Learning and Memory Flashcards
Sensory Memory
Msec-sec
High capacity
Evidence - occasional auditory stimulus presented with frequent auditory stimulus, the occasional stimulus produces mismatch field (MMF) in MEG
Short-term Memory
Sec-mins
Limited capacity
Evidence - Patient E.E had tumor in left angular gyrus, after surgery to remove tumor the STM was impaired but LTM was intact
Working Memory Model (Baddley & Hitch, 1974)
Working Memory is STM but there are different systems for different types of info
WMM:
-Central executive: controls operation of subsystems
-Visuo-spatial sketchpad: stores/processes info in visual and spatial form
-Phonological loop: deals with spoken and written info, made up of the phonological store and the articulatory control process
Long-term Memory
Days-years
Unlimited capacity
Evidence - Henry Molaison (HM) had a bilateral medial temporal lobectomy, impaired LTM but intact STM
Declarative Memory
Medial temporal lobe
Memory for events and facts, can be verbally reported
-Episodic memory: personal experience
-Semantic memory: objective knowledge
Non-Declarative Memory
Basal ganglia and cerebellum
Memory for conditioning, priming etc
Medial Temporal Lobe System (MTL)
Hippocampus - binds items with context - episodic memory
Parahippocampul cortex - where/when - context
Perirhinal cortex - who/what - specific items
Frontal lobe also involved in memory
Morris Water Task
Ability to take course to a place not directly marked
Rats with hippocampul lesions can’t use the visual cue
Suggests contextual memory relies on hippocampus
Delayed Non-Match to Sample Task
Monkey has to select different object after a delay
Performance was impaired after hippocampul lesion
London Taxi Drivers
Right posterior hippocampus increases in size
Drivers with hippocampul damage become lost when roads in virtual navigation leave the main route
Retrieval Activity Montaldi et al (2006)
Montaldi et al. (2006)
Retrieval activity analysed according to familiarity
Familiarity (where/when) retrieval activates parahippocampal cortex
Recollection (episodic memory - autobiographical events) retrieval activates hippocampus
Encoding Task - Recognition Task (Ranganath et al, 2004)
Ranganath et al. (2004)
Encoding words (fMRI) - recognition task
Participants had to rate how confident they were of seeing old/new words
As confidence increased so did perirhinal cortex activity
Sensory Reactivation by LTM Retrieval
Different brain areas activated by viewing pictures rather than the ones activated by memory retrieval of pictures
Relive past moments by reactivating LTM in sensory areas
