Types of Long-term Memory Flashcards
Three types of Long-term Memory - Episodic
Episodic memory:
- The ability to recall events from our lives
- Personal events/experiences (most recent visit to the dentist)
- Firstly, all these memories are time stamped, you remember when they happened as well as what happened (how events relate to each other in time)
- Secondly, your memory of a single episode will include multiple elements, such as people, objects, places, behaviours - all these memories are interwoven to produce a single memory
- Thirdly, you have to make a conscious effort to recall episodic memories, you do this quickly but are still aware you are searching for our memory of what happened when you went to the dentist
Evaluation for Types of Long-term memory
Clinical evidence:
- famous case studies of HM and Clive Wearing
- episodic memory was affected due to brain damage
- semantic memories were unaffected
- procedural memories were also in tact
- both still new how to walk and talk
This evidence supports Tulvings view that there are different memory stores in the LTM - one store can be damaged but the other stores are unaffected
Counterpoint:
- clinical studies are not perfect - a major limitation is that they lack control of variables
- the researcher has no knowledge of the patient’s memory before the accident/damage
- it is therefore difficult to judge exactly how much worse it is afterwards
This lack of control limits what clinical studies can tell us about different types of LTM
Conflicting neuroimaging evidence:
- research findings conflict in where types of LTM are located in areas of the brain
- semantic located left side of the prefrontal cortex and episodic on the right, however other research links the left prefrontal cortex with episodic memories and the rich prefrontal cortex with semantic memories
This challenges any neurophysiological evidence to support types of memory and there is poor agreement on where each type may be located
Real world application:
- understanding LTM can allow psychologists to help people with memory problems
- memory loss with age frequently leads to episodic memory loss
- to combat this patients could be trained to try help improve the intervention of episodic memories in older people (trained group performed better in a test of episodic memory than a control group)
This shows that distinguishing between types of LTM enables specific treatments to be developed
Evaluation extra:
- Tulving more recently has taken the view that episodic memory is just a “specialised subcategory” of semantic memory
- patients with amnesia could lose semantic but not episodic but could also lose episodic and not semantic
- Hodges and Peterson found people with Alzheimer’s disease could form new episodic memories but not semantic memories
Three types of long-term memory - Semantic
Semantic memory:
- this store contains our shared knowledge of the world
- it includes knowledge of things such as what an orange tastes like and what a colour a strawberry is
- your semantic memory contains your knowledge of an impressive number of concepts such as “animals”, “love” and “frozen”
- these memories are not “time-stamped”
- this type of knowledge is less personal and more about the facts we all share (generic)
- it contains an immense amount of knowledge that we are constantly adding to
- according to Tulving, it is less vulnerable to distortion and forgetting than episodic memory
Three types of long-term memory - Procedural
Procedural memory:
- this is our memory for actions or skills, or basically how we do things
- we can recall these memories without conscious awareness or much effort
- for example driving a car
- our ability to do this becomes natural/automatic through practice
- these are the types of skills that we might even find quite hard to explain to someone else - if you try to describe what you are doing whilst driving the car, the task may become more difficult
