Chapter 7 Vocab Flashcards
Memory Systems
Underwent surgery to treat unremitting seizures.
- Medial temporal lobectomy, which includes the hippocampus – a major seat of memory function
- Left surgery with anterograde amnesia
Patient H.M.
The inability to
learn new information despite retaining old memories
Anterograde amnesia
Can learn new information but cannot recall information acquired
prior to their brain damage
Retrograde amnesia
Also known as declarative or conscious memory, is the
ability to consciously remember and report facts, events, and
associations
Explicit memory
Allows people to recall past experiences, single events in specific places at specific times: what, where, and when something happened
Episodic memory
Involves facts and knowledge that—as a form of explicit, or declarative, memory—can be stated or recounted.
- The learning of such information accumulates over time across repeated occasions.
Semantic memory
Degenerative disease, associated with amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles
- Earliest symptoms include loss
of episodic memory
- Semantic memory impairment
comes later
Alzheimer’s Disease
Tests the difference
between familiarity and recollection
Remember/know procedure
Also known as non-declarative or non-conscious memory, which refers to skills and habits that are learned but that are usually not
consciously accessible
Implicit memory
The acquisition of
skills and habits
Procedural learning
Refers to how a perception, response, or thought is
enhanced by prior exposure to an identical or related stimulus,
action, or idea.
- Repetition priming
- Associative priming
- Perceptual priming
- Conceptual priming
Priming
People are faster at recognizing and
responding to repeated items than to new items
Repetition priming
Priming can also occur from related items
Associative priming
Perception is improved by repeated exposure to
perceptual features
Perceptual priming
Reveals how the meanings of stimuli were processed
Conceptual priming
Known regularities about our
world (e.g., the layout of your house or the expectations of your job) enable us to predict probable future events in our world.
Statistical learning
The faster search time for targets in repeated displays versus targets in novel displays.
- Enables faster search of targets
whose location or identity is predictable from surrounding context
- Is implicit
Contextual cueing
Plotting memory performance according to serial
position, a U-shaped curve emerges
Serial position curve
Higher memory performance for the items at the beginning of the list
Primacy effect
Higher memory performance for the items
toward the end of the list
Recency effect
- Associates items and their contexts (time, space,
characters, etc.) across different brain areas - All this different info is integrated and indexed
according to the memory’s unique features. - Hippocampus + Medial temporal lobe
Hippocampal system
Multi-modal input from visual, tactile, auditory cortices
are pulled together to form associations
Reactivation
. The act of
stabilizing memories
Consolidation
- The mechanism behind Hebb’s Rule
- Refers to how communication across a synapse strengthens future
communication between the presynaptic and postsynaptic neurons
Long-term potentiation
Involves reactivation of the brain regions involved during initial encoding
Memory retrieval
The hippocampus constructs a
map of the environment, providing the basis for spatial memory and
navigation
Cognitive map theory
Spatial navigation depends on knowing both one’s
own position and one’s relation to the space around oneself.
- Can be egocentric
- Or allocentric
Spacial framework
with the environment’s layout defined
relative to the viewer
Egocentric
With one object’s location
defined relative to the location of another object or landmark
Allocentric
