What Came First: Episodic or Semantic Memory?

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Ever wonder how your brain remembers stuff? Like knowing that Paris is the capital of France, or remembering the time you tripped at your birthday party? These two types of memories are called semantic and episodic. But here’s a fun question: What came first?

It turns out, scientists and brain researchers have been puzzling over this for a long time. A fascinating paper by Greenberg and Verfaellie (2010) explores this question in detail- and while it doesn’t give one final answer, it shares some cool insights that help us better understand how memory works.

Two Kinds of Memory, Two Different Jobs

Let’s break it down:

  • Semantic memory is your general knowledge about the world. Like knowing what a microwave does or the names of colors.

  • Episodic memory is your memory for personal events. Like that one time you had a surprise party.

Tulving’s SPI Model: Semantic Comes First?

One idea, called the SPI model, says that information goes through three steps:

  1. First, you see or hear something (perception),

  2. Then, you connect it to what you already know (semantic memory),

  3. Finally, if it’s a personal experience, you store it as a memory of an event (episodic memory).

So what does that mean?
Basically, your brain needs to understand what’s going on before it can remember it as an experience. For example, you can’t really remember a cooking class as an event if you don’t know what “cooking” or “ingredients” mean!

Brain Clues from Amnesia and Dementia

Scientists have also looked at people with brain damage to see how these two memory types work.

  • People with damage in certain brain areas (like the medial temporal lobe) often lose their episodic memory- they can’t remember new experiences- but they still know facts they learned earlier.

  • People with semantic dementia show the opposite: they lose knowledge about facts and words, but can still remember personal experiences for a while.

This suggests that the two memory types are separate, but connected.

Can You Learn Facts Without Remembering Events?

Surprisingly- yes!

Some people with memory problems (like amnesia from a young age) can still learn new facts, like words or names. But it’s really slow, takes lots of effort, and often doesn’t “stick” as well. Without personal memories to help out, it’s like trying to put together a puzzle without the picture on the box.

Can General Knowledge Help Us Remember Events?

Definitely!

In one study, people were better at remembering prices of grocery items if those prices made sense based on what they already knew. For example, if milk was listed as $3.85, that “clicked” better than if it was $7.59. Their general knowledge helped them remember better.

So, our facts and knowledge give us a kind of “mental framework” that helps us store new memories more easily.

🤔 So… What Came First?

  • If we look at how information flows in the brain, it seems that semantic memory (knowledge) comes before episodic memory (personal experiences).

  • But if we think about learning over time, some scientists believe that facts come from collecting many personal memories, which then get “boiled down” into general knowledge.

So it’s not a clear-cut answer. The truth is, both types of memory support each other, and some memories aren’t purely one or the other.

So whether semantic came first or episodic, one thing is for sure- without either, you would forget why you started reading this... and what a "memory" even is!

References-

Greenberg, D. L., & Verfaellie, M. (2010). Interdependence of episodic and semantic memory: Evidence from neuropsychology. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, 16(5), 748–753. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1355617710000676

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