Learning & Memory

Question 1

What was HM’s memory disorder?

Answer 1

anterograde amnesia

ability to form new memories was severely injured

feedforward pathway –> cortical association areas –> parahippocampal & rhinal cortical areas –> hippocampus –> thalamus, hypothalamus

Question 2

What types of memory are and are not affected after deficits?

Answer 2

implicit (motor) memory not affected

(recall of words only partially impacted by HM)

short term (working memory) & long term memory have a strong interdependence on explicit memories

Question 3

What does the ‘delayed match to sample (DMS) task’ allow scientists to do?

Answer 3

monkey had to remember what the object was and where it was located

Brain activity associated with that sample continued with the delay (neuron activity persisted)

but didnt happen when the non-preferred cue was seen

allows them to match activation in brain with object recognition

some insight into the nerve circuit that is involved in laying down that memory

links memory to prefrontal cortex

Question 4

What are the 3 subsystems of working memory?

Answer 4

1) verbal info
2) visuospatial info
3) the functioning of these 2 subsystems is cooredinated by a 3rd system called the executive control processes

Question 5

Phonological storage depends on. . .

Answer 5

posterior parietal cortices

Question 6

Rehearsal partially depends on. . .

Answer 6

articulatory processes in Broca’s area

Question 7

The rehearsal of spatial & object info is thought to involve:

Answer 7

• modulation of such representations in the parietal, inferior temporal, & extrastriate occipital cortices by the frontal & premotor cortices

Question 8

What are the 4 processes of ‘processing episodic memory’?

Answer 8

encoding - storage - consolidation - retrieval (however memory can change over time depending on the relationship between the encoding and retrieval)

if you have an injury, then the consolidation process can’t occur

Question 9

• Associating food with visual cue
• learning relationship b/w the 2
• What was found?

Answer 9

• Primates are very good at doing this
• After training, the accuracy of the recall drops
• however, lesions in the hippocampus increase amount of working memory loss
• core brain region involved in working memory (short term memory)

Question 10

seagulls

Answer 10

• urban seagulls were more likely to investigate objects if they had been handled by people (more likely to be food)

Question 11

HABITUATION in aplysia

Answer 11

• sensory neurons responding exactly the same to the stimulus, but it’s transmitting less effectively to the post-synaptic motor neuron
• so the reduction in the response is due to a loss of the transmission of the signal from the sensory neuron to the motor neuron
• after some time however there is a recovery of the response
• EPSP is almost absent during the time of prolonged habituation

HABITUATION

Question 12

Sensitization in aplysia

Answer 12

• change was happening pre-synaptically in the sensory neuron
• the were 2 pathways
• 5-HT is transmitter
• One pathway increases transmitter release and production, another one reduces K+ channels which reduces excitability of synapses
• allows more calcium channels to open