Tulvings gold memory study

Question 1

aim?

Answer 1

See whether thinking about episodic memories produced blood flow in different parts of brain than semantic memories

Question 2

method?

Answer 2

• 6 volunteers, including him and wife
• injected radioative gold
• substance taken up - active areas of brain would show up on PET scan
• peformed 8 trials: four episodic and four semantic - repeated measures
• episodic - thought about personal experience
• semantic- recalling historical facts from memory
  on signal they would think about a topic, whilst blood flow to brain was monitored on the scan

Question 3

results?

Answer 3

• clear differences in blood flow for 3 of 6 participants
• semantic - greater flow to the back of the brain
  episodic - greater concentration to the front of the brain

Question 4

conclusions?

Answer 4

seperate forms of LTM , located in different parts of the brain, suppourts the ideas of localisation

Question 5

evaluation?

Answer 5

strength: scientific evidence
may work out the aim of the study and change behaviour - mess up results, try too hard - difficult to do in study, assuming they were thinking what they were told to think about, difficult to fake the scan, produced unbiased evidence

weakness: sample of participants was restricted - six participants including tulving, differences of blood flow was only seen in 3 participants, results are inconclusive, few people showed same pattern of blood flow it may not be able to be generalised