Learning and Memory Flashcards
What is learning?
acquisition of new information or knowledge
What is memory?
Retention of learned information
What is declarative (explicit) memory?
Memory of facts and events
What is nondeclarative (implicit) memory?
Procedural learning and memory
Associative learning and memory
What is procedural learning and memory?
Memory for skills, habits, behaviors.
Ex. Riding a bike
What is associative learning and memory?
Classical conditioning
What is long-term memory?
Memories you can recall days, months or years after they were originally stored
What is short-term memory?
Memories that last seconds to hours
What is memory consolidation?
Converting memories into permanent form
What is working memory?
Temporary form of information stage.
The maximum number of randomly chosen numbers a person can repeat back after hearing a list read (7)
limited in capacity
What is retrograde amnesia?
Memory loss for events before the trauma. Usually limited to loss of memory months or years before the trauma
What is anterograde amnesia?
Inability to form new memories following trauma
What is the case study of HM?
HM had a bilateral temporal lobectomy due to his having seizures that made it difficult to live.
He had partial retrograde amnesia
Unable to form new declarative memories.
Extreme anterograde amnesia.
Found that the hippocampus is involved in learning and memory
What tasks can be used to investigate spatial learning?
The radial arm maze, Morris water maze,
What is the radial arm maze?
At start of each trial each arm is baited
Rat placed in center
Rats make a mental list of places it has visited
Rats learn to visit each arm only once
What is the morris water maze?
Rat placed in circular pool of cloudy water
Rat must find hidden platform under surface of water
Rat learns to swim directly to platform
Platform remains in fixed position relative to visible cues outside pool
What is perseveration?
Repetition of choices, even when they are incorrect
When is perseveration observed?
When rats have bilateral hippocampal damage and they are performing the radial arm maze and morris water maze
What are place cells?
They are pyramidal neurons
Place cells’ place field can sometimes be broadly responsive, sometimes focused point in space
Found in CA1 hippocampus
The site for a cognitive map tells the animal to know where it is in its environment
What are head direction cells?
Cells fire when the head is in a fixed direction with respect to the surrounding environment
Function as neural compass that signals animal’s direction heading to the navigational system
Using internal and external cues
Found in the subiculum
What are grid cells?
Evenly spread-out grids
The place where all of the grids overlap is where you are
Functions as a GPS system
Found in Medial Entorhinal Cortex (MEC)
What are the properties of long term potentiation (LTP) in CA1?
To induce LTP, input 1 axons are given a tetanus shot (brief burst of high frequency stimulation)
LTP is input-specific
The synapses need to be active at the same time that the postsynaptic CA1 neuron is strongly depolarized.
Need temporal summation and spatial summation
How is LTP mediated?
It is mediated by the NMDA receptor
NMDA receptor is both ligand (glutamate) and voltage-gated (blocked by Mg2+)
Mg2+ block is removed by depolarization.
What are the mechanisms of protein kinases for LTP?
Ca2+ entering through NMDA receptors activates calcium-dependent protein kinases
Kinases change the effectiveness of existing postsynaptic AMPA receptors by phosphorylating them
Kinases stimulate insertion of new AMPA receptors into the membrane
