Amnesia Flashcards
Prefrontal lobes
important for short-term memory.
Temporal lobes
hippocampus and amygdala
processing of short-term to long-term memory
-> consolidation
Diencephalon
thalamus, hypothalamus, mammillary bodies
processing of short-term to long-term memory.
-> emotional/ tramatic memory
Retrograde
loss of memory for events prior to injury.
- cant rmbr event prior to brain damage
Anterograde
inability to form new memories.
- cant latre rmbr events that occur after brain damage
Post-traumatic Amnesia (PTA)
period of time after brain injury during which new memories can not be formed (patient is also usually disoriented in time and space).
questions like what year is it who is the PM are asked
Describe what Kent could and couldn’t remember?
good at knowing facts like why are dark colours warmer then lighter colours; semantic memory
cant remember what happened yesterday
knows where he works but doesn’t know what he does
knows process for hot to change a tire but can’t rmbr if he’s every had one
semantic memory is intact but episodic memory is affected
Who is H.M.?
Patient H.M. suffered from epilepsy thought to be caused by a head injury at age 9.
H.M.’s epilepsy could not be controlled through drug interventions.
H.M. underwent bilateral temporal lobotomies in 1958.
The medial temporal lobes (MTL)
What did the surgery lead to in HM?
Surgery successfully treated epileptic seizures, but left severe memory impairments.
His memory for the remote past was intact (could remember his childhood), but he had some retrograde amnesia and severe anterograde amnesia.
If you left H.M. for only a few minutes, upon returning he would most likely forget who you were or that you had already met!
Loss of episodic memory. Semantic memory generally intact.
Semantic
memory for factual based material
Episodic
memory for events that can be linked to a time and place.
Describe Clive’s condition
suffered an infection of brain that damaged tissue similar to areas removed in H.M
- damage to left and right temporal lobe and part of frontal lobe
- damage to hippocampus
- damage to frontal lobe causes him to repeat himself a lot
when his wife comes into the room he gets very excited saying he hasn’t seen her yet even though he just saw her a few moments ago
doesn’t rmbr writing stuff down in his diary and gets very angry when he’s told he did
has severe anterograde amnesia
has semantic but not episodic memory
has damage to areas that control emotion
Describe The case of N.A.
A small lesion in the left dorsomedial nucleus of the thalamus.
- suffered from a fencining incident
Similar pattern of deficits to H.M.
Retrograde amnesia for the 2 years preceding the accident.
Almost complete anterograde amnesia – can remember virtually nothing of events since the accident.
More verbal than visual memory deficits, although both domains affected (e.g., has spatial memory impairments).
Episodic lost but semantic intact.
What does the video in class showed about N. A tell us?
- hippocampus and amygdala are crucial to memory
- he has difficulty rmbr words he saw and repeating them
- good at telling stories from the past all the way up until the accident- no problem in retrieval
- problem in recording new memories in LTM
- brain structures damaged are involved in processing memory not storage of memory
What types of functions may be left intact in cases of severe amnesia, such as H.M., Clive and N.A.?
immediate memory – can recite back several words immediately (but within five minutes no recollection of words).
intact memory for remote events (e.g., from childhood).
factual knowledge (e.g. water boils at 100°C).
perceptual and motor memory (e.g. riding a bike, brushing teeth).
language and social skills. procedural learning (e.g. mirror drawing).
Other facets of functioning:
Personality
Intellectual Functioning
Insight into intact and impaired functions in amnesics enables us to learn much about memory processing.