Episodic Memory

 

Memory for personal events and people, the episodes of your life.

It is this kind of memory that is which is tested in experimental work. It tends to be unstructured and rapidly lost, particularly as new information arrives and interferes. However it can quite precise , Lindsay and Norman(1977) asked students ‘what were you doing on a Monday afternoon in the 3rd week in September, 2 years ago?’, and found many students actually knew !

Very vivid episodic memories have been termed ‘flashbulb’ memories(Brown and Kulik 1977) which involve recalling exactly what you were doing and where you were when a particularly important , exciting or emotional event happened

 

Semantic Memory

Memory for meanings, feelings, ideas, language, other cognitive concepts and general knowledge.

It is well organised.

Usually isn’t forgotten and doesn’t disappear in cases of amnesia.

 

Procedural Memory

It is also known as implicit memory, this is the memory for Knowing how:

Our knowledge of how to do things, skills such as riding a bicycle.

Although we know how to do these things we are often completely unable to consciously introspect upon or describe how we do them. Procedural knowledge is very resistant to forgetting and is also resistant to brain damage that eradicates other forms of memory.

 

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