Types of LTM

• Procedural


  knowledge of skills of simply how to do things such as riding a bike.

  can recall these memories without conscious effort

  e.g. ability to change a gear in a car without actually thinking about it

  Non-declarative and utilises the motor cortex and cerebellum
• Semantic


  knowledge of the world - they're facts in the broadest sense of the term. they require conscious effort to recall

  Declarative memory type located in the left prefrontal cortex
• Episodic


  regards our ability to recall particular events, requires conscious effort to recall

  these contain 3 different elements:

  1. remember when exactly they happened

  2. your memory will include a number of different elements such as people involved, objects, location

  3. have to make a conscious effort to recall the memory.

  Declarative memory type located in the right prefrontal cortex
• Strength - supporting research evidence - Clinical

  episodic memories in HM + Clive Wearing was severely impaired. but their semantic memories were relatively unaffected and their procedural memories were also intact

  evidence supports Tulving as it shows that different memories are stored in different parts of the brain
• Strength - supporting research evidence - Neuroimaging

  evidence from brain scans. Tulving et al got their ppts to perform different memory tasks while their brain were scanned (PET scan).

  found that episodic + semantic -> prefrontal cortex, one on each side

  supports the physical reality there's different types of LTM
• Strength - practical applications

  Belleville et al demonstrated that episodic memories could be improved better on a test of episodic memory after training than a control group

  being able to identify different aspects of LTM allows psychologists to target certain kinds of memory in order to better people's lives
• Weakness - only 2 types of LTM

  Cohen and Squire disagree with Tulving. they accept that procedural memories represent one type of LTM - non-declarative memory

  argue that episodic and semantic memories are stored together in one LTM store - declarative memory
• Weakness - limitations of supporting research evidence

  people like Clive Wearing + HM have provided a lots of useful info about what happens when memory is damaged

  helped researchers to understand how memory is supposed to work normally

  such clinical studies aren't perfect -> there's a lack of control of all sorts of different variables in clinical studies