Summary of Remembering and Knowing the Past

The main purposed of this article is based on the traditional view that remembering the past and knowing things learned in the past represent the same cognitive processes. Tulving proposed or discussed two memory stores containing different types of information, episodic and semantic memory retrieval. The episodic which is involved in the retrieval of personal and our ability to recall events from our past lives whiles the semantic is about the retrieval of impersonal and Contains our knowledge of the world, including broad facts.

He came up with two evidence that supported his argument that episodic and semantic memory is in the sense that, not only similar but different. The first argument was based on observations of a remarkable amnesic patient who could not remember anything but knows many things. This was driven from the K.C case which is about a 30-year-old man who had an accident with his motorcycle that left him with extensive brain damage. He could not remember anything and his personal life experience, even though K.C. did not remember any personally experienced events either before or after his accident, he does know many things about the world. which caused a remarkable case of memory impairment. On standard testing, K.C.'s anterograde amnesia is as severe as that of that of H.M case. However, his ability to make use of knowledge and experiences from the time before his accident shows a sharp dissociation between semantic and episodic memory. A good deal of his general knowledge of the world, including knowledge about himself, is preserved, but he is incapable of recollecting any personally experienced events, which encompasses an entire lifetime of personal experiences, K.C. differs from many other amnesic cases.

The second evidence was about the difference in regional cerebral blood flow patterns in the brain. Ithis evidence Tulving got participants to perform various memory tasks while their brains were scanned using a PET scanner. The found that episodic and semantic memories were both recalled from an area of the brain known as the prefrontal cortex. The area is divided into two, one on each side hemisphere of the brain. The left prefrontal cortex was involved in recalling semantic memories and episodic memories were recalled from the right prefrontal lobes. The strength of finding supports the view that there is a physical reality to the different types of LTM within the brain. It has also been confirmed in