Episodic And Semantic Memory example essay topic

'Memory' is a label for a diverse set of cognitive capacities by which humans and perhaps other animals retain information and reconstruct past experiences, usually for present purposes. Autobiographical memory is a complex and multiply determined skill, consisting of neurological, social, cognitive, and linguistic components. At most basic level, autobiographical memories refer to personally experienced past events. Over the past decade the research into autobiographical memory has led to an account of human memory in which personal goals play a major role in the formation, access and construction of specific memories Episodic memory is reconceive d as a memory system that retains highly detailed sensory perceptual knowledge of recent experience over retention intervals measured in minutes and hours.

Episodic knowledge has yet to be integrated with the autobiographical memory knowledge base and so takes as its referent the immediate past of the experiencing self or the 'I'. When recalled it can be accessed independently of content and is re collectively experienced. Autobiographical memory, in contrast, retains knowledge over retention intervals measured in weeks, months, years, decades and across the life span. Autobiographical knowledge represents the experienced self, or the 'me', is always accessed by its content and, when accessed, does not necessarily give rise to recollective experience. Instead, recollective experience occurs when autobiographical knowledge retains access to associated episodic memories. Autobiographical memory in simplest terms can be described as memory for events and issues related to yourself and includes memories for specific experiences and for the personal facts of one's life.

Neisser, a psychologist who specialised in memory, defined autobiographical memory in the following way: 1/2 If the remembered event seems to have played a significant part in the life of the remember er, it becomes an example of autobiographical memory and may form part of's life narrative. 1/2 The three major characteristics of autobiographical memory are: long term recollection of general features of an event, interpretations of an event, and some ra call of a few specific details of an event. Autobiographical memory contains the information you have about yourself. There are three different types of autobiographical memory. They include: personal memory, autobiographical fact, and generic personal memory.

Personal memory consists of an image based representations of a single unrepeated event. The next type is autobiographical fact. This is identical to personal memory except for the fact that the memory is not image based. The final type of autobiographical memory is generic personal memory.

This is similar to personal memory but the event is repeated or a series of similar events occur and are represented in a more abstract form. The psychologist William Brewer defines recollective episodic memory as a 'reliving' of he individual phenomenal experience from a specific moment in their past, accompanied by a belief that the remembered episode was personally experienced by the individual in their past. Significant psychological complexity is required, on such views, for genuine episodic remembering. The concept of 'episodic memory was originally proposed by Tulving (1972) and later elaborated.

We conceive of episodic memory as a system that contains experience-near, highly event specific, sensory-perceptual details of recent experiences-experiences that lasted for comparatively short periods of time (minutes and hours). These sensory-perceptual episodic memories do not endure in memory unless they become linked to more permanent autobiographical memory knowledge structures, where they induce recollective experience in autobiographical remembering. By this view a cess to episodic memories rapidly degrades and most are lost within 24 h of formation. Only those episodic memories that integrated at the time or consolidated later, possibly during the sleep period following formation, remain accessible and can enter into the subsequent formation of autobiographical memories.

Episodic memories are represented in the brain regions most closely involved in the processing that took place during actual. Because of this episodic memory sensory-perceptual details are represented in posterior regions of the brain and especially in networks sited in the occipital lobes, posterior parts of the temporal lobes. Thus, Episodic memory is a topographically separate memory system. Episodic memories represent knowledge of specific actions and action aut comes derived from moment-by-moment experience. Tulving proposed that there is a distinction between episodic memory and semantic memory. Accord in to Tulving, as has all ready been explained, episodic memory refers to the storage and retrieval of specific events occuring at particular time in particular place.

Retrieval mode is characterized by turning inwards of attention, a redirecting of attention from action to mental representations and, as a consequence, can probably only be engaged in under certain circumstances. Retrieval mode is also a state in which the cognitive system is prepared for or expects memory construction and recollection. In contrast, semantic memory contains information about our stock of knowledge about the world. Tulving defined semantic memory as follows: 1/2 It is a mental thesaurus, organized knowledge a person possesses abut words and other verbal symbols, their meanings and referents, about rules, formulas, and algorithms for the manipulation of these symbols, concepts, and relations. According to Wheeler et al. The major distinction between episodic ans semantic memory is made in terms of subjective experience that accompanies the operations of the systems at encoding and retrieval.

It also import an to say that in spite of the important differences between episodic and semantic memory there are also important similarities in Wheeler's view: 1/2 The manner in which information is registered i the episodic and semantic systems is highly similar -there is no known method of readily encoding information into an adult's semantic memory without putting corresponding information in episodic memory or vice versa... both episodic and semantic memory obey the principles of encoding specificity and transfer appropriate processing 1/2. Episodic memory possess a sense of conscious recollection of the past that semantic memory does not posses. The way in which information is registered in episodic and semantic memory is very similar. Autobiographical memory is very interesting and important when looking at eyewitness testimony.

It is reasonably accurate but does contain errors. 1. Michael W. Eysenck and Mark T. Keane, Cognitive Psychology, 4th edition, first published 2000 by Psychology Press 2. Tulving, E. 1972 Episodic and semantic memory. In Organization of memory (ed. E. Tulving & W Donaldson), pp. 382-403. New York: Academic Press.