Semantic Memory
What is Semantic Memory?
Semantic memory is the brain’s library of general knowledge: facts, meanings, concepts, and ideas, untethered from any specific personal experience. This cognitive framework allows you to know that Paris is the capital of France, that triangles have three sides, and that zebras are animals with stripes, even if you've never personally been to Paris or seen a real zebra.
The Basic Idea
Let’s pretend you’re watching a trivia show. The host asks, “What’s the largest mammal in the world?” You buzz in: “Blue whale.” You don’t remember where or when you learned it. You didn’t relive a moment or recall a teacher’s voice, you just knew. That’s semantic memory: the system that stores facts, concepts, and knowledge about the world, separate from any personal experience.
Semantic memory allows us to know what a screwdriver is, what democracy means, and why Paris is a capital city, even if we can’t trace the moment that knowledge formed. It powers our ability to understand words, interpret symbols, follow instructions, and engage in abstract reasoning. This system forms the backbone of language, learning, and logic, the essential scaffolding that makes communication possible.
If someone says the word “apple,” your mind may quickly pull up “fruit,” “red,” “sweet,” or even “iPhone,” depending on the context. Think of a hierarchical model in which each concept branches to closely related ideas, so activating “bird” also activates “wings,” “feathers,” and “can fly”. This structure helps explain semantic priming: why seeing the word “nurse” makes you recognize “doctor” faster than an unrelated word like “bicycle.”
Beyond word associations, semantic memory also supports abstraction. You don’t need to relearn what a restaurant is every time you enter a new one. The brain stores general patterns, or schemas, that help us navigate new situations with efficiency. A schema for “restaurant” might include being seated, reading a menu, ordering, eating, and paying. These frameworks grow richer with experience, but don’t rely on specific episodes.
This form of memory plays a central role in learning, too. A child who sees three types of chairs quickly understands the core concept: legs, seat, back. As soon as that pattern is recognized, it gets stored as a category. That’s semantic memory at work, organizing the world into usable, transferable knowledge.
While episodic memory—the ability to recall personal experiences tied to specific times and places—and semantic memory are distinct systems, they constantly interact. Remembering your graduation day involves both the lived experience and the conceptual understanding of what “graduation” means. And over time, repeated episodic recall can evolve into semantic generalization. A personal memory like “that time I fell off a scooter” may gradually become a broader belief: “scooters are dangerous.” Psychologists refer to this shift as semanticization, the transformation of context-rich memories into context-free knowledge.
"[Semantic memory] is a mental thesaurus, organized knowledge a person possesses about words and other verbal symbols, their meaning and referents, about relations about them, and about rules, formulas, and algorithms for the manipulation of these symbols, concepts and relations."
— Endel Tulving, cognitive psychologist and pioneer of memory research1
About the Author
Adam Boros
Adam studied at the University of Toronto, Faculty of Medicine for his MSc and PhD in Developmental Physiology, complemented by an Honours BSc specializing in Biomedical Research from Queen's University. His extensive clinical and research background in women’s health at Mount Sinai Hospital includes significant contributions to initiatives to improve patient comfort, mental health outcomes, and cognitive care. His work has focused on understanding physiological responses and developing practical, patient-centered approaches to enhance well-being. When Adam isn’t working, you can find him playing jazz piano or cooking something adventurous in the kitchen.