
Strength: supporting evidence, case studies
I: supporting evidence for existence of different types of long term memories from patients from case studies on individuals with amnesia
E: Clive Wearing - damage to his hippocampus
Unable to form any new LTM, only STM
Damage to LTM was specific - unable to remember episodic memories ( episodic memory was damaged, very little semantic) but he could still play the piano and procedural was unaffected
C: demonstrates that memory does not consist one of the single store within LLTM, but has 3 different stores
Strength: supporting evidence, brain scans
I: supporting evidence for the existence of different types of LTM from brain scans
E: PET scans reveal there is different parts of the brain associated with different long term memories, carried out by Tulvin
- limbic system: this brain reason was accretive during procedural tasks
- hippocampus: this brain region was active when recalling episodic memories
- temporal lobe: this brain region was active when recalling semantic memories
C: increases the validity that there are different types of long term memories as there are physical and neural differences between each type
Weakness: methodological weaknesses
I: Methodological weaknesses with the evidence used to evaluate the types of LTM
E: using case studies to study memory is problematic as it is only one study of a particular person. Eg: Clive wearing is an extreme case of someone who has brain damage which we are using to correlate with memory deficits
We don’t know Clive’s memory before the injury and therefore its hard to draw strong conclusions about LTM
Who proposed the Working Memory Model
Baddeley and Hitch
What does the model propose ?
STM does not consist of a single unitary store as the MSM suggested, but consists of active component stores holding different pieces of information at any one time while they are being “worked on”
Explain dual processing in STM
- Ppts who were asked to perform two similar tasks simultaneously performed less well compared to when they were asked to perform 2 dissimilar tasks
Explain procedure of Baddeley’s dual processing experiment
Ppts were asked to carry out two simultaneous tasks requiring the use of separate components (visual and verbal)
Explain the findings of Baddeley’s dual processing experiment
When Ppts were asked to carry out two tasks that use the same component Eg: visual and visual.
The performance was less efficient than carrying them out individually
What was the conclusions for Baddeley’s dual processing experiment
Shows that sound and vision are processed separately by different stores. Sound is processed by the phonological loop and visual information by the visual spatial sketch pad
What are the 5 components of the WMM
- Central executive
- Visuospatial sketch pad
- Phonological loop
- Episode buffer
- Long term memory
What does the central executive do ?
- control centre which acts as a processor dealing with incoming information and sending it to the sub - systems
- non specific modality and processes any information from any of the 5 senses
- directs attention to particular tasks. Involved in monitoring and coordinating info and making decisions which ‘slave systems’ to allocate resources to
- very limited capacity as it can’t attend to too much info at once, virtually no capacity to store data
What does the phonological loop do ?
- acoustically coded
- used for speaking and listening tasks and is divided into 2 further sub-systems: the phonological store and articulatory control system
What does the phonological store do
- Holds the memory of sounds and stores the words heard
- verbal information is kept in a speech based format for 1 to 2 seconds
- known as the inner ear
What does the articulatory control system do
- Rehearses information through sub - vocalisation (talking to yourself) to keep the information ‘alive’ within the store.
- known as the inner voice
Explain Baddeley’s word length experiment
Procedure: Ppts were given single syllables words or multi-syllable words to recall
Findings: Ppts could remember more singly syllable words than multi - syllabic ones, they called this the word length effect
Conclusion: provides strong evidence that we can hold as much and we can say in 1-2 seconds, supporting the duration of the phonological store
What is the visual spatial sketch pad
- temporary storage system used for the manipulation, planning and understanding of visual & spatial information
- used whenever navigation and interaction with the physical environment is needed
- has a limited capacity storing about 3-4 objects
- known as the ‘inner eye’
What 2 sub systems is the visuo spatial sketch pad divided into
Visual cache - stores visual data regarding form (what things look like) and Color
Inner scribe - stores spatial and movement data. Involves rehearsing information from visual cache
Procedure for Research in visual spatial sketch pad
Asked ppts to do 2 tasks that would utilise them viso-spatial sketch pad either separately or at the same time
One task was to use a pointer to track a point of light moving around on a screen, and the other task was to imagine a capital F and mentally move round the edge of the letter classifying the angles as either belonging to its top or bottom
Explain the findings of research into visuo-spatial sketch pad
- Ppts were able to perform the tasks separately without any difficulty, but when they did them together their performance at both was impaired
- if they asked them to do one of the two tasks at the same time as the verbal task then they were as good as the visual task as when performing it alone
Conclusion for research into visuo-spatial sketch pad
Shows that when tasks are using the limited capacity of the visuo-spatial sketch pad that it is unable to handle information that uses the same type of info
Eg: visual info as the visuo-spatial sketch pad has a limited capacity storing
