Amnesia: Inability to form memories (usually caused by an injury)

• Anterograde Amnesia: Cannot form new memories
• Retrograde Amnesia: Cannot remember old memories
• Ribot Gradient: People with retrograde amnesia usually don’t lose all memories. Usually lose memories that are most recently formed first.

Declarative/Explicit Memory: Semantic or Episodic memory that can be explicitly communicated

Nondeclarative/Implicit Memory: Skills, associations, memories that aren’t consciously accessible

Declarative/Explicit Memories

Episodic Memory: Occurred events at a place & time, always autobiographical, from one exposure.

Semantic Memory: Factual information, can be non-autobiographical, can from multiple learning.

• Differences between Episodic and Semantic

Interactions between Episodic and Semantic:

• Memories organized by previous knowledge - concepts benefit memory (E.g. Voss 1980: experts vs non-experts recall a baseball game, show better recall)
• Repetitions increase semantic memory recall, decrease episodic memory accuracy. (E.g. more times going to a place → harder to recall a specific time going to the place)

Semantic Memory

Organization

• Similar objects within categories are linked together
• Prototypes (stereotype of a category, e.g. drawing a dog) (E.g. takes longer to answer “is this a bird” if the picture is further away from the bird prototype)
• Schemas: Expectation of the context of different scenarios (E.g. show an office picture → ask what’s in the office → P respond with typical office supplies)
• Scripts: Expectation of the timeline of how things should go (E.g. go to a restaurant, expect: walk in, someone greet you, etc.)
• The way we misremember things reveal our initial organization of memory.