LTM (Tulving)

• Explanation of LTM (Tulving 1972): procedural


  Non declarative, 'muscle memory, how to do stuff, memory for skills eg: how to ride a bike
• LTM: episodic

  declarative (consciously aware)

  ability to recall events (autobiographical)

  like diary, eg: your breakfast
• LTM: semantic


  declarative

  knowledge of world, includes facts

  combo of encyclopaedia + dictionary

  eg. applying to uni
• semantic v episodic

  mental encyclopaedia

  v mental diary

  independent of time referencing, input can be fragmentary

  v time and context references (time stamped+time travel), input continuous

  retrieval possible w/o learning + no cued retrieval

  v retrieval using cues which are encoded at time of learning

  memory trace is more robust and less susceptible to transformation

  forgetting due to retrieval. Memory trace can be transformed/fabricated
• Tulving LTM explanation strength 1

  He argues about the encoding specificity principle.

  Godden and Baddeley 1975 found that scuba divers who learned and practiced words in water/ land had better performance in same context ‘context effect’ which supports
• Tulbing strength 2

  Distinction between episodic and semantic by HM - episodic mem was impaired but Semantic was intact. Didn’t remmener he had a dog or that he stroked it half an hour ago but knew about concept of dog.
• Tulving weakness 1

  EM and SM described as seperate stores - they work together : when given episodic mem task like learning words there is a semantic feature (meaning) and episodic reference (when + where learned). Problematic as they can’t be researched in isolation
• Tulving weakness 2

  Word lists are problematic as it doesn’t take guesses into account. If P makes informed guess about a word that could’ve been on list then this shows recall of semantic mot episodic.
• Weakness Tulving 3

  Clinical studies lack control of variables and have very low generalisability (brain damage is unique).