Semantic:
- Facts, meaning and knowledge.
- Information about ourselves, stores information about the world.
- Involves conscious thought & doesn’t rely on cue’s for retrieval.
- Can work independently.
- Found in frontal & temporal lobe.
- Fragmented structure.
Episodic:
- Encodes on cues which trigger recall, gives a sense of identity.
- Stores information about events (who, what, where) & involves conscious thought.
- Stores memories chronologically (date stamped).
- Gives emotional & entire context surroundings of events.
- Helps remember past experiences & relies on semantics.
- If not triggered by cue there could be failure to retrieve.
- Found in hippocampus.
Procedural:
- Motor skills memory.
- Emotional behaviours.
- Knowing how to do things, performing skills.
- Not aware of able to recall memories.
- Doesn’t involve conscious thought.
| Strengths | Weaknesses |
| Clive Wearing – have widespread damage to the brain meaning they cannot produce new episodal & semantic memories. However can still remember motor skills like piano – showing that there are separate areas of the brain for semantic, procedural & episodic
Hm – person had parts of hippocampus & temporal lobes removed to stop seizures which damaged his episodic & semantic memory – showing different areas of brain responsible for memory as procedural skills still working. Application – Tulving demonstrates the importance of cues to improve episodic memory – helps educational rehabilitation by learner’s effort to identify cues helping retention. |
Low G – case studies are usually unique and damage cannot be replicated – e.g HM temporal & hippocampus removed – cannot generalise these to everyone as they are unique.
Doesn’t account for continuity between each system as they work together e.g when episodic tasks like learning a list of words, it uses both semantic & episodic features – unable to study separate memory functions in isolation. Contrasting theory – Atkin & Shiffrin – states that LTM is just one store and that it is simplistic & only one store for procedural, semantic & episodic memory – stating Tulving is over complicating memory |