The episodic and semantic distinction
Write a critical review essay evaluating current scientific evidence addressing this question: Are these types of explicit long-term memory fully dissociable?
In your practical session for ‘Topic 1: Can you trust your memories?’ we focused on Autobiographical Memory. You investigated your own and others’ autobiographical memories for different time periods, you completed a scale examining different styles of remembering and you took part in some tests of episodic memory, which relies on the episodic system that you learnt about in the lecture and that researchers believe underlies our ability to remember personally experienced events from our lives.
Through these learning experiences you will have seen that that although we learn that these types of memory are separable and dissociable systems, there are perhaps more interactions between episodic and semantic memory in our autobiographical memory than we might think. For example, we scaffold our memory for personal events (episodic memory) with personal-related semantic information (e.g. names of our friends, or of the town we were brought up in) – known as ‘personal semantics’.
For your coursework on this topic we would like you to answer the question above by considering recent interpretations of the interaction and dissociations between EPISODIC and SEMANTIC memory. We would like you to consider evidence related to how these memories are encoded, stored and retrieved. You will need to consider neuroscientific evidence; this can include functional neuroimaging, EEG and research with neurological patients.
Your essay is to take the format of a critical review article aimed at an intelligent audience with scientific knowledge but no expertise in memory. In order to critically review you should start by reading some of the review articles referenced below, but you then must read the original experimental work these review articles are based on, so that you can evaluate the strength of the evidence. Some experimental papers on this topic are also listed below but you are also expected to find your own as you complete searches on Pubmed/ PsycInfo and as you read the review articles.
