types of LTM Flashcards
who proposed the 3 types of LTM
Tulving
-Semantic, procedural, episodic
Semantic memory
• Semantic Memory contains our knowledge of the world.
• This includes facts, but in the broadest of senses.
• General knowledge: Capital cities, applying to university, the taste of an orange, the meaning of words.
- Also contains information on concepts, such an animals, love etc.
• These memories are not time-stamped - they are less personal and more about facts that we all share.
-stored in hippocampus
procedural memory
- Procedural memory is our memory for actions, skills ie. how we do things.
• We can recall these memories without conscious awareness - we just do them.
• These are also the sort of skills that we would find hard to explain to others or would become more difficult if we tried to explain them whilst doing them.
-Stored in cerebellum
episodic memory
• Episodic memory is our memory for events from our lives.
-Like a diary e.g. your most recent visit to the dentist, birthday parties, a gig etc.
-They are time-stamped and each memory will includes several elements e.g. people, places, objects, behaviours.
-They require conscious effort to recall ie. you are aware that you are searching for the memory.
-Coded in prefrontal cortex-stored all across the brain.
strength-research support
Supporting from clinical studies of patients with amnesia.
HM and Clive Wearing, both sufferers of amnesia. HM displayed normal functioning in his semantic memory (e.g. He understood the concept of a dog), but impaired functioning in their episodic memory (could not remember having owned a dog).
Clive Wearing was a professional musician and could play the piano without difficulty, however could not remember having learnt to play, suggesting an impaired episodic memory but functioning procedural memory.
Both of these cases support the idea of a clear separation of different types of LTM.
strength-support from Neuroimaging research
There is also evidence from brain scan studies that different types of memory are stored in different parts of the brain.
Tulving et al. (1994) asked their participants to perform various tasks whilst scanning their brain with a PET scanner.
They found that semantic memories involved the left prefrontal cortext whilst episodic memories involved the right prefrontal cortex.
Supports Tulving’s theory as it shows there is a physical reality to the different LTM stores. These findings have been confirmed many times in later research, further supporting the validity of the finding.
strength-real life application
Understanding different types of memory allows for the development of helpful real world applications.
Belleville et al. (2006) compared the performance of older people suffering with a mild cognitive impairment who received memory training with that of a control group who did not.
It was found that participants in the experimental group performed better on a test of episodic memory.
This suggests that being able to identify different types of LTM can provide psychologists with the opportunity to improve peoples’ lives though devising appropriate treatments.
