Types of Long-term Memory

Who proposed the idea of 3 LTM stores

What are they

Tulving (1985)

Episodic

Memory of an event eg details, context, emotions

Semantic

Facts and meanings eg capital city of France

Procedural

How to do something eg tying shoelace

What happened to Clive Wearing

What main part of his brain was damaged

What two ways has this affected him

What Type of LTM was retained

Which has he kept

Has a brain disease

Hippocampus

Unable to form new memories

Has a 7 - 30 second memory

Retained Procedural memory

Lost Episodic

What proof for Types of LTM did Tulving have

What areas did he find were associated with which LTM type

Connected participants brain to PET scanner

Made them perform various memory tasks

Found that:

- Episodic memories recalled from the Right Prefrontal Cortex

- Semantic memories from the Left Prefrontal Cortex

Shows episodic and semantic memory are 2 distinct types of memory, stored in two different places

Methodological strength of Tulvings brain scan experiment

- Used scientific methods to research the areas of the brain linked to different types of LTM

- PET scan method gives objective + emperical results that cannot be interpreted by the experimenter.

- Therefore increases internal validity

Strength of the use of case studies

- Often ethical as tests are part of the recovery

- Consent is given and they are cared for by medical professionals

- Doctors ensure confidentiality and anonymity unless patient asks otherwise

- Therefore easy to get permission from ethic committees to carry out research and repeat tests

Methodological weakness of Clive Wearing

- Only studies the case of one patient and few individuals experience the same type of severe brain damage

- Extreme nature of Clives case means cannot be generalised to to people with different types of brain damage or memory disorders

- Therefore decreases its population validity

Ethical strength of Clive Wearing

- Case studies allow psychologists to study brain damage that would otherwise be unethical to create experimentally

- Cases exploit existing situations of brain damage, meaning the individual is taken care of by professionals who also ensure the patients confidentiality and anonymity unless the patient allows otherwise

- This aligns with the BPS guidelines and therefore allows for further research to be done.

- Increases reliability of the research done on Clive

Contradictory research on Tulvings research

Cohen and Squire

- Found that Hippocampus plays role in all types of memory, not just episodic

- Semantic and Episodic memory are not fully distinct and can be derived from each other