Week 13 homework

Tulving’s study

What goes on in the brain when people are processing episodic and semantic memories, this is what
Tulving was pondering. Tulving didnt buy the idea of long term memory being a huge storage unit,
rather he believed that memory was far more complicated. By complicated he thought that memory
was divided into different parts and that these parts were linked to different areas of the brain. He
tested his idea by using a form of a PET scan and in this case the radioactive substance was gold.

Tulving wanted to understand whether thinking about episodic memories produced blood flow in
different parts of the brain than thinking about semantic memories. The way how Tulving researched
this was by using six volunteers including himself and his wife. In this test they were injected with a
small amount of gold and once the gold had ascended towards the brain, active areas would show
up on a PET scan using gamma rays. Furthermore there were 8 trials with four episodic and four
semantic in a random order for each participant.

One strength of Tulving’s study is that it produced objective scientific evidence. One of the biggest
issues in lab studies in psychology is that the participant may actually find out what the end goal of
the study is. Therefore they may try to mess up intentionally to ruin the study or they may try too
hard to make the study run smoothly, which immediately ruins the study. However with Tulving’s
study it would be impossible to fake or influence a brain scan result, unless they were thinking of
something that they weren’t supposes to think. As a result of this, this makes the study unbiased,
which is a huge strength for Tulving.

One weakness of Tulving’s study is that the sample of participants was restricted. There were so little
participants including Tulving himself, with only three participants showing differences in blood flow
for episodic and semantic memories .That immediately makes the results very inconclusive and on
top of that, because there was so little people in the study it is difficult to generalise the results of all
people.