Episodic Memory

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Memory is a vital feature of the brain that is used on an everyday basis. People will remember phone numbers, lyrics to their favorite song, or even an event that occurred years ago. Memory has a three stage process which is storage, encoding and retrieval; and memory has two subsets which are working memory (short-term) and long term memory. When a person experiences a significant event, the brain will start to store the new memory for a short amount of time which is working memory (short-term). From there, the brain will start to process the memory and then restore the certain memory. This section would be the encoding process of the memory. If the encoding process was successful then the memory would be stored into long term memory, but …show more content…
A study by Wagner was conducted to see if different parts of the parietal lobe have an impact on episodic memory. Individuals were asked certain things about their past and some new thing to receive a response. An fMRI was used, and the scientist were looking the parietal lobe, more specifically the posterior parietal cortex (PPC), to find any brain activity on responses (Wagner, Shannon, Kahn, & Buckner, 2005). They found out people can recall old and new memory from that area, but it also activated when there were false memories on certain topics (Wagner, Shannon, Kahn, & Buckner, 2005). The left inferior parietal cortex was activated whenever a false memory implied. The PPC was constantly activated for any type of mnemonic device used to retrieve any information, and it contributed differently to episodic memory (Wagner, Shannon, Kahn, & Buckner, 2005). Another study wanted to find out if episodic memory can be manipulated into identifying errors. To accomplish this, two experiments were done to see the difference. The overall basis of both of the experiments were the same, but there were a few minor changes that made a drastic effect. The first experiment had a sample size of 90 subjects who read aloud two different scenarios (Wilkes & Leatherbarrow, 1988). One talked about a report on a fire, while the other was a report on a man missing. The scenarios were told in a total of 13 messages and they were in chronological order (Wilkes & Leatherbarrow, 1988). The subjects were then given a recall test to see if there was any significance in episodic memory error. They found that there was no significance and that the subjects were able to recall each event (Wilkes & Leatherbarrow, 1988). In the second experiment, different subjects were used, but the sample size was the same. The same scenarios were given, but this time the information was edited and was given out to