What is Long-term memory?
Memory erasure
There are three main types of memories: sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory. Sensory memory in short is the ability to hold sensory information for a short period of time, for example looking at an object and being able to remember what it looked like moments after. Short-term memory is memory that allows a person to recall a short period of time; this can be a few seconds to a minute. Short-term memory allows people to remember what happened during that short time span without actually practicing the memory. Long-term memory has a much larger capacity than the prior two and actually stores information from both these types of memories to create a long lasting and large memory. Long-term memory is the largest target for research involving selective memory erasure.
Late positive component
In psychological literature on memory, long-term memory (LTM) is commonly divided into two types: semantic and episodic. Semantic memories are memories that are stored in LTM without specific encoding information linked to them, and thus represent general knowledge about the world that a person has acquired across the lifespan. Episodic memories are memories that are stored in long term memory as specific "episodes" and that, therefore, have some sort of specific context information associated with them, such as where or when they were encoded. At retrieval, episodic memories are often divided into two different categories based on how much information is available about the "episode." These two categories are recollection and familiarity. Recollection is when certain information about the context of the memory at encoding, for instance when or where a memory was encoded, is recalled. Familiarity is a general sense that a person has seen something before without any other details about the event. Even though they are divided into two categories, it is currently debated whether they are separate entities controlled by different brain functions or just a graded continuum of the same function.