Evaluation

• Case studies such as HM supporting Tulving's theory. After HM's hippocampus was removed he could not remember new events in his life or new factual info. He could, however, learn how to do new tasks- when asked to draw a star through a mirror he got quicker at drawing each time he did it. This suggests there are in fact different long term memory stores and HM had damage to his episodic and semantic memory but his procedural memory was intact.
• Research support based on case study investigations is limited as one individual is not representative enough to make inferences about the wider population. The study of HM is limited in its generalisability as the sample consisted of one person who had brain damage, long term memory may not be identically distributed in the non clinical population.
• However there is research of types of Long Term memory in the population of non clinical people, Tulving used brain scanning techniques to show that recall of episodic memories activated the frontal and temporal lobes but recall of semantic memories activated the parietal and occipital lobes. This supports the idea there are multiple types of memory that are processed in different areas of the brain. The research into types of LTM has real world application. Being able to identify different areas of the brain specialised for different types of memory help us.