TYPES OF MEMORY

TYPES OF MEMORY

1. Types of long term memory

   • Episodic memory: Personal memories of events, e.g. what you did yesterday or a teavher you liked. This kind of memory includes contextual details plus emotional one.
   • Procedural memory: memory of how to do things e.g. riding a bike or learning how to read. Such memories are automatic as a result of repeated practise.
   • Semantic memory: Shared memories for facts and knowledge. These memories may be concrete, e.g. knowing that ice is made of water, or abstract such as mathematical knowledge.
   • Eavaluation: real life applications. Being able to identify different aspects of LTM allows psychologists to target certain kinds of memory in order to better people’s lives. evidence shows that episodic memories could be improved in older people who had a mild cognitive impairment. The trained pts performed better on a test of episodic memory after training than a control group. Episodic memory is the type of memory most often affected by mild cognitive impairment, which highlights the benefit of being able to distinguish between types of LTM.
   • Evaluation: Theres clinical evidence from people with brain-damage. Several cases of patients who have suffered brain damage to their hippocampus & have memory deficits: Clive Wearing and HM Their memory loss tends to be selective. Episodic memory in both of these men was severely impaired as a consequence of amnesia. They had difficulty recalling events that had happened from their pasts. But, their semantic memories were relatively unaffected. E.g. they still knew the meaning of words. So HM wouldn't be able to recall stroking a dog half an hour earlier and couldn't remember owning one in the past, but he would never need the concept of ‘dog’ explained to him over and over again. Their procedural memories were also intact. They both knew how to tie their shoelaces, how to walk and speak. In Clive Wearing’s case (he was a professional musician), how to read music, sing and play piano.
   • Evaluation: Neuroimaging Evidence. There's evidence from brain scan studies that different types of memory are stored in different parts of the brain. Pts were asked to perform various tasks while their brains were scanned using a PET scanner. E - They found that episodic and semantic were both recalled from an area of the brain- the prefrontal cortex. This area is divided into 2 areas, one on each side of the brain. The left prefrontal cortex was involved in recalling semantic memories. Episodic memories were recalled from the right prefrontal cortex. Procedural memories, however, were recalled from the cerebellum and the basal ganglia.

2. Short term and long term memory

   • Evaluation: Coding: LTM might not have been tested. STM was tested by asking pts to recall a word list immediately after hearing it. LTM was tested by waiting 20 mins, its questionable if thats testing LTM.
   • Evaluation- capacity: The size of the chunk matters: Research showed that people had a shorter memory span for larger chunks, e.g. 8 word phrases, than similar chunks e.g. one syllable words.
   • Evaluation: The STM isnt the same for everyone:research shows capacity increases with age. 8 year olds could remember 6.6 digits, 19 year olds could remember 8.6 digits. Could be due to gradual increase in brain capacity people may have developed strategies as they got older to remember info by chunking etc.
   • Evaluation: Duration: Testing STM is artificial: memorising syllables doesnt reflect everyday life where we are trying to remember is meaningful. Although it does have some relevance when comapred to remembering phone numbers or post codes.
   • Evaluation: Duration: Forgetting things could be due to displacement rather than decay.

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