Declarative Memory

Question 1

episodic memory

Answer 1

memory of personal expereinces

in lab, alternatively defined s memories created during the experient

Question 2

semantic memory

Answer 2

knowledge about the world that individuals share w/ other members of their culture
in lab, alternatively defined as memories held before the experiment

Question 3

autobiographical memory

Answer 3

memory for the events of our lives, a complex mixture of episodic and semantic memories

Question 4

recollection

Answer 4

memories of a past event that includes specific associations and contexual details

Question 5

familiarity

Answer 5

the sense that we experienced an event at some point in the past, even though no specific associations or contextual details come to mind; has been argued that familiarity is more closely related to semantic memory or priming than it is to recollection / episodic memory

Question 6

recognition tests

Answer 6

participants provided w/ targets intermixd w/ non targets and asked to distinguish the targets

a corrected recognition score is produced by subtracting false alarms from hits

Question 7

item information

Answer 7

memory of what happened; tests sensitive to both recollection and familiarity

Question 8

context information

Answer 8

memory of where, when and how it happened; tests tend to be sensitive to recollection

Question 9

source memory

Answer 9

contextual memory of the source of a stimulus

Question 10

cognitive map theory

Answer 10

idea that hippocampus mediates memory for spatial relations among objects in the environment;

strongest evidence comes from existence of place cells in the rodent hippocampus; finding that experienced (correlated w/ # of years at work) London taxi drivers have a significantly larger than average posterior hippocampus is more evidence

Question 11

place cells

Answer 11

cells that become active only when the individual is at a particular spatial location in its local environment

Question 12

relational memory theory

Answer 12

a more general theory of hippocampal function than the cognitive map theory, it asserts that the hippocampus does not mediate a representation of space as such but rather a memory space in which relationships are coded by the conjunction of overlapping cues.

Evinced by fact that place cells in rodents don’t represent a global topology of the environment but the spatial relationships among subsets of cues. Furthermore, the firing of place cells is also affected by nonspatial variables, such as the speed with which the rat moves and the presence of particular stimuli or rewards in the environment

Question 13

delayed nonmatch-to-sample task

Answer 13

three phases typically:
sample phase: monkey shown single stimulus above a well containing a food reward
delay phase: door lowared so monkey can no longer see the stimulus
choice phase: monkey presented with the previously rewarded stimulus along with a new stimulus. This time the animal must select the new stimulus in order to obtain the reward.

Declarative memory is index by ability to choose a novel stimulus.

Question 14

morris water maze

Answer 14

animal’s task is to swim to a small platform hidden just beneath the surface in a circular tank filled w/ murky water, which then provides a safe haven. Can access memory by testing how long it takes rat to find platform again and again. Or how long it spends in the quadrant that contains the platform compared to the other three quadrants of the tank. Measures spatial memory, but can be modified to measure other sorts of memory.

Question 15

episodic memory theory

Answer 15

theory that the hippocampus is critical for episodic memory but not required for semantic memory

evidence:
1) retrograde memory deficits following hippocampal damage are more pronounced for episodic than for semantic memory - evinced by example of KC who’s hippocampal damage eliminated his retrograde and anterograde memory but left semantic memory intact

2) anterograde memory deficits following hippocampal damage can spare new semantic learning to a certain degree (KC, for example, can learn new facts/words, albeit slowly). People w/ developmental amnesia causing hippocampal lesions have severe difficulties remembering personal occurrences and perform poorly on tests of episodic memories but make normal progress in school.
3) A double dissociation. Whereas hippocampal damage affects episodic more than semantic memory, Left-lateralized damange to the anterior temporal cortex affects semantic more than episodic memory (a pattern displayed by those w/ semantic dementia).

Question 16

developmental amnesia

Answer 16

amnesia due to brain damage occurring early during childhood development and is characterized by a deficit in episodic memory but relatively normal semantic memory (because of damage to the hippocampal brain during birth complications)

Question 17

semantic dementia

Answer 17

a memory deificit that impairs semantic memory rather than episodic memory and is associated w/ left-lateralized atrophy of the anterior temporal cortex

Question 18

declarative memory theory

Answer 18

argument that the hippocampus mediates all delcarative memories, regardless of whether they are spatial or nonspatial, relational or nonrelational, episodic or semantic.

Evidence:

1) studies of patients w/ hippocampal lesions indicate that some are impaired to about the same extent in item- and context-memory tasks
2) several functional neuroimaging studies show that the hippocampus is similarly activated in normal subjects carrying out item and context memory tasks

Question 19

hippocampal-perhihinal theory

Answer 19

theory that the hippocampus processes information relatively slowly and is associational and spatial, whereas the perirhinal cortex processes information more rapidly and is item-based;

it also asserts that neurons in the hippocampus signal information about spatial positions or associations b/t items (recollection), whereas neurons in the perihinal cortex signal information about the novelty of individual items (familiarity);

Evidence:
- single cell-recordings in animals shown that perihinal neurons show a stronger response when an item is first presented than when the same is shown again

• hippomcampus shows sharp increase in activity when participants are sure they have encountered an item before, but perihinal activity decreases gradually as items are regarded as more and more familiar – similar to the habituation phenomenon

Question 20

item-in-context theory

Answer 20

theory that the perirhinal cortex and associated lateral entorhinal cortex are concerned w memory for items, whereas the parahippocampal cortex and associated medial entorhinal cortex are involved in memory for context; in this vierw, the hippocampus interacts w/ both regions and is thus involved in memory for the item in context;

Strengths:
- accounts for the evidence linking the perirhinal cortex to familiarity and the hippocampus to recollection
- the distiction b/t perirhinal and parahippocampal functions fits well with anatomical, lesion, and functional neuroimaging evidence.
A, the perirhinal cortex receives most of its visual input from the ventral what pathway and the parahippocampal receives most of its input from the dorsal “where” pathway.
B. in humans, fucntional neuroimaging studies have prepeatedly shown that the parahippocampal place area is consistenly activated during perception and memory of spatial layouts
- Notion of “item-in-context memory” accomodates both the role of the hippocampus in spatial memory and its more general role in context memory in recollection (the relational and episodic theories).