Learning and Memory Flashcards
What is our working definition of a memory?
Experientially induced changes in the nervous system that may alter future behavior
What type of learning are habits associated with?
Stimulus-response (S-R) learning
What is Thorndike’s Law of Effect?
A behavior produced by an organism is likely to increase in the future if a desirable outcome is obtained
What er Tolman’s three cognitive arguments about learning?
Learning involved making associations among stimuli in environment – no response was necessary
No “biologically significant event” was necessary for learning
You do not need reinforcement or punishment for learning
What type of learning do rats show early in training?
Place learning
What type of learning do rats show when overtrained?
S-R learning
How do place and S-R learning differ with the associations they make?
S-R learning makes associations between a stimuli and a response that will bring about the desired effect.
Place learning makes associations between multiple stimuli.
What type of memories are the hippocampus critical for?
Spatial Memories
What type of memories are believed to be the basis for declarative memories?
Spatial memories
What type of memories is the caudate nucleus critical for?
Response learning
What advantage does response learning have over spatial/place learning?
Response learning requires less cognitive load than place/ spatial learning. Shifting to caudate allows hippocampus to “ponder other things.”
Describe the Trisynaptic circuit of the hypothalamus
Entorhinal cortex to dentate gyrus (DG) granule cells -> CA3 pyramidals -> CA1 pyramidals
What is the name for the Entorhinal->DG path?
Perforant Path
What is the name for the fibers from DG->CA3?
Mossy FIbers
What is the name for the fibers from CA3->CA1?
Schaffer collaterals
What role does the ventral hippocampus (anterior hippocampus in primates) seem to have a greater role in?
Emotional processing
How does the brain track time (short term, not circadian)?
Ensembles of neurons in the hippocampus are sequentially active
What is the evidence for neuronal ensembles tracking time?
Animals’ ability to time responses precisely goes down as delay increases, and ensembles become more diffuse with greater passages of time
What do the cells encoding spatial and temporal relationships suggest about the hippocampus?
They suggest the hippocampus plays a broad role in “relational” learning
Where does the hippocampus get most of its information?
The entorhinal cortex
What type of info does the medial entorhinal likely provide?
Spatial information
What type of info does the lateral entorhinal likely provide?
What/identity information
What are the key systems for non-declarative memories?
The cerebellum and basal ganglia.
What type of learning is the ventromedial part of the nucleus accumbens (shell) important for?
Reinforcement learning
How is the connection between a response and an outcome “stamped in” at the accumbens shell?
Dopamine increases following the first (few?) reward(s)
How was DA in the accumbens shell shown to be important for reinforcement learning.
Blocking DA in the accumbens shell prevents reinforcement learning
