Types Of LTM Flashcards
What are the 3 types of LTM?
Semantic, episodic and procedural
What is semantic memory?
Explicit kind of LTM related to shared facts and knowledge about the world. These facts may be concrete e.g. 1+1=2 and London is the capital of England. Semantic memories may relate to things such as functions of objects, what behaviour is appropriate such as social customs but also may relate to abstract concepts such as mathematics and language
Semantic memories generally begin as
Episodic memories because we acquire knowledge based on personal experiences. However, there is a general transition from episodic to semantic memory where the memory slowly loses its association to particular events so that the information can be generalised to a semantic memory- as a result, most semantic memories are not time-stamped. Ultimately, semantic knowledge is less personal and more the objective knowledge we all share
What is episodic memory?
An explicit kind of LTM involving personal memories of events (episodes) e.g. most recent trip to the dentist, what you ate for breakfast yesterday morning, or your first day at high school. It is possible to recall the context surrounding the event such as what happened just before or after, or why you were there and associated emotions with the event. As a result, episodic memories are complex as they are time-stamped, involve several elements (people, places, objects woven into one memory) and you have to make a conscious effort to recall them
What are procedural memories?
An implicit (less aware and more automatic) LTM concerning actions and skills e.g. tying a shoelace, riding a bike and knowing how to read- it is all about remembering how to do something rather than knowing the rules of what to do. Procedural memories are typically acquired through repetition and practice. Recall of these memories occurs without great effort however these are the sort of skills we might find difficult to explain to someone because we can recall these memories without conscious awareness
What are the evaluation points for the different types of LTM?
✅ brain scans provide evidence for the existence of different LTM stores- Tulving et al (1994) got their participants to perform various memory tasks while their brains were scanned using a PET scanner. It was found that episodic and semantic memories were both recalled in the pre-frontal cortex with the left side of the pre-frontal cortex involved in recalling semantic memories and the right side of the pre-frontal cortex involved in recalling episodic memories. This supports the view that there is a physical reality to the different types of LTM within the brain.
✅ the existence of an episodic memory store is supported by case study evidence- in the cases of HM and Clive Wearing, both men had difficulty recalling events that had happened to them as consequence of amnesia. In contrast, their semantic memories were relatively unaffected as they still understood the meaning of words e.g. HM would not be able to recall ever owning a dog but didn’t need the concept of a dog explaining to him. This evidence supports the view that there are different memory stores in the LTM as one store can be damaged and the others unaffected as in HM and Clive Wearing’s case
❌ there are problems with clinical evidence- cases like Clive Wearing and Patient HM have provided a lot of useful information about what happens when memory is damaged. However, there is a series lack of control of all sorts of variables in clinical studies. For example, it is not possible to control the precise location of the brain damage or personality variables. As such, it is difficult to generalise from these case studies to determine the exact nature of LTM
❌ possibly incomplete- priming describes how implicit memories influence the response a person makes to a stimulus. For example, if a person is given a list of words including the word ‘yellow’ and is later asked to name a fruit,the probability that he or she will answer “banana” is greater than if they are not primed; this is a kind of implicit memory because the answers are automatic and unconscious. Research has shown that priming is controlled by a brain system separate from the temporal system that supports explicit memory (semantic and episodic) = has led to the suggestion of a 4th kind of LTM
