Understanding Psychology (10th Ed)

declarative memory
Memory for 
factual information: names, faces, 
dates, and the like.
procedural memory 
Memory for skills 
and habits, such as riding a bike or 
hitting a baseball; sometimes referred 
to as nondeclarative memory.
episodic memory
Memory for events 
that occur in a particular time, place, 
or context.
semantic memory 
Memory for general 
knowledge and facts about the world, 
as well as memory for the rules of logic 
that are used to deduce other facts.
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216 Chapter 
7 
Memory
a researcher and a participant in a study who was asked, in a memory experiment, what 
he was doing “on Monday afternoon in the third week of September two years ago.”
PARTICIPANT: Come on. How should I know? 
EXPERIMENTER: Just try it anyhow. 
PARTICIPANT: OK. Let’s see: Two years ago . . . I would be in high school in Pitts-
burgh . . . . That would be my senior year. Third week in September—that’s just after 
summer—that would be the fall term . . . . Let me see. I think I had chemistry lab on 
Mondays. I don’t know. I was probably in chemistry lab. Wait a minute—that would be 
the second week of school. I remember he started off with the atomic table—a big fancy 
chart. I thought he was crazy trying to make us memorize that thing. You know, I think 
I can remember sitting . . . . (Lindsay & Norman, 1977).
Episodic memory, then, can provide information about events that happened 
long in the past (Reynolds & Takooshian, 1988). But semantic memory is no less 
impressive, permitting us to dredge up tens of thousands of facts ranging from the 
date of our birthday to the knowledge that $1 is less than $5.