A report on Memory and Episodic memory

Long-term memory is commonly labelled as explicit memory (declarative), as well as episodic memory, semantic memory, autobiographical memory, and implicit memory (procedural memory).

Rats exposed to an intense learning event may retain a life-long memory of the event, even after a single training session.

People with extensive, bilateral hippocampal damage may experience anterograde amnesia: the inability to form and retain new memories.

Over the years, three main ideas of hippocampal function have dominated the literature: response inhibition, episodic memory, and spatial cognition.

Explicit memory can be divided into two categories: episodic memory, which stores specific personal experiences, and semantic memory, which stores factual information.

Autobiographical memory is a memory system consisting of episodes recollected from an individual's life, based on a combination of episodic (personal experiences and specific objects, people and events experienced at particular time and place) and semantic (general knowledge and facts about the world) memory.

Recall in memory refers to the mental process of retrieval of information from the past.

Tulving described episodic memory as a memory about a specific event that occurred at a particular time and place, for example what you got for your 10th birthday.

Autobiographical memory is a memory system consisting of episodes recollected from an individual's life, based on a combination of episodic (personal experiences and specific objects, people and events experienced at particular time and place) and semantic (general knowledge and facts about the world) memory.

Long-term memory, when discussed in the context of synaptic consolidation, is conventionally said to be memory that lasts for at least 24 hours.

Multiple trace theory (MTT) builds on the distinction between semantic memory and episodic memory and addresses perceived shortcomings of the standard model with respect to the dependency of the hippocampus.

Amnesia is a deficit in memory caused by brain damage or disease, but it can also be caused temporarily by the use of various sedatives and hypnotic drugs.

Retrograde amnesia is inability to recall memories before onset of amnesia. One may be able to encode new memories after the incident. Retrograde is usually caused by head trauma or brain damage to parts of the brain besides the hippocampus. The hippocampus is responsible for encoding new memory. Episodic memory is more likely to be affected than semantic memory. The damage is usually caused by head trauma, cerebrovascular accident, stroke, tumor, hypoxia, encephalitis, or chronic alcoholism. People with retrograde amnesia are more likely to remember general knowledge rather than specifics. Recent memories are less likely to be recovered, but older memories will be easier to recall due to strengthening over time. Retrograde amnesia is usually temporary and can be treated by exposing them to memories from the loss. Another type of consolidation (process by which memories become stable in the brain) occurs over much longer periods of time/days, weeks, months and years and likely involves transfer of information from the hippocampus to more permanent storage site in the cortex. The operation of this longer-term consolidation process is seen in the retrograde amnesia of patients with hippocampal damage who can recall memories from childhood relatively normally, but are impaired when recalling experiences that occurred just a few years prior to the time they became amnesic. (Kirwan et al.,2008)In the case of LSJ, her case shows that retrograde amnesia can affect many different parts of knowledge. LSJ was not able to remember things from her child or adult life. She was not able to remember things that most people pick up in everyday life such as logos or the names of common songs.

The disease is known to target the hippocampus which is associated with memory, and this is responsible for the first symptoms of memory impairment.

Older memories of the person's life (episodic memory), facts learned (semantic memory), and implicit memory (the memory of the body on how to do things, such as using a fork to eat or how to drink from a glass) are affected to a lesser degree than new facts or memories.

Working memory is a cognitive system with a limited capacity that can hold information temporarily.

The episodic buffer resembles Tulving's concept of episodic memory, but it differs in that the episodic buffer is a temporary store.