Do you know the different types of long-term memory?

Long-term memory or LTM is that warehouse where we store all significant information from the past. These data, about past experiences, somehow guide our behavior. Through experience we know what consequences each behavior has and what we should do depending on the context in which we are. This is why long-term memory plays a very important evolutionary role.

However, Not all long-term memory contains the same type of data. We can see a clear difference between knowing the capital of Spain, or what I ate today, or knowing how to ride a bike. It is possible to differentiate between this type of “knowledge”, and to do so we are going to look at the classification of psychologist L. Squire. In this sense, It divides the MLP into declarative and procedural memory.

Declarative long-term memory

The declarative MLP is that type of memory that we can access explicitly and intentionally. That is, those data to which we voluntarily access and can express in words. This is a memory of facts and is made up mainly of propositions or mental images.

Now, within the declarative memory we can make a subclassification. Among the memory that is responsible for personal experiences, which we will call episodic memory; and the one that is in charge of the data that speaks about the world and language, which will be semantic memory.

Episodic memory

Episodic memory is used to encode experiences or personal experiences that occurred in the past.. For a subsequent conscious recovery of events and episodes in our own lives that have occurred at a specific time. Therefore, a main characteristic of this type of memory is its temporal nature, since each event is labeled at a specific time. Tulving (1972) He defined it as: “he conscious awareness of events or episodes temporarily dated, spatially located and personally experienced”.

When the person tries to recover something from this memory voluntarily, they have to travel back in time… until they reach the objective event. For this, recovery is closely linked to contextual cues that serve to access the information that we want to remember.

There are two key aspects that enhance the encoding of a particular event and improve its subsequent retrieval. One is the processing that has gone into encoding or storing it: studies tell us that the more resources we spend trying to store a fact, the easier it will be to remember. And the other is the emotional aspects, those memories linked to a specific emotion leave much more of a mark and are easier to remember.

Caneza and Nyberg (2000)through neuroimaging studies, showed that the right prefrontal cortex is related to episodic retrieval.

Semantic memory

Semantic memory is a type of memory necessary for the use of language. It is a database that people have about words, other verbal symbols and their meaning. It is an independent system of episodic memory at the level of encoding, storage and retrieval. Unlike episodic, it lacks temporal coding; You know that water boils at 100 Cº but you don’t remember – because you didn’t store it, it didn’t seem relevant to you – when you learned that fact.

Semantic memory is a great store of concepts and information. But how is this data organized? Although there are multiple theories about how they are stored and organized, the most validated comes from connectionist models. According to these, Semantic memory is organized in a network system in which all concepts are related to each other in various ways. Something that makes it easier to recover memories. Thus the concept of dog is strongly related to mammal, fur and barking, but very little (in general) to book, computer and stapler.

This memory hides a deep theory behind it. Researchers are interested in knowing how we acquire our relationship with objects. Each of us can define an object differently but we know that we are talking about the same thing. Thus, the information we have about an object or symbol is not only the objective information that the object may possess but also our experience with him. As stated Jorge Rivas (2010), from the National University of Mar del Plata: “Every communicative relationship between two speakers always implies an act of interpretation and a negotiation of meanings“.

Procedural long-term memory

Procedural memory is that which is automated and is explicitly inaccessible to us.. It is that memory related to information about “know-how”. Within this we can find implicit memory, motor skills and conditioning.

Implicit memory

It is that long-term memory that does not require the intentional recovery of previously acquired experience.. Perhaps it is one of the most difficult types of memory to define and explain. Therefore, to understand it, we turn to priming studies or tests to measure implicit memory.

A clear example of priming is found in the speed when responding or reading familiar words. Imagine that we present a subject with a series of words and We tell him to read them out loud to make sure he pays attention to them.. And after a reasonable amount of time, he may no longer remember those words explicitly, but if we present him with another list of words he will take longer to read those that were not presented in the previous list.

It seems that there is a certain store that stores episodic events implicitly to facilitate situations in the near future. Furthermore, as a curious fact, this type of memory is perfectly preserved in amnesic patients: proof of its independence from declarative memory.

Motor skills

When we talk about motor skills we are referring to those skills that we have automated thanks to practice, such as riding a bike or walking. While we perform these automated activities, we are not explicitly remembering how they are done: our body acts in a practically automatic way.

This type of memory is very useful to us, since When a skill is proceduralized, it frees up a large amount of working memory resources.. So, for example, instead of thinking about what I have to do to keep my balance on the bike, I can allocate resources to paying attention to the directions to go to a specific place.

Conditioning

This type of memory is related to associative learning, such as classical or operant conditioning.. In these cases we have created an association: when faced with a certain stimulus, a type of response immediately follows. Thus, when that stimulus appears, we will automatically carry out that associated response.

A simple example is disgust conditioning.. Imagine that on one occasion we eat expired yogurt that makes our stomach feel really bad. The body is likely to associate discomfort with that yogurt, especially since we are programmed to form very quick associations with foods. Thus, the next time we see yogurt, processes will be triggered in our body that will make us feel an upset stomach, and thus avoid ingesting it.

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