Learning & Memory

Question 1

What does working memory do?

Answer 1

It holds information in your mind for a short time in an active conscious state

Question 2

What is central to the system of memory?

Answer 2

Fidelity (accuracy)

Question 3

How many items can a normal person remember in working memory?

Answer 3

7 +-2

Question 4

What does the central executive system do?

Answer 4

It controls the flow of information

Question 5

What is the central executive system supported by?

Answer 5

Two additional memory stores: phonological store alongside a silent rehearsal loop

Question 6

What does phonological store do?

Answer 6

It processes speech perception and stores spoken words we hears for 1 to 2 seconds

Question 7

What does a silent rehearsal loop do?

Answer 7

It processes speech production and rehearses and stores verbal information from the phonological store

Question 8

When happens when you read words of numbers visually?

Answer 8

Information will be transcribed into a phonological code and stored for a short while in the two part system

Question 9

What does a visual sketchpad do?

Answer 9

Hold on to images of objects for long enough for you to manipulate them in your mind’s eye

Question 10

Where is working memory largely located?

Answer 10

In the frontal and parietal lobes

Question 11

Where are auditory parts of working memory located?

Answer 11

Left frontal and parietal lobes where they interact with neuronal networks involved in speech, planning and decision-making

Question 12

Where is the visual sketchpad located?

Answer 12

Right hemispheres

Question 13

How did working-memory evolve?

Answer 13

It may have co-evolved with speech

Question 14

How is a memory formed of an object and when and where it has been seen?

Answer 14

Information enters the visual system and is passed down a ventral pathway from the striate cortex to the medial temporal lobe through a cascade of networks that figure out shape, colour, object density and whether this object is familiar or not

Question 15

How do we have the ability to recognise familiar things and people?

Answer 15

There are areas in the cortex that extract a perceptual representation of what we are looking at and it is used to store and later recognise the things around us

Question 16

What is the semantic memory?

Answer 16

It is where we store the factual knowledge we accumulated

Question 17

What is a property of facts in the brain?

Answer 17

They are organised into categories

Question 18

How are memory retrieved?

Answer 18

The search process shuttle through tree diagrams in the storehouse to find things efficiently

Question 19

How are skills learnt?

Answer 19

Through deliberate and extensive practice

Question 20

How are emotional learning done?

Answer 20

It is much more rapid

Question 21

What type of learning are skills and emotional learning?

Answer 21

Conditioning

Question 22

What parts of the brain are important for skill learning?

Answer 22

Basal ganglia and cerebellum

Question 23

What part of the brain is very important for emotional learning?

Answer 23

amygdala

Question 24

What type of memory keeps track of personal experience?

Answer 24

Episodic memory

Question 25

What is the difference between remembering events and learning facts?

Answer 25

Events happen only once so you cannot rerun an event, thus the system has to learn quickly because it has to

Question 26

What is amnesia?

Answer 26

The lost of memories

Question 27

What is retrograde amnesia?

Answer 27

People cannot remember things that happened before they became ill

Question 28

What does the hippocampus deal with?

Answer 28

It deals largely with memory consolidation, where information from working to short-term memory is encoded in long-term memory for future retrieval

Question 29

What does amnesia patients with damage to hippocampus demonstrate?

Answer 29

Some degree of unimpaired semantic memory, despite a loss of episodic memory due to spared parahippocampal cortex, this results in them knowing languages but don’t remember how they know

Question 30

What is semantic dementia?

Answer 30

A type of Alzheimer’s disease

Question 31

What is imprinting?

Answer 31

Young animal come to recognise and attach to parent or other animal

Question 32

What happens in the young animals mind during imprinting?

Answer 32

Chemical transmitters are released to act on receptors involved in storing some kind of precise image of the mother

Question 33

How do young animals know what food are safe to eat?

Answer 33

Second-messenger chemicals transmit signals to the nucleus of brain sells where genes are activated to make special proteins that can fix memory

Question 34

What are place cells?

Answer 34

They are neurons in the hippocampus that fire action-potentials only when animal explodes a familiar place

Question 35

How do place cells help animal to find its way around the world?

Answer 35

Different cells code different parts of the environment such that a population of cells is involved in mapping a whole area, other cells in nearby brain area code for the direction the animal is moving in, these two areas work together to create a map of space and sense of direction

Question 36

What does the navigational learning system relate to?

Answer 36

Both semantic and episodic memory, animals form a stable representation of where things are in their territory and map of space provides a memory framework to remember events

Question 37

When is learning about places impaired?

Answer 37

When a drug that blocks NMDA receptors is applied to the hippocampus

Question 38

How are maps formed?

Answer 38

Through encoding of the correct location of the Omar form into memory using plasticity triggered by NMDA receptors

Question 39

How are rally serious forgetfulness alleviated?

Answer 39

Drugs that make NMDA or AMPA receptors work better or drugs that stimulate the cascade (passing on) of second-messenger signals

Question 40

What is cognitive engineering?

Answer 40

Take advantage of what has been learned about how information is encoded, stored and consolidated and then retrieved and through paying attention, spacing out learning sessions and getting frequent reminders to help improve memory