Disorders of Memory Flashcards
Freud 1915 suggested repression is …
- threateninginformation is often blocked from consciousawareness
- Most evidence based on adult patients thatoften spontaneously retrieve memories ofbeing abused as children (113 of patients) that they report noprevious memory of.
Clancy et al 2000 – Experiment
compared women withrecovered memories of childhood sexualabuse, with women who believed they wereabused but could not recall it and women whohad always remembered abuse and controls.
issue of prompting
- subsequent studieshave shown that adult patients that admit toreporting false recovered memories hadclinicians that categorically suggested theyhad been abused as children
- This finding relates to the literature ofeyewitness testimony and its unreliability.
The case of HM (Milner, 1978)
- Had surgery to cure severeepilepsy
- After operation had near normal memory for eventsprior to surgery, and STM normal (approx 15s)
- But severe deficit for new memory of facts or ofevents occurring after surgery (encoding from STM toLTM).
- Since operation he forgets the events of his life astheyoccur
- Able to learn motor skills but could not rememberwhich skills he had learned (Short term declarative)
Temporal Lobe Amnesia
e.g. Korsakoff’s syndrome a vitamin B1 deficiency due to chronic alcohol consumption
-procedural (learning skills) fine but declarative (learning new facts) impaired
The case of KC (Tulving, 1989)
- Damage to specific brain regions, (left frontal-parietal andright parieto-occipital lobes) following a traffic accident
- Can no longer retrieve any personal memory of his past(autobiographical memory) but general knowledgeremains good
Can learn semantic knowledge when care is taken butcannotacquire episodic knowledge
Amnesia can be brought about by:
- damage - head injury, stroke
- chronic alcohol abuse - Korsakoff’s syndrome
- disease - Alzheimer’s (episodic)
- reversible brain disease e.g. tumours and deficiencies (B1, B6, B12), endocrine disease, syphilis
- psychogenic memory loss - abuse, war
- anterograde amnesia (HM) - inability to store new info and transfer info from STM -> LTM
- retrograde amnesia - inability to recall info prior to trauma
Temporary Amnesia
-Can result from head injuries, psychologicalstates or drugs
- Concussion often associated with memoryloss (retrograde amnesia)
-Fugue states (Schachter et al., 1982) - extreme psycho trauma often loss of previous experience and fertility
-drugs - date rape rugs (Rohypnol)
Amnesia Research
- Brain damage studies are broadly supportiveof the 3 types of autobiographical knowledge
- Generallyevent specific knowledge is morecompromised than general events or lifetime periods
- Confabulation on basis of plausibility is common
HM had _____surgically removed
-bothhippocampi- yet retained information from thepast.
-so not the actualrepository
- Memories are stored in various regions of thecortex
Hippocampal Function
- Memories are stored in a distributed fashionthroughout the cortex
- Thereforesomethinghas tointegrate theseinto coherent memories = probably thehippocampalregion (Schacter, 1996)
Memory across the lifespan is…
unequallydistributed as we have seen (Rubin,Wetzler&Nebes, 1986).
Infantile amnesia
failure to recall anything fromfirst 3 years often first 5 years
Reminiscence Bump
better memory for period10 to 30 but strongest for positive information
Conway &Pleydell,Pearce (2000)
- Knowledge base
- Lifetime periods – vast swathes of time defined in terms ofongoing situations
- General Events – often repeated but related to each other
- Specific knowledge of events
- Working self - agent with agenda
- Concerned with goal attainment frames knowledge in termsof progress or lack of progress towards important goals
