Semantic memory

The type of long-term memory for facts or knowledge. It's associated with the act of knowing without the need of mental time travel like the Episodic memory.

For example, I can recall the estimated fact of Indonesia's population, which is around 270 million, but I don't really know where this fact came from or when it's the first time I learned about it, nor me requiring to have a mental time travel to retrieve that fact.

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References

Goldstein, Cognitive Psychology (p. 174).

In contrast to the mental time travel property of episodic memory, the experience of semantic memory involves accessing knowledge about the world that does not have to be tied to remembering a personal experience of specific encoding/study period.

Tulving (1985) describes the experience of semantic memory as knowing, with the idea that knowing does not involve mental time travel.

Backlinks

• Semantic memory might be the context-less version of episodic memory
  • One of the property of Semantic memory is we could recall a fact, concept, or knowledge without time travel. One way to think about where semantic memory comes from is that they were previously represented as Episodic memory, but over time, the context were removed.