Psych: Types of LTM

• Types of Long-Term Memory

  • Episodic Memory
  • Procedural Memory
  • Semantic Memory
• Episodic Memory


  Personal memories of events, may include contextual details and emotional tone, has three elements: specific details of the events, context, and emotion
• H.M. and Clive Wearing

  • Damage to their hippocampus resulted in episodic memory damage and amnesia, but their semantic memory was relatively unaffected
• Procedural Memory


  Memory for how to do things; remembering how to do something rather than knowing the rules of what to do; typically acquired through repetition and practice - automatic
• C.W.


  • Could play the piano, supporting the view of different memory stores in the LTM and that they are in different parts of the brain
• Tulving found that episodic memory was in the right prefrontal cortex and semantic memory was in the left prefrontal cortex
• Buckner and Peterson found the opposite, that episodic memory was actually in the left prefrontal cortex and semantic memory was in the right prefrontal cortex
• Semantic Memory


  Stored memories for facts and knowledge, concrete or abstract, factual knowledge, not time-stamped, usually don't remember how/when we learned about something
• This makes the finding contradictory, as the two studies have conflicting results about the brain regions for episodic and semantic memory