types of LTM

Cards (3)

  • STRENGTH:
    • Evidence from famous case of HM (Henry Molaison) and Clive Wearing.
    • Episodic memory in both men was severely impaired due to brain damage and infection
    • But their semantic memory was relatively unaffected
    • They still understood the meaning of words
    • IE: HM could not recall having stroked a dog half an hour earlier but did not need the concept of dog being explained to him
    • Their procedural memory was intact they could both walk, speak and Clive Wearing could still play the piano
    • Evidence supports Tulving's view that there are different memory stores in LTM
  • LIMITATION:
    • Studying people w brain injuries can help researchers to understand how memory is supposed to work normally
    • But clinical studies aren't perfect
    • Major limitation is the lack of control of variables
    • Brain injuries experienced by pp were usually unexpected
    • The researcher had no way of controlling what happened to the pp before + during the injury
    • The researcher has no knowledge of the pp's memory before the injury
    • Without this its difficult to judge exactly how much worse it is afterwards
    • Lack of control limits what clinical studies can tell us about diff types of LTM
  • LIMITATION
    • Conflicting research findings linking types of LTM to areas of the brain
    • IE: Bucker and Peterson 1996 reviewed evidence regarding the location of semantic and episodic memory
    • Concluded that semantic memory is located on the left side of the pre-frontal cortex and episodic memory on the right
    • However other research links the left prefrontal cortex with encoding of episodic memories and the right prefrontal cortex w episodic retrieval (Tulving 1994)
    • Challenges any neurophysiological evidence to support types of memory as there is poor agreement on where each type is located