What Is the Function of Semantic Memory?

Semantic memory is a type of memory proposed by psychologist Tarvin. Refers to the organized storage of the knowledge that a person has. As opposed to "plot memory". The information held is cognitive. Such as "I know Newton's laws of mechanics", "Suzhou is in Jiangsu Province", "If A> B, B> C, then A> C" and so on. It includes not only knowledge of word meaning, language, steps to do things, and problem-solving strategies, but also knowledge of the world and its individual events, people, places, and laws. According to Tarvin, traditional memory experiments mostly involve plot memory, ignoring the knowledge of abstract concepts and their relationships. The laws derived from such experiments may not be credible, because the two types of memory have different learning and forgetting laws. ^[1]

Semantic memory is the memory necessary for the use of language. It is a psychological thesaurus. It is a word or other language symbol held by a person, its meaning and referents, the relationship between them, and rules, formulas and operations Organized knowledge of algorithms for symbols, concepts and relationships. Semantic memory uses semantic coding. Semantic coding is an abstract meaning representation, which has

Semantic memory is the memory of all kinds of organized knowledge, such as the memory of words, concepts, their relationships and laws, formulas, etc. It corresponds to episodic memory. E. Torvin distinguishes memory into episodic memory and semantic memory. He believes that the organization of semantic memory is abstract and general. The information it contains is not limited by the specific time and space of the received information Is based on meaning. For example, Beijing is the capital of the People's Republic of China, and voltage and resistance are inversely proportional. Semantic memory is less disturbed than episodic memory, and it extracts information more quickly, often without searching. Tolven does not deny that semantic memory and episodic memory are interdependent.

Current research suggests that it is not clear to treat episodic memory and semantic memory as two different memory stores. They may represent the two ends of a continuum, and it is difficult to draw a strict line between semantic memory and episodic memory. If the memory of the scene at a specific time and place is recovered multiple times in different backgrounds, it will gradually be generalized to form a semantic memory. Recent trends are trying to combine the two into a single system. ^[3]