Disorders of Memory Flashcards
What did Freud suggest in 1915?
-suggested threatening information is often blocked from conscious awareness
What is the supposed evidence for Freuds claim in 1915?
-Most evidence based on adult patients that often spontaneously retrieve memories of being abused as children that they report no previous memory of
Why doesn’t brain encode every detail of every event in our lives?
- Not enough biological storage
- So only gist of events is stored
- Memories can be misleading
What was the experiment of Clancy et al 2000 and what did it implicate?
- Asked to recite two lists
- When asked to repeat, people used words bread and doctor even though they were not on list
- This shows we store memories via association (associative memory)
Why is eye-witness testimony unreliable?
- How individual is questioned by the police questioning
- Length of time since initial incident
- issue of prompting
What is the issue of prompting?
- if individual is prompted of something
- More likely to recall it
- even if it didn’t happen
What was the case of HM?
- Had surgery to cure severe epilepsy
- After operation had near normal memory for events prior to surgery, and STM normal
- But severe deficit for new memory
- Since operation he forgets the events of his life as they occur
- Able to learn motor skills but could not remember which skills he had learned (Short term declarative)
- Hand buzzer example
What is hippocampi crucial for?
- Crucial in encoding and saying down long-tern memories
- However doesnt store memories
- Stored in cortex
- Transfers STM to LTM
- Crucial for semantic and episodic memory
What is temporal lobe amnesia- Korsakoff syndrome?
- Memory disorder brought about over long-periods of time due to excessive alcohol consumption
- B-Vitamins required for metabolism of alcohol
- Leads to lack of b vitamins for cellular formation of memory
What is the consequence of temporal lobe amnesia- Korsakoff syndrome?
- Unable to learn news facts- semantic declarative memory impaired
- Procedural memory intact
Describe case of KC
- Damage to specific brain regions, (left frontal-parietal and right parieto-occipital lobes)
- Can no longer retrieve any personal memory of his past (autobiographical memory) but general knowledge remains good
- Plays chess well but does not remember where he learned to play
- Can learn semantic knowledge when care is taken but cannot acquire episodic knowledge
What did the case of KC show?
-Semantic and episodic memory stored in different locations in brain
What is anterograde amnesia?
- Inability to store new information
- Inability to transfer information from STM
What is retrograde amnesia?
- Inability to recall information prior to trauma
- Often following closed head injury, can be relatively short duration
Cause of Amnesia?
- Damage
- Chronic alcohol abuse
- Disease
- Reversible brain disease
- Psychogenic Memory Loss
