amnesia Flashcards
what is amnesia ?
memory loss
what are all the types of amnesia we studied ?
anterograde amnesia, retrograde amnesia, dysexecutive amnesia, korsakoff’s amnesia
amnesia is associated with damage to what brain regions ?
hippocampus and medial temporal lobe
what is anterograde amnesia ?
inability to form NEW explicit memories
what is retrograde amnesia ?
inability to remember PREVIOUSLY learned explicit memories
what does temporally graded mean in terms of retrograde amnesia ?
the person has better memory of things learned earlier in life and worse memory right before their damage to the hippocampus
how does amnesia affect explicit and implicit memory ?
explicit memory has deficits, implicit memory is spared
who is HM (henry molaison) ?
patient with epilepsy, his hippocampus caused seizures so he got his hippocampus and medial temporal lobe removed
what type of amnesia did HM have ?
mostly anterograde amnesia, but some retrograde amnesia
what task was HM still good at ?
tower of hanoi bc he still had implicit memory abilities
what types of memory did HM still have ?
working memory (short term memory) and implicit memory
what brain region is impaired in dysexecutive amnesia ? why ?
frontal lobe, frontal lobe performs higher level executive functions
what is one of the main things impaired in dysexecutive amnesia ?
recall of memories due to frontal lobe damage
list 3 of the impairments in dysexecutive amnesia
- difficulty with encoding and retrieval
- greater difficulty with recall than recognition
- impaired memory of order of events
- source amnesia: forgetting the context
- impaired metamemory: awareness of ones own memory
- confabulation: making things up to make sense of the situation
- impaired working memory (STM)
what is korsakoffs amnesia caused by ? why ?
alcoholism and poor diet, due to a thiamine deficiency
