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Semantic memory is one of the two types of declarative or explicit memory (our memory of facts or events that is explicitly stored and retrieved). Semantic memory refers to general world knowledge that we have accumulated throughout our lives. This general knowledge (facts, ideas, meaning and concepts) is intertwined in experience and dependent on culture. Semantic memory is distinct from episodic memory, which is our memory of experiences and specific events that occur during our lives, from which we can recreate at any given point. For instance, semantic memory might contain information about what a cat is, whereas episodic memory might contain a specific memory of petting a particular cat. We can learn about new concepts by applying our knowledge learned from things in the past. The counterpart to declarative, or explicit memory, is procedural memory, or implicit memory. == History == The idea of semantic memory was first introduced following a conference in 1972 between Endel Tulving, of the University of Toronto, and W. Donaldson on the role of organization in human memory. Tulving constructed a proposal to distinguish between episodic memory and what he termed semantic memory. He was mainly influenced by the ideas of Reiff and Scheers, who in 1959 made the distinction between two primary forms of memory. One form titled remembrances and the other memoria. The remembrance concept dealt with memories that contained the experiences of an autobiographic index, whereas the memoria’ concept dealt with those memories without the experiences of an autobiographic index. Semantic memory was to reflect our knowledge of the world around us. It holds generic information that is more than likely acquired across various contexts and is able to be used across different situations. According to Madigan in his book titled Memory, semantic memory is the sum of all knowledge you have obtained- whether it be your vocabulary, understanding of math, and all the facts you know. In his book titled "Episodic and Semantic Memory", Endel Tulving adopted the term semantic from linguists to refer to a system of memory for "words and verbal symbols, their meanings and referents, the relations between them, and the rules, formulas, or algorithms for influencing them. The use of semantic memory is quite different from that of episodic memory. Semantic memory refers to general facts and meanings we share with others whereas episodic memory refers to unique and concrete personal experiences. Tulving's proposal of this distinction between semantic and episodic memory was widely accepted mainly because it allowed the separate conceptualization of knowledge of the world. Tulving discusses these separate systems of conceptualization of episodic and semantic memory in his book titled Elements of Episodic Memory. He states that both episodic and semantic memory differ in regards to several factors including: # the characteristics of their operations, # the kind of information they process, and # their application to the real world as well as the memory laboratory. Before this proposal by Tulving this area of human memory had been neglected by experimental psychologists. A number of experimenters have conducted tests to determine the validity of Tulving’s hypothesized distinction of episodic and semantic memory. Recent research has focused on the idea that when people access a word's meaning, their sensorimotor information that is used to perceive and act on the concrete object to which the word suggests is automatically activated. In the theory of grounded cognition, the meaning of a particular word is grounded in the sensorimotor systems. For example, when one thinks of a pear, knowledge regarding grasping, chewing, sights, sounds, and tastes used to encode episodic experiences of a pear are restored by way of sensorimotor simulation. A grounded simulation approach refers to context-specific re-activations that integrate the important features of episodic experience into a current depiction. Recent research has challenged the previous used amodal views. Amodal views (also known as amodal perception) is a way that the brain encodes multiple inputs such as words and pictures to integrate and create a larger conceptual idea. Instead of being representations in modality-specific systems, semantic memory representations had previously been viewed as redescriptions of modality specific states. Some accounts of category-specific semantic deficits that are amodal remain even though researchers are beginning to find support for theories in which knowledge is tied to modality-specific brain regions. This research defines a clear link between episodic experiences and semantic memory. The concept that semantic representations are grounded across modality-specific brain regions can be supported by the fact that episodic memory and semantic appear to function in different yet mutually dependent ways. The distinction between semantic and episodic became part of the broader scientific discourse. For example, it has been speculated that semantic memory captures the stable aspects of our personality while episodes of illness may have a more episodic nature. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「semantic memory」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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