tulvings theory of ltm

• what does it split long term memory into?

  semantic and episodic memory
• what does episodic memory store

  info about dates, times, events and things that relate to the individual
• how is episodic memory stored and encoded?

  according to how it is experienced, making it temporal and spatial
• what does retrieval do to epsiodic memory

  changes the memory that is stored
• what is an episode

  multiple info sources interwoven, easily distorted
• what is autonoetic consciousness


  the ability to go back and relive epsiodic memories due to the subjevctive nature of ltm
• what is stored in semantic memory?

  meanings, definitions, which is needed for language
• how is semantic memory encoded

  not temporal or spatial, encoded how we learn it not where or when we did
• how do we retrieve semnatic memory

  does not rely on stored info just stored rules
• experiments looking at episodic memory require recall of a personal episode, experimenter may input this episode themselves
• experiments on semantic memory look at retrieval process, what is recorded tends to come from free recall
• research to support

  Bower et al, used four lists of 28 words and presented them, they recalled as many as they called, one set of participants had the words in categories and the other randomly. out of 112 words those who had the categories recaled 73 words on average and those without 21. this suggests that meaning is involved in recall
• weakness of Bower et al.

  task of remembering may lack validity and has very low mundane realism, does not reflect anything in real life
• strength of tulving

  neurophysical evidence to support separate two categories, for example, episodic memories seem to be affected when there is damage to areas such as the medial temporal lobe or the prefrontal lobes but semantic memory not affected
• weakness of neurophysical evidence

  it has been suggested that the medial temporal lobe is used for semnatic memory, the stores may rely on one another and therefore are not as separate as tulving believed