Episodic and Semantic Memory

Within declarative memory, Tulving proposed a further division between episodic memory and semantic memory.

Episodic memory holds the biographical details of our own lives — our personal experiences, which is why its contents tend to be emotional in nature. Questions such as how a person felt on standing first in class, or how angry a friend was on a particular occasion, are answered from episodic memory, and such incidents, if they genuinely happened, can usually be recalled with reasonable accuracy because of the emotional charge attached to them. At the same time, episodic memory is far from complete: countless events happen continuously in our lives, and we do not retain all of them, and painful or unpleasant experiences in particular tend to be remembered in less vivid detail than pleasant ones. …