tulving's long term memory

• episodic, a mental diary which stores memories in an autobiographical way linked to time and context of an individual’s life for example, if you have been to India in the summer, you will know that it is hot because you will remember going to the beach.
• Episodic are memories of events that have happened to you and are linked to the time in which they occurred e.g., the date of your first day at school. Input into episodic memory is continuous as we experience a whole episode in a time frame. Retrieval is dependent on the context in which the event was learned or experienced e.g., if you learn content in one setting, you will find it easier to recall in the same setting.
• semantic memory, a mental encyclopaedia storing words, facts, rules, meanings, and concepts of general knowledge for example, if you have never been to south Africa for summer but know that it is hot. Semantic memory allows you to recall information without time reference e.g., you know that 2+2=4 but don’t exactly remember when you learnt it.
• Semantic input is fragmented as we can piece together information which has been learned at different times e.g., you may learn that henry the VIII had six wives, later learn about each wife and what happened to her. You store these pieces of information independently and then piece them together later to understand this period of British history. Recall of semantic memory is based on interference and is not affected by retrieval as the factual information remains unchanged.
• A strength of this theory is that it has real life applications e.g., episodic memory can be improved in older people with mild cognitive impairment by showing them pictures and talking to them about their past life experiences for example, their wedding day or the day their child was born, refreshing their episodic memory as it has a continuous input. This is a strength as it allows us to keep memory going for longer in older people.
• Another strength is that there is evidence to show that the LTM has two distinct stores where episodic memories are stored separately to semantic memories. A study done on a boy with brain damage where he could not process episodic memories but still managed to progress academically suggests the existence of the two separates stores of long-term memory.
• A weakness is that the theory doesn’t account for people who have impaired episodic and semantic memory but can still do everyday tasks. The case study of HM shows that he couldn’t remember stroking a dog an hour earlier but never needed to be reminded of the concept of the term ‘dog’. However, he knew how to do his shoelaces, walk, and get dressed suggesting that there’s a third type of long-term memory for remembering practiced skills, procedural memory, which is not accounted for in the original theory.