Procedural memory
Procedural memory or
coding of some acts of behavior (creation of dynamic stereotypes) is abilities
of senso-motorics or abilities to achieve results by means of repetition. You
can remember how to change gears in a car, go to your friend in the
neighborhood, how to cook eggs and so on and so forth. This is memory of
acquired skills that have become reflexive habits. This type of memory has big
influence while learning by heart or creating inner automatism. This is
implicit ability of memory for we often do not remember how we have learned
this or that thing.
Episodic memory
Episodic memory
affects specific experiences. It helps to retain various personal experiences
and events. It is some kind of autobiography, because we remember our past and
various daily episodes. That’s why we know that you have to check if water is
switched off before leaving home for a few days. This type of memory is not
only important, because we have to remember what we did, but also to help us
comprehend what we will have to do in the future. Let us say, each day I have
to get up at six and go to work, or on Mondays and Wednesdays (at 18.00) I go
to the local gym.
Episodic memory helps
us to get oriented in time and space. We are able to understand what happened
in which place and when. These kind of experiences shape some kind of
chronological order without us understanding when exactly it happened. Let’s
say we can remember that we lost our key before we entered the university. We
simply are aware that we had the key before that. Furthermore, episodic
reminiscences renew our knowledge and supply information that we had acquired
by means of semantic memory.
Semantic memory
Semantic memory is a
lot more important than semantic one, for it helps us to create broad and
complex base of knowledge, forms our cultural and social essence and connects
our general education and all possible knowledge about the world that surrounds
us. It encompasses management of words
and concepts which become meaningful for our minds. It names the objects that
surround us.
Semantic memory
divides meanings of words in to specific separate categories. We acquire most
of our knowledge in hierarchical order. Semantic (meaningful) categories are
sorted out to topics that are put into separate memory ‘rubrics’ that can be
compared to library.
Organization of semantic memory
Semantic memory
registers not signs of incoming signals, but cognitive representations. Semantic
memory is a systematically organized, summarized and given sense to information
giving base to human knowledge consisting of collections of words, concepts,
rules and abstract ideas. It is necessary for language usage, so that we could
speak fluently. For this purpose, a lot of authors studied verbal memory. There
are a lot of theories that try to describe how knowledge is structured and
organized in semantic memory.