AO3 - Types of Long-term Memory

• Clive Wearing suffered from amnesia from a viral infection in his brain. He could still play the piano as before suggesting good procedural memory.
• Clive Wearing could not recall personal information from his life, like the names of his children, suggesting problems with his episodic memory.
• H.M had brain damage following an operation for epilepsy. His episodic memory was damaged but his semantic memory remained mostly intact.
• A disadvantage of studying brain damaged patients is the inability to generalise.
• Buckner & Peterson (1996) challenge Tulving's suggestions about where in the brain memories are encoded.
• Buckner & Peterson (1996) suggest that semantic memories are encoded in the left side of the prefrontal cortex and episodic memories on the right.
• Tulving et al (1994) suggest that episodic memories are encoded in the left prefrontal cortex and retrieval on the right.
• Belleville et al (2006) devised a real world application by developing an intervention to help older people memorise episodic memories more effectively.
• Tulving (2002) takes the view that episodic memory is a specialised category of semantic memory - now essentially the same store.
• Hodges & Patterson (2007) found that people with Alzheimer's disease could form new episodic memories but not semantic ones.
• Vicari (2007) did a case study of CL, an 8 year-old girl with brain damage. He found problems with her episodic LTM but she had no trouble creating or recalling semantic memories. This shows that semantic and episodic memories are separate and use different brain areas.