Exam 4 Flashcards
Damage to which brain area causes amnesia?
The Hippocampus
Hippocampal damage causes amnesia, a disorder of long-term memory
Amnesia
the inability to from most new long-term memories
Which famous patient did we study to assess the effects of amnesia?
H.M.
What type of memory does amnesia effect? Why is this?
Long-term memory
It results from extensive damage to the medial temporal lobe as well as an area closely related to the midline diencephalic region
Damage to the middle diencephalic region may cause?
Korsakoff’s disease
Following chronic alcohol abuse or sometimes through an accident
Bilateral hippocampal damage results in what?
results in a general impairment across all types of materials
Unilateral hippocampal damage
leads to deficits in memory for verbal material after left hemisphere damage or non-verbal material after right hemisphere damage
Retrograde amnesia
impairment in memory for the info that was acquired prior to the event that caused the amnesia
Anterograde amnesia
is the deficit in learning new information after the onset of amnesia
Virtually always occurs with some retrograde amnesia
Which is characterized by a temporal gradient?
Retrograde amnesia
Which is associated with episodic memory?
Retrograde amnesia
Patients with amnesia will have some spared memory. What types of memory are spared?
Working memory
Skill learning
What is skill learning?
The ability to learn a skill without consciously realizing it
Explicit memory
permits the conscious recollection or prior experience and facts
The memory system that is lost in amnesia
Implicit memory
allows prior experience to affect behavior without the individual consciously retrieving the memory or even being aware of it
Declarative memory is associated with which brain structure?
Hippocampus
What is procedural memory?
Supports memory of “how” something should be done, allows skill-learning
What is relational learning and when does it occur?
Occurs in tasks or situations where performance depends on acquiring memory for the relations among items
What is long term potentiation?
Pattern activation of particular pathways produces a stable increase in synaptic efficacy for hours to weeks
Place cells
cells fire in the hippocampus to the relative location within the environment
Grid cells
in the entorhinal cortex fire when the animal is in certain locations in the environment, aligned with a hexagonal grid
Time cells
in the hippocampus provide information on the temporal associations. They fire to the same relative “location” but it is location in time, not space
The basal ganglia has neurons associated with which neurotransmitter?
Dopaminergic neurons (dopamine)
Under what conditions will dopaminergic neurons fire?
They increase cell firing to unpredicted reward
They decrease cell firing to predicted rewards that don’t occur
What is contextual fear conditioning?
A fear response that is selective to the context, or environment, in which conditioning occurs
How is fear conditioning related to amygdala activity?
There is increased amygdala activation associated with fear conditioning