Chap 9

Question 1

Midline diencephalic region

Answer 1

Brain area, related to the hippocampus, where damage may result in amnesia.

Question 2

Mammillary bodies

Answer 2

Parts of the hypothalamus; damage to these structures may result in amnesia.

Question 3

Anterograde amnesia

Answer 3

Deficit in learning new information after the onset of amnesia.

Question 4

Episodic memory

Answer 4

Autobiographical memories that are specific to one’s particular experience; includes context about the time, space, etc.

Question 4

Retrograde amnesia

Answer 4

Memory impairment for information that was acquired prior to the event that caused the amnesia; a deficit stretching back in time to some point before the onset of amnesia.

Question 5

Semantic memory

Answer 5

Knowledge that allows the formation and retention of facts, concepts, categories, and word meaning and retention of information about ourselves and the people we know – all of which are expressed across many different contexts.

Question 6

Temporal gradient

Answer 6

Effect of amnesia in which there is greater
compromise of more recent memories than
more remote memories.

Question 7

Working memory

Answer 7

The ability to hold a limited amount of
information on-line over the short term
while the information is being actively
used or processed.

Question 8

Digit span task

Answer 8

Test in which a person must report back a
sequence of digits read one at a time by
the experimenter; reveals the person’s
working memory span.

Question 9

Extended digit span task

Answer 9

Test in which the same digit string is
presented on each trial but with an
additional digit added to extend the span;
requires use of long-term storage in
addition to working memory.

Question 10

Delayed nonmatch-to-sample task

Answer 10

Test in which an animal is exposed to one of a large set of
objects and, following a delay, is presented again with the
object just viewed, together with another from the set of
available objects; to receive a reward, the animal must
select the object that was not previously presented. Reveals
dissociation between long-term-memory deficit and fully
functional working memory.

Question 11

Skill learning

Answer 11

The acquisition – usually gradually and
incrementally through repetition – of motor,
perceptual, or cognitive operations or
procedures that aid performance.

Question 12

Mirror-tracing task

Answer 12

Test in which the person must trace the
outline of a figure by looking in a mirror.

Question 13

Mirror-reading task

Answer 13

Test in which word triplets are presented in mirror-image orientation, and the viewer reads them aloud as quickly and accurately as possible; determines whether a skill generalizes to new exemplars.

Question 14

Word-stem completion task

Answer 14

Test in which participants are given a list of words to
study. After a delay, memory for the words is tested in two
ways, both of which involve the presentation of three-letter
stems. In the cued-recall condition, participants are asked
to recall the word from the study list that started with those
same three letters. In the word-stem completion condition,
individuals are to report “the first word that comes to mind”
that completes each stem.

Question 15

Morris water maze

Answer 15

Test of learning and memory of spatial relations in
animals. A rat is placed in a circular tank filled with an
opaque liquid that obscures a slightly submerged
platform, which is positioned at a constant location
relative to various visual cues outside the maze.
Normal animals learn the position of the platform,
and across trials there is a decrease in the time it
takes them to swim to the platform.

Question 16

Explicit memory system

Answer 16

Memory system that permits the conscious
recollection of prior experiences and facts;
lost in amnesia.

Question 17

Declarative memory system

Answer 17

Memory system, supported by the
hippocampus, that allows particular
information to be used flexibly in contexts not
linked to the situation in which the information
was acquired.

Question 18

Implicit memory system

Answer 18

Memory system that allows prior experience to
affect behavior without conscious retrieval or
awareness of the memory.

Question 19

Procedural memory system

Answer 19

Supports memory of “how” things should be
done, allowing for the acquisition and expression
of skill; learning in this system is probabilistic,
integrating information across events rather than
storing each event separately.

Question 21

Relational learning

Answer 21

Hippocampal memory system that supports
learning (whether conscious or unconscious)
occurring in tasks or situations where
performance depends on acquiring memory for
the relations among items, especially items
associated only arbitrarily.

Question 22

Long-term potentiation (LTP)

Answer 22

Neuronal mechanism that allows processing
of the conjunctions or co-occurrences of
inputs, in which brief, patterned activation of
particular pathways produces a stable
increase in synaptic efficacy lasting for hours
to weeks.

Question 23

Place fields

Answer 23

Particular places in the environment to which
hippocampal neurons fire preferentially.

Question 24

Grid cells

Answer 24

Located in the entorhinal cortex, grid cells have firing fields dispersed across the environment in a hexagonal grid, and are thought to help code an animal’s location within a wider environmental cortex.

Question 25

Repetition priming

Answer 25

Enhancement or biasing of performance as a result of previous exposure to an item; major category of preserved learning
and memory in amnesia.

Question 26

Fear conditioning

Answer 26

Method in which a stimulus comes to invoke fear because it is paired with an aversive event.

Question 27

Contextual fear conditioning

Answer 27

Conditioning in which a fear response is evoked by the context or environment in which an aversive stimulus has previously been
presented.

Question 28

Semantic dementia

Answer 28

Disorder in which the affected person progressively loses the ability to retain semantic information.

Question 29

Subsequent memory effect

Answer 29

Effect in which subsequently remembered items are associated with greater brain activity at encoding than items that are not subsequently remembered.

Question 30

Memory consolidation

Answer 30

Process by which memories are strengthened to allow for long-term retention. Theoretically, the hippocampus aids in slowly binding together pieces of a memory trace in separate neocortical
processors; once they are bound in this way, they can be retrieved without involvement of the hippocampal system.

Question 31

Pattern completion

Answer 31

Process in which interaction of the hippocampal system with neocortical storage sites may allow one piece of information to be used to reconstitute a whole memory (essentially, to reactivate
long-term memories).

Question 32

Auditory-verbal working memory

Answer 32

Phonological store; memory of the contents of immediately preceding verbal utterances.

Question 33

Central executive

Answer 33

Theoretical construct in working memory; per forms the mental work of (1) controlling slave subsystems that mediate the storage process and (2) forming strategies for using the information the subsystems contain.