13.1 Learning, Memory, Amnesia, And Brain Functioning Flashcards
Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov pioneered the investigation of what we now call ____ ____, in which pairing two stimuli changes the response to one of them.
classical conditioning
Life without memory means no sense of existing across time, your memory is almost synonymous with your sense of “____”.
self
The experiment starts by presenting a ____ ____ (CS), which initially elicits no response of note, and then presents the unconditioned stimulus (UCS), which automatically elicits the unconditioned response (UCR).
conditioned stimulus
After some pairings of the CS and the UCS the individual begins making a new, learned response to the CS, called a ____ ____ (CR).
conditioned response
In his original experiments, Pavlov presented a ___ with a sound (CS) followed by meat (UCS), which stimulated the dog to salivate (UCR).
dog
In ____ ____ (aka operant conditioning), an individuals response leads to a reinforcer or punishment.
instrumental conditioning
A ____ is any event that increases the future probability of the response.
reinforcer
A ____ is an event that suppresses the frequency of the response.
punishment
The primary ____ between classical and instrumental conditioning is that in instrumental conditioning the individuals response determines the outcome (reinforcer or punishment), whereas in classical conditioning the CS and the UCS occur at certain times regardless of the individual’s behaviour.
difference
Pavlov proposed that classical conditioning reflects a strengthened connection between a CS centre and a UCS centre in the brain. That strengthened connection lets any excitation of the CS centre flow to the UCS centre, evoking the ____ ____.
unconditioned response
Carl Lashley set out to test this hypothesis. Lashley was searching for the ____ – the physical representation of what has been learned. (A connection between two brain areas would be a possible example of an engram.)
engram
Lashley reasoned that if learning depends on new or strengthened connections between two brain areas, a ____ ___ somewhere in the brain should interrupted that connection and abolish the learned response.
knife cut
Lashley also tested whether any portion of the ____ ____ is more important than others for learning.
cerebral cortex
Learning and memory apparently did not rely on a single cortical area. Lashley therefore proposed two principles about the ____ ____: equipotentiality, and mass action.
nervous system
In _____, all parts of the cortex contribute equally to complex behaviours such as learning, and any part of the cortex can substitute for any other.
equipotentiality
In ____ ____, the cortex works as a whole, and more cortex is better.
mass action
Eventually researchers found that Lashley’s conclusions rested on two ____ assumptions: (A) that the cerebrum cortex is the best or only place to search for an engram, and (B) that all kinds of memory are physiologically the same.
unnecessary
Donald head (1949) reasoned that no one mechanism could account for all the phenomena of ____. You can immediately repeat something you just heard, so it is clear that some memories respond quickly. Old people can recall events from childhood, so we also see that some memories last a lifetime.
learning
Hebb could not imagine a ____ ____ that is fast enough to account for immediate memory yet stable enough to provide permanent memory.
chemical process
Hebb therefore proposed a distinction between ____ memory of events that have just occurred and ____ memory of events from further back.
short-term : long-term
Based on these distinctions, researchers proposed that all information initially entered a short-term storage, where it stayed until the brain had time to ____ it into long-term memory.
consolidate
If anything interrupted the ____ before consolidate took place, the information was simply lost.
rehearsal
Consolidation isn’t what we used to think it was. The original idea was it the brain held onto something in ____ ____ for whatever time it needed to do what it had to do in order to establish a long-term memory – mainly, synthesising new proteins.
short-term storage
Once formed, the long-term memory was supposed to be ____. This idea failed in two ways. First, o do with timing and, second, to do with reconsolidation.
permanent
To replace the concept of short-term memory, Baddeley and Hitch, introduced the term ____ ____ to refer to the way we store information while we are working with it.
working memory
