Chapter 9 Key Terms Flashcards
Amnesia
Loss of memory that is global with regard to modality and material; inability to form most new long-term memories.
Midline diencephalic region
Brain area, related to the hippocampus, where damage may result in amnesia.
Mammillary bodies
Parts of the hypothalamus; damage to these structures may result in amnesia.
Anterograde amnesia
Deficit in learning new information after the onset of amnesia.
Retrograde amnesia
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.
Episodic memory
Autobiographical memories that are specific to one’s particular experience; includes context about the time, space, etc.
Semantic memory
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.
Temporal gradient
Effect of amnesia in which there is greater compromise of more recent memories than more remote memories.
Working memory
The ability to hold a limited amount of information on-line over the short term while the information is being actively used or processed.
Digit span task
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.
Extended digit span task
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.
Delayed nonmatch-to-sample task
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.
Skill learning
The acquisition – usually gradually and incrementally through repetition – of motor, perceptual, or cognitive operations or procedures that aid performance.
Mirror-tracing task
Test in which the person must trace the outline of a figure by looking in a mirror.
Mirror-reading task
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.
Word-stem completion task
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.
Morris water maze
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.
Explicit memory system
Memory system that permits the conscious recollection of prior experiences and facts; lost in amnesia.
Implicit memory system
Memory system that allows prior experience to affect behavior without conscious retrieval or awareness of the memory.
Declarative memory system
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.
Procedural memory system
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.
Relational learning
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.
Long-term potentiation (LTP)
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.
Place fields
Particular places in the environment to which hippocampal neurons fire preferentially.
Grid cells
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.
Repetition priming
Enhancement or biasing of performance as a result of previous exposure to an item; major category of preserved learning and memory in amnesia.
Fear conditioning
Method in which a stimulus comes to invoke fear because it is paired with an aversive event.
Contextual fear conditioning
Conditioning in which a fear response is evoked by the context or environment in which an aversive stimulus has previously been presented.
Semantic dementia
Disorder in which the affected person progressively loses the ability to retain semantic information.
Subsequent memory effect
Effect in which subsequently remembered items are associated with greater brain activity at encoding than items that are not subsequently remembered.
Memory consolidation
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.
Pattern completion
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).
Auditory-verbal working memory
Phonological store; memory of the contents of immediately preceding verbal utterances.
Central executive
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.
