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Sunday, January 23, 2011

MEMORY MODELS

KINDS OF REMEMBERING
Psychologists have applied a number of techniques in their efforts to understand memory. One approach has been to subdivide the vast field of memory into areas that seem to function differently from one another. Cast your mind back to the last time you arrived home. How does that memory differ from remembering how to spell ‘table’, or that there are 11 players in a soccer team, or remembering how to ride a bicycle? Our intuition would suggest that there are different kinds of remembering. But what is the evidence? Episodic and semantic memory One distinction made by psychologists is between episodic and semantic memory (Tulving, 1983). Episodic memory (episodic memory memory for personally experienced events) can be defined as memory for the personally experienced events of your life. Such memories naturally tend to retain details of the time and situation in which they were acquired.

Semantic memory, (semantic memory abstract knowledge that is retained irrespective of the circumstances under which it was acquired (e.g. ‘the world’s largest ocean is the Pacific’)) by contrast, is knowledge that is retained irrespective of the circumstances under which it was acquired. For example, your memory of eating breakfast this morning will be an episodic one involving when, where and what you ate. On the other hand, remembering the meaning of the term ‘breakfast’ involves semantic memory. You can describe what ‘breakfast’ means but you probably have no recollection of when and how you learned the concept. Autobiographical memory – the recall of events from our earlier life – has become a particular aspect of episodic memory that has attracted considerable interest in recent years (Cohen, 1996; Conway, 1996). (autobiographical memory the recall of events from our earlier life – a type of episodic memory)

Declarative and procedural knowledge
Another sub-division of memory is between declarative and procedural knowledge (Anderson, 1976; 1995). Declarative knowledge is explicit knowledge that people are consciously aware of and can report. For example, you can probably remember eating breakfast this morning. Ryle (1949) described this type of memory as ‘Knowing That’. Procedural knowledge is a knowledge of how to do things, such as riding a bicycle or typing. Ryle referred to it as ‘Knowing How’. The skills of typing, driving and so forth may be well learned and highly developed, but it is generally not easy to describe in detail how to carry them out. So an accomplished typist might find it difficult to identify each finger movement required to type this sentence, while being quite capable of typing it quickly and correctly.

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