ASSIGNMENT

Write a critical review essay evaluating current scientific evidence addressing this question: The episodic and semantic distinction: Are these types of explicit long-term memory fully dissociable? OR a diff q to chose from ….:

In your practical session for ‘Topic 1: Can you trust your memories?’ we focused on Autobiographical Memory. You investigated your own and others’ autobiographical memories for different time periods, you completed a scale examining different styles of remembering and you took part in some tests of episodic memory, which relies on the episodic system that you learnt about in the lecture and that researchers believe underlies our ability to remember personally experienced events from our lives.
Through these learning experiences you will have seen that that although we learn that these types of memory are separable and dissociable systems, there are perhaps more interactions between episodic and semantic memory in our autobiographical memory than we might think. For example, we scaffold our memory for personal events (episodic memory) with personal-related semantic information (e.g. names of our friends, or of the town we were brought up in) – known as ‘personal semantics’.
For your coursework on this topic we would like you to answer the question above by considering recent interpretations of the interaction and dissociations between EPISODIC and SEMANTIC memory. We would like you to consider evidence related to how these memories are encoded, stored and retrieved. You will need to consider neuroscientific evidence; this can include functional neuroimaging, EEG and research with neurological patients.

Your essay is to take the format of a critical review article aimed at an intelligent audience with scientific knowledge but no expertise in memory. In order to critically review you should start by reading some of the review articles referenced below, but you then must read the original experimental work these review articles are based on, so that you can evaluate the strength of the evidence. Some experimental papers on this topic are also listed below but you are also expected to find your own as you complete searches on Pubmed/ PsycInfo and as you read the review articles.
Recent reviews on this topic (make sure to include asterisked article in your reading):
Duff MC, Covington NV, Hilverman C, Cohen NJ. (2020) Semantic Memory and the Hippocampus: Revisiting, Reaffirming, and Extending the Reach of Their Critical Relationship. Front Hum Neurosci. 3:471 doi:10.3389/fnhum.2019.00471

Renoult L, Davidson PS, Palombo DJ, Moscovitch M, Levine B. (2012) Personal semantics: at the crossroads of semantic and episodic memory. Trends Cogn Sci. 16(11):550-558. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2012.09.003

* Renoult L, Irish M, Moscovitch M, Rugg MD. (2019) From Knowing to Remembering: The Semantic-Episodic Distinction. Trends Cogn Sci. 23(12):1041-1057. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2019.09.008

Renoult L, Rugg MD. (2020) An historical perspective on Endel Tulving’s episodic-semantic distinction. Neuropsychologia. 139:107366. doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2020.107366

Staniloiu A, Kordon A, Markowitsch HJ. (2020) Quo vadis ‘episodic memory’? – Past, present, and perspective. Neuropsychologia. 141:107362. doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2020.107362

A selection of related EXPERIMENTAL research studies:
Burianova H, Grady CL. (2007) Common and unique neural activations in autobiographical, episodic, and semantic retrieval. J Cogn Neurosci. 19(9):1520-1534. doi:10.1162/jocn.2007.19.9.1520

Coane, J.H., Umanath, S., Cimenian, T. et al. (2022) Using the phenomenology of memory for recent events to bridge the gap between episodic and semantic memory. Mem Cogn 50, 495–511 https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-021-01193-y

Cohn-Sheehy, B.I., Delarazan, A.I., Crivelli-Decker, J.E. et al. (2022) Narratives bridge the divide between distant events in episodic memory. Mem Cogn 50, 478–494. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-021-01178-x

Grilli MD. (2017) The association of personal semantic memory to identity representations: insight into higher-order networks of autobiographical contents. Memory. 25(10):1435-1443. doi:10.1080/09658211.2017.1315137

Irish M, Addis DR, Hodges JR, Piguet O. (2012) Considering the role of semantic memory in episodic future thinking: evidence from semantic dementia. Brain. 135(Pt 7):2178-2191. doi:10.1093/brain/aws119

Lalla, A., Tarder-Stoll, H., Hasher, L., & Duncan, K. (2022). Aging shifts the relative contributions of episodic and semantic memory to decision-making. Psychology and aging, 37(6), 667–680. https://doi.org/10.1037/pag0000700

Renoult L, Davidson PS, Schmitz E, et al. (2015) Autobiographically significant concepts: more episodic than semantic in nature? An electrophysiological investigation of overlapping types of memory. J Cogn Neurosci. 27(1):57-72. doi:10.1162/jocn_a_00689

Svoboda E, Levine B. (2009) The effects of rehearsal on the functional neuroanatomy of episodic autobiographical and semantic remembering: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study. J Neurosci. 29(10):3073-3082. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3452-08.2009

Strikwerda-Brown C, Mothakunnel A, Hodges JR, Piguet O, Irish M. (2019) External details revisited – A new taxonomy for coding ‘non-episodic’ content during autobiographical memory retrieval. J Neuropsychol.13(3):371-397. doi:10.1111/jnp.12160