Chapter 7- Semantic vs Episodic

What is the difference between episodic and semantic memory?

Episodic: Memories of personal experiences tied to a specific time and place. Semantic: General facts, meanings, and knowledge that do not require remembering when you learned them.

How can we dissociate episodic and semantic memory?

Test personal-event recall separately from factual knowledge. A person may lose the ability to recall personal experiences but retain general knowledge, or vice versa.

What happens to episodic and semantic memory when the hippocampus is damaged?

Episodic memory: Often severely impaired, especially forming new memories of events. Semantic memory: Can be relatively preserved, although learning new facts may also be impaired, depending on the extent and location of damage

What does amnesia show about the two memory systems? What brain regions are involved?

Some amnesia patients have severe episodic-memory problems but retain some semantic knowledge. The hippocampus and medial temporal lobes are important for episodic memory and for initially learning many new facts. Other regions, including parts of the neocortex, support long-term semantic knowledge.

Renoult et al. (2016): What did they do, find, and conclude?

Studied how episodic and semantic memory relate to one another. Their work emphasized that memories can contain both personally experienced information and general knowledge Takeaway: Episodic and semantic memory are distinguishable but interact; they are not necessarily completely separate systems.

Cabeza et al. (2018): What do they argue?

Episodic and semantic memory are distinguishable forms of memory that can work together. Memory is supported by interacting brain networks rather than necessarily being divided into completely independent systems.

Collins and Quillian (1969): What is their theory of semantic memory?

Semantic memory is organized like a hierarchical network of connected concepts. Example: canary → bird → animal. Properties are stored at the highest relevant level to avoid repeating information

What makes retrieval faster?

Fewer links or levels to travel through the network should mean faster retrieval. Example: “A canary is a canary” should be verified faster than “A canary is an animal.”

What are the limitations?

People do not always take longer to verify information that is farther away in the hierarchy. It does not fully explain typicality: a robin is judged a more typical bird than a penguin. Concepts can belong to multiple categories, not just one strict hierarchy.

What is spreading-activation theory?

Collins and Loftus (1975): activating one concept spreads some activation to related concepts in memory. Example: hearing “doctor” may activate “nurse,” “hospital,” or “patient.”

What evidence supports semantic activation and priming?

Semantic priming: People recognize or respond to a word faster when it follows a related word. Example: people usually recognize nurse faster after doctor than after bread. This supports the idea that related concepts become temporarily easier to access

What are the limitations of spreading-activation theory?

It can be difficult to measure activation directly. It does not fully explain how all concept connections are learned or how strong each connection should be. Priming may reflect more than spreading activation alone, including attention, expectations, and overlap in meaning.

Rosch, Mervis, Gray, Johnson, and Boyes-Braem (1976): What did they find?

People often categorize objects most easily at the basic level: dog rather than animal or poodle. Basic-level categories balance useful information with ease of recognition. People often name objects at this level because it gives a useful amount of detail without being too general or too specific

Did Van Hoef et al. (2023) agree? (With Rosch, Mervis, Gray, Johnson, and Boyes-Braem 1997)

They examined the basic-level advantage using sensorimotor information (perception and action) and linguistic information (how words are used together). Their work questions whether the advantage is explained only by category structure; language and experience also matter. Takeaway: Basic-level naming and categorization advantages are real, but the reasons behind them may be more complex than the original explanation.

How are concepts represented?

• Concepts may be represented through features, connections to other concepts, sensory and motor experiences, or combinations of these.

• Example: “apple” may involve its appearance, taste, texture, typical uses, and links to other fruit.

Barsalou (2012): What is grounded cognition theory?

• Concepts are partly grounded in the brain’s systems for perception, action, bodily states, and experience.

• Thinking about an object can partly reactivate experiences of seeing, touching, or using it.

What are the predictions and evidence for grounded cognition?

• Prediction: Understanding a concept should sometimes involve reactivating sensory or motor information.

• Evidence: Some studies find that thinking about actions or objects influences activity in related sensory and motor systems.

• Example: understanding action words may involve some of the same systems used to perform those actions

What evidence is against it, and what are its limitations?

• Not all concepts are easily explained through direct sensory experience, especially abstract ideas like justice or freedom.

• Sensory or motor brain activity does not necessarily prove that this activity is required to understand a concept.

• Takeaway: Experience helps shape concepts, but it may not explain every part of conceptual knowledge.

Patterson et al. (2007): What is the hub-and-spoke model?

• Hub: Combines information from different sources to create a general meaning for a concept.

• Spokes: Specialized brain regions that process sensory, motor, visual, and language information.

• Hub location: The anterior temporal lobes (ATLs), on both sides of the brain.

What evidence supports and challenges the hub-and-spokesmodel?

• For: People with semantic dementia and damage involving the ATLs can lose knowledge about many different types of concepts.

• Against/limitations: Some patients show differences between types of information or categories, suggesting that knowledge may also depend on specialized brain regions.

• The model does not completely explain how concepts are learned or how context changes meaning

What did Hoffman et al. (2018) add to the model?

• Added the importance of semantic control: selecting the meaning that is relevant to the current situation.

• The brain uses stored knowledge and context to focus on the right information.

• Takeaway: Knowing a concept and being able to retrieve the right part of that knowledge are different processes

What are the features of a schema?

• A schema is an organized framework of knowledge about a familiar situation, object, person, or event.

• It contains expectations and typical relationships.

• It helps us interpret new information, make predictions, and fill in gaps—but can also create errors.

What types of schemas are there?

• Person schemas: Expectations about people or personality types.

• Self-schemas: Knowledge and beliefs about yourself.

• Role schemas: Expectations about people in particular roles, such as teachers or doctors.

• Event schemas/scripts: What usually happens in a situation, such as going to a restaurant.

• Object schemas: Knowledge about familiar objects.

• Spatial schemas: Expectations about how places are arranged.

How do schemas differ from concepts?

• Concept: Knowledge about a particular category or thing, such as dog.

• Schema: A broader framework of related knowledge and expectations, such as what usually happens during a visit to the veterinarian.

• Concepts can be parts of schemas.

Are different brain regions involved? What do patient studies show?

• Medial prefrontal cortex: Often involved in using prior knowledge and schemas.

• Hippocampus: Important for forming and retrieving specific episodic memories and connecting details to a situation.

• Anterior temporal lobes: Important for conceptual and semantic knowledge.

• Patient studies suggest that general knowledge and schemas can sometimes remain available even when memory for specific events is impaired, although the systems interact.

What do we use schemas for?

• Organize information and make it easier to understand.

• Predict what is likely to happen.

• Help us remember important details.

• Fill in missing information—but sometimes incorrectly.

Bartlett (1932): What did he find?

• Participants recalled The War of the Ghosts, an unfamiliar story.

• They changed or omitted unfamiliar details and made the story fit their own cultural expectations.

• Takeaway: Remembering is reconstructive, not an exact replay of the past.

Brewer and Treyens (1981): What did they find?

• Participants waited in a room resembling a graduate student's office and were later asked to remember it.

• They sometimes remembered expected office objects that were not actually there.

• Takeaway: Schemas can lead people to remember typical details that they only expected to see

Quent et al. (2022): What did they find?

• This is a specific study I can’t confidently identify from the citation alone.

• For your flashcards, check the assigned reading for the exact method and result before memorizing a claim about it.

What are limitations of schema theories?

• They can be vague about exactly when schemas help or distort memory.

• A mistaken recollection does not automatically prove that a schema caused it.

• Researchers must distinguish genuine memory errors from guessing, response strategies, and deliberate filling-in of gaps.

Gauld and Stephenson (1967): How did they challenge claims about memory errors?

• They tested whether people deliberately or consciously filled gaps when recalling stories.

• Strong instructions to avoid errors reduced mistakes; participants could also recognize some of their own errors.

• Takeaway: Some apparent schema-based distortions may reflect guessing or how participants approach the task, not only automatic reconstruction

Diamond et al. (2020): What did they investigate?

• Studied memory for verifiable real-world events, where researchers could check whether recalled details were accurate.

• This approach helps test memory accuracy against real evidence rather than relying only on participants’ reports.

• Takeaway: Memory can be evaluated against objective records; not every confident recollection or general claim about memory errors should be accepted without checking accuracy

Personal semantics

• Facts about your own life that you know as general knowledge, such as where you went to school or the name of a childhood friend.

• The term is associated with Renoult and colleagues in research on the overlap between episodic and semantic memory.

• Personal semantics may feel personal but can sometimes be recalled without reliving the original event.

Semanticization

• The process by which memories become more like general knowledge over time, with less detail about the original event.

• Example: You may remember that you visited a city but eventually lose the details of one specific trip.

Inference

• Drawing a conclusion from information you already know.

• Example: If the ground is wet and the sky is cloudy, you might infer that it rained

Semantic priming

• When exposure to one concept makes a related concept easier or faster to process.

• Example: Seeing doctor can make it faster to recognize nurse.

Concrete vs. abstract concepts

• Concrete: Can be experienced through the senses, such as apple, chair, or rain.

• Abstract: Less directly tied to a specific physical object or sensory experience, such as justice, freedom, or honesty.

• Concrete concepts often have clearer sensory features; abstract concepts may depend more on language, context, and social experience.