Chapter 9 Key Terms

Question 1

Amnesia

Answer 1

Loss of memory that is global with regard to modality and material; inability to form most new long-term memories.

Question 2

Midline diencephalic region

Answer 2

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

Question 3

Mammillary bodies

Answer 3

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

Question 4

Anterograde amnesia

Answer 4

Deficit in learning new information after the onset of amnesia.

Question 5

Retrograde amnesia

Answer 5

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 6

Episodic memory

Answer 6

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

Question 7

Semantic memory

Answer 7

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 8

Temporal gradient

Answer 8

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

Question 9

Working memory

Answer 9

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 10

Digit span task

Answer 10

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 11

Extended digit span task

Answer 11

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 12

Delayed nonmatch-to-sample task

Answer 12

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 13

Skill learning

Answer 13

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

Question 14

Mirror-tracing task

Answer 14

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

Question 15

Mirror-reading task

Answer 15

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 16

Word-stem completion task

Answer 16

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 17

Morris water maze

Answer 17

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 18

Explicit memory system

Answer 18

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

Question 19

Implicit memory system

Answer 19

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

Question 20

Declarative memory system

Answer 20

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 21

Procedural memory system

Answer 21

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 22

Relational learning

Answer 22

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 23

Long-term potentiation (LTP)

Answer 23

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 24

Place fields

Answer 24

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

Question 25

Grid cells

Answer 25

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 26

Repetition priming

Answer 26

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

Question 27

Fear conditioning

Answer 27

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

Question 28

Contextual fear conditioning

Answer 28

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

Question 29

Semantic dementia

Answer 29

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

Question 30

Subsequent memory effect

Answer 30

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

Question 31

Memory consolidation

Answer 31

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 32

Pattern completion

Answer 32

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 33

Auditory-verbal working memory

Answer 33

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

Question 34

Central executive

Answer 34

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.