Unit 2.1

 AO1 - Tulving (1967)

Leading figure in memory research

Based on MSM idea of LTM
They suggest there is a difference between episodic memory (remembering a family holiday) and genera memory. (knowing the country is in a continent)

DIfferent typed of LTM:

Procedural memory is memory on how to do things.

Autobiographical memory means episodes from your life and come from experiences you have had

Long term memory types are declarative and procedural. Declarative leads to episodic and semantic.

Episodic-

Memory of particular events and specific information. They involve the element of the individual and their experiences. They are autobiographical. They seem to be perceptually encoded and are linked to the 5 senses. IT is stored according to how its experienced and the time and place.

Semantic - 

The memory of relationships and how things fit together. This included the memory that you have siblings, where things are located and what they do. They are not usually stored with temporal and spatial information but some might be. Relating to time and to environment. It does not seem to be organised according to time and place over when the memories were encoded. IT is needed for language because words have meaning - learning words in the first place involves episodic memory but once these are earned they go into the semantic store. Symbols are also included like for maths. The understanding between the relationship of words and symbols. Any language that is learnt is then stored in semantic memory. They have a cognitive or thinking element and are about objects and concepts unrelated to the individual. 

Comparisons-

Retrieval of EM is only possible if it has been encoded and stored when it is retrieved it changes the memory as a new episode.

Retrieval of SM does not always rely on stored info just on stored rules, retrieval does not change memory it may make new ones though.

Episodic - these memories are unique to the individual

Semantic - these are more general and they include concepts and relationships between them. 

They both have unlimited capacity and duration.

Long term memory - Case of Clive Wearing

Musician who suffered brain damage from viral infection ( herpes simplex encephalitis) in 1985

Suffered almost the majority of amnesia

Lost the ability to encode new long term memories

Clive Wearing forgets everything within 7 seconds and is always 'coming into consciousness'  feeling he is waking up for the first time.

Even though he has lost his episodic memory but he still has semantic memory.

Even though he has no episodic memories of Deborah, he has semantic knowledge of her and he remembers that he loves her.

He has intact procedural memory, he can still play piano and conduct of choir. He cannot remember his musical education and as soon as the music stops her forgets he was performing and suffers a shaking fit.

Sir Colin Blakemore (1988) carried out a case study on Clive Wearing.

Blakemore discovered that damage to Clive Wearing's brain had been to the hippocampus, which seems to be the part of the brain where the short term memory (STM) rehearses information to encode.

AO2 - Memory in the real world

Jogging your memory -

Tulving argues that episodic memory is encoded based on how it was experienced (the encoding specificity principle)

This means that when a memory is stored details of time and space (when and where) are stored with it.

This means that episodic memory can be jogged by context cues - things that remind you of when/ where the original memory was encoded.

Godden and Baddeley  (1974) tested this and found that divers who learned words underwater recalled them better underwater than back on dry hand.

Semantic memory doesn't seem to be organised this way. Instead, it seems to work by using rules.

Episodic memory seems to be changed by being used.

Semantic memory doesn't seem to work like this. Your memory of relationships and meanings is not changed by being used and it can be quite separate from episodes.

Dementia and Alzeimer's - 

Most common symptom of dementia is difficulty to make new memories.

STM is the first type of memory to go.

Episodic memory is the next to go, as sufferers begin to forget autobiographical events.

Normally the recent episodes are lost first, but sufferers still remember episodes from their young adulthood and youth. 

Semantic memory is lost later, when sufferers struggle with language and no longer recognise family members.

As the disease advances, parts of memory which were previously intact also become impaired

Eventually all reasoning and language abilities are disrupted.

Patients tend to display a loss of knowledge of semantic categories. 

They lose the ability distinguish fine categories such as species of animals or types of objects but overtime this lack of discrimination becomes more general.

At first a patient with advanced dementia may see a spaniel and say "That id dog" later, they may just say "that is an animal"

AO3 - CODA

Credibility - 

There's a lot of research in support of Tulving's distinctions. Some of this is case studies of amnesia patients like Clive Wearing who have lost episodic memory but still have semantic memory.

The deterioration of dementia patients also suggests that episodic and semantic memory are separate because episodic memory is lost first and semantic memory last.

Classic Cognitive Study by Baddeley (1966b) also supports the existence of semantic memory. He found that PPs struggled with word lists linked by a common theme, which suggests the semantic similarity confused LTM. Unrelated word lists were not confusing. This suggests at least part of LTM works semantically. 

The contemporary study by Shmolck et al. (2002) also supports the idea of long term memory being located in a specific part of the brain - the temporal cortex.

Tulving carried out a case study of Kent Cochrane who suffered brain damage in a moto accident in 1981.

Like Clive Wearing . K.Cs hippocampus was destroyed in the injury and he lost all episodic memory.

K.C could still remember things he had learned like books, dates etc

This is evidence for a difference between episodic and semantic memory.

Objections - 

It seems as if semantic and episodic memory both rely on each other and might not be all that separate.

Damage to the temporal cortex of the brain seems to cause problems with both types of memory, as does dementia. This highlights declarative and non-declarative memory are located in the same place and may turn out to be the same thing working in different ways.

Squire & Zola (1998) put this to the test.

They examined children with amnesia - they never got a chance to gain a semantic store in the first place originally

They examined adults with amnesia - who had semantic and episodic memories from before suffering brain damage

PPs' episodic and semantic memories seem to be equally impaired which supports the idea that the two memory functions are linked or even the same thing.

episodic and semantic memory depend similarly on the medial temporal lobe according to these.

Squire & Zola propose that K.C.'s problems were due to damage to his frontal lobe.

This leads to the last criticism of Tulving's ideas that it's really hard to define episodic and semantic memory in a measurable way. This means that Tulving's concepts are not opertaionalisable.

Differences - 

Tulvings idea of these memories may also link to Baddeley and Hitch working memory model.

The VSSP component distinguishes the spatial awareness people have when they are remembering memories such as mentally walking through their house.

This ties in with Tulving and the Spatial awareness needed for when episodic memories are trying to be recalled.

Tulving’s ideas tie in closely with Atkinson & Shiffrin's Multi Store Model of Memory, which proposes that LTM is a separate memory store from STM and that LTM is created through rehearsal.

Tulving would agree, but argues there are different types of encoding, episodic and semantic. Shiffrin seems to have come round to this view and added Elaborative Rehearsal to his model in 2003.

These ideas also link to the theory of Reconstructive Memory and Bartlett’s ideas about schemas.

Applications :

We know that when a EM is retrieved it changes the memory as a new episode.

So could we argue that in terms of individuals that have associated memories with fears. Could it be made possible for them to retrieve that fearful memory and recreate the memory without the attached fear.

And if so could this then be used as a form of treatment for memories individuals have in regards to phobias and fears that they actually want to forget ?

The distinction between semantic memory and episodic memory helps us understand patients with memory loss like Clive Wearing, K.C. or people in the early stages of dementia.