20 Facts About Semantic memory

Semantic memory refers to general world knowledge that humans have accumulated throughout their lives.

Semantic memory is distinct from episodic memory, which is our memory of experiences and specific events that occur during our lives, from which we can recreate at any given point.

For instance, semantic memory might contain information about what a cat is, whereas episodic memory might contain a specific memory of petting a particular cat.

Idea of semantic memory was first introduced following a conference in 1972 between Endel Tulving, of the University of Toronto, and W Donaldson on the role of organization in human memory.

Semantic memory was mainly influenced by the ideas of Reiff and Scheers, who in 1959 made the distinction between two primary forms of memory.

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Semantic memory reflects our knowledge of the world around us, hence the term 'general knowledge' is often used.

Semantic memory refers to general facts and meanings one shares with others whereas episodic memory refers to unique and concrete personal experiences.

Tulving's proposal of this distinction between semantic and episodic memory was widely accepted, primarily because it allowed the separate conceptualization of knowledge of the world.

The concept that semantic representations are grounded across modality-specific brain regions can be supported by the fact that episodic and semantic memory appear to function in different yet mutually dependent ways.

The distinction between semantic and episodic memory has become a part of the broader scientific discourse.

Essence of semantic memory is that its contents are not tied to any particular instance of experience, as in episodic memory.

This, of course, is only one example among many models of semantic memory which have been proposed; they are summarized below.

The semantic feature-comparison model, proposed by Smith, Shoben, and Rips, describes memory as being composed of feature lists for different concepts.

The set of associations among a collection of items in Semantic memory is equivalent to the links between nodes in a network, where each node corresponds to a unique item in Semantic memory.

Standard model of Semantic memory that employs association in this manner is the Search of Associative Memory model.

Semantic memory information is gleaned by performing a statistical analysis of this matrix.

The degree of semantic relatedness of items in memory is given by the cosine of the angle between the items' context vectors.

Cognitive neuroscience of semantic memory is a somewhat controversial issue with two dominant views.

Certain experts are still arguing whether or not the two types of Semantic memory are from distinct systems or whether the neural imaging makes it appear that way as a result of the activation of different mental processes during retrieval.

Semantic memory has had a comeback in interest in the past 15 years, due in part to the development of functional neuroimaging methods such as positron emission tomography and functional magnetic resonance imaging, which have been used to address some of the central questions about our understanding of semantic memory.