types of LTM

• tulving (1985) was one of the first cognitive psychologists to relalize MSM view of LTM was too simple and iniflexible

  proposed that there was really 3 LTM stores containing different types of information : episodic, semantic and procedural memory
• episodic memory: refers to our ability to recall events in our lives, such as our childhood, record of our personal events (birthdays, weddings)

  1. these memories are time-stamped, you remember when they happened as well as what actually happened, they also store information about how these memories relate to eachother in time
  2. memory of a single episode will have several elements such as the people there, location it occured, objects and behaviours. all of these aspects are interwoven to produce a single memory
  3. you have to make a concious effort to recall episodic memories, fast but concious
• semantic memory: shared knowledge of the world, likened to an encyclopidia and a dictionary. knows things such as how to apply to a course, what an orange tastes like, the loaction of the eiffel tower and the meaning of words; concepts such as 'animals', 'love' or the film 'frozen'

  these memories are not time-stamped we dont know when we first heard something, semantic knowledge is less personal and more about facts that we all know, constantly gaining new knowledge and is less vulnerable to distortion and forgetting than episodic memories are
• procedual memory: actions or skills (how to do things), we can recall these things without any concious effort (eventually, may need to learn)

  driving a car/riding a bike, our ability to do these things becomes natural through practice, changin ggear and indicating without even thinking about it

  skills we may find hard to describe to others (when you try to teach someone else to drive a car, the task becomes more difficult for you)
• strength of types of LTM: clinical evidence

  case studies of HM & clive wearing, episodic memory of both was severly injured but their semantic memories were relativly unaffected. HM could not recall stroking a dog 30 minutes prior but knew what a dog was. procedual memories were not affected, they could walk and talk and clive wearing (a professional musician) could sing, read music and play the piano

  supports Tulving's views that there are different memory stores in the LTM, one store can be damaged whilst others unaffected
• limitation of types of LTM: conflicting neuroimaging evidence

  there is conflicting research findings linking types of LTM to certain areas of the brain, buckner and petersen (1996) reviewed evidence regardign location of sematic and episodic memory. they conculded semantic memory is located on the left side of the prefrontal cortex and the episodic memory is on the right

  other research links left prefrontal cortex with episodic memory and the right prefrontal cortex with semantic memory

  challenges any neurophysical evidence to support types of memory as conflict on where it is located
• strength of types of LTM: real world application

  allows psychologists to help people with memory problems, as we age we begin to lose memory, tends to be episodic memories lost, becomes harder to recall personal information and events that have happened in their lives, more based on events that have happened fairly recently, past episodic memories stay intact. belleville devised an intervention to help older people maintain their episodic memory, trained them to score better on an episodic memory test than the control group

  shows that distinguishing LTM allows treatments to be designed