Long term memory systems

• Explicit memory requires participants to actively and consciously recollect a fact or a previous experience.
• Implicit memory is revealed when performance on a task is facilitated in the absence of conscious recollection.
• Explicit and Implicit memory are different types of memory, but can be classified into five major memory systems: working memory, semantic memory, episodic memory, memory embodied in a perceptual representation system, usually evidenced by priming, and memory that results from procedural (skill) learning.
• Semantic memory is a mental thesaurus, organized knowledge a person possesses about words and other verbal symbols, their meanings and referents, about rules, formulas and algorithms for the manipulation of these symbols, concepts and relations.
• Semantic memory is not contextualized to the time or place of its learning.
• Collins & Quillian (1969, 1970) proposed a hierarchy (like a family tree) of attributes (properties that are true about a thing) as a model of semantic memory.
• The model of Collins & Quillian (1969, 1970) found that subjects were quicker to confirm that, say, “a canary is a bird'' than “a canary is an animal”, in keeping with the number of links between the relevant levels in the network.
• The model of Collins & Quillian (1969, 1970) had problems with what is called the defining attribute view of meanings: it could not explain fuzzy category boundaries and typicality effects, e.g., the fact that Tarzan is not a good instance of the category bachelor.
• Collins & Loftus (1975) thought of semantic information as being structured as spreading activation through a network of related concepts, where distance represents connectedness.
• This allowed semantic information to be graded and to build up with experience.
• The model of Collins & Loftus (1975) helped to account for semantic priming and other measures of semantic relationship.
• What is the main characteristic of explicit memory? Recollection of facts or previous experiences is conscious and intentional.
• How does Graf & Schachter (1985) define implicit memory? Performance on a task is facilitated by previous experiences without conscious recollection.
• According to Baddeley (1997), what does implicit memory NOT constitute? Recollective memory
• Which is NOT one of the five major memory systems proposed by Schachter and Tulving (1994)? Implicit memory
• What is semantic memory, according to Tulving (1972)? Organized knowledge about words and verbal symbols.
• What did Collins & Quillian's (1969, 1970) semantic net consist of? Hierarchy of attributes in a family tree-like structure.
• What limitation was associated with statements like "a canary is a stone" in Collins & Quillian's model? Inconsistency with the defining attribute view of meanings.
• How did Collins & Loftus (1975) conceptualize semantic information? As spreading activation through a network.
• Rosch and Mervis (1975) identified three levels of generality: a superordinate (high-level) category-level, a basic-level category-level, and a subordinate (low-level) category-level.
• Basic-level categories seem to have an important status: they are used by adults in spontaneous naming, learned first by children, group things in a way such that real-world interaction with members of the class is somewhat similar, and group things which have similar shapes.
• Basic-level categories can change with expertise, for example, ornithologists might consider warbler to be a basic level category; nonexperts are more likely to use bird.
• The membership of categories is likely to be graded rather than all-or-none, for example, Rosch (1973) found different levels of typicality different category members, such as robins being more typical birds than are penguins.
• Categories can be very useful in making predictions, for example, if this is a dog then it might bite, whereas if it's a sheep it probably won't.
• Theoretical models of word meaning include Landauer and Dumais (1997) whose Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) model proposed that words were similar in meaning to other words that appeared in approximately the same contexts as did they.
• Neuropsychological work on semantic memory has concentrated on the way in which semantics break down in diseases like semantic dementia and category-specific anomia.
• Semantic dementia is a progressive disease that seems to primarily affect sufferers’ ability to determine the meaning of verbal terms, pictures, objects.
• In category-specific anomia, patients are described as having specific problems naming, say, living things.
• Farah and McClelland (1991) proposed that the living/nonliving distinction was a reflection of a more basic distinction between sensory features and functional features.
• Shelton & Caramazza (2001) claimed that knowledge was organized into “broad domains reflecting evolutionarily salient distinctions”.
• Their theory predicts that patients will be found with category-specific anomia, if that category is relevant to survival, such as animals, plants, etc.
• Episodic memory is the memory for events from the personal past, involving a particular kind of "mental time travel" that elicits a particular kind of awareness: the type of awareness experienced when one thinks back to a specific moment in one's personal past and consciously recollects some prior episode or state as it was previously experienced.
• This type of awareness is sometimes called "auto-noetic" (self-knowing) awareness.
• Episodic memory and semantic memory are different in terms of their subjective properties and appear distinct by definition.
• Episodic encoding problems, such as anterograde amnesia, are often associated with semantic learning problems, but this is not always the case.
• Loss of previously encoded episodes does not usually lead to loss of previously encoded semantics.
• Episodic memory is the memory for events from the personal past, involving a particular kind of "mental time travel" that elicits a particular kind of awareness: the type of awareness experienced when one thinks back to a specific moment in one's personal past and consciously recollects some prior episode or state as it was previously experienced.
• Declarative and nondeclarative memories are often used as a classification.
• This type of awareness is sometimes called "auto-noetic" (self-knowing) awareness.
• Semantic memory and episodic memory are types of explicit memory, also referred to as declarative memory systems because their contents can be declared.