Lecture 1 - Introduction

Question 1

What is learning?

Answer 1

An adaptive change in behaviour resulting from experience

Question 2

What kind of memory do you have as a child, what does this mean and what is it good for?

Answer 2

Idetic memory.
Like a camera - captures things and scenes
Fantastic for learning things like language

Question 3

Features of explicit memory?

Answer 3

• Remembering things like facts, words or history
• Available to conciousness
• Short term storage in hippocampus
• Long term storage in cortical sites

Question 4

Features of implicit memory?

Answer 4

• Motor skills, associations
• Unavailable to conciousness
• Short term storage unknown (presumably widespread)
• Long term storage in cerebellum, basal ganglia and pre-motor cortex

Question 5

Who is HM?

Answer 5

A patient who suffered from epilepsy from age 10

Question 6

what surgery was performed on HM?

Answer 6

Bilateral resection - removed the medial temporal lobe (amygdala, hippocampal gyrus, 2/3 of hippocampus)

Question 7

What effect did the surgery have on HM?

Answer 7

Epilepsy was controlled but he could only recall early memories.
He had implicit but not explicit memory.

Question 8

What experiment did Karl Lashley do in the 1920s?

Answer 8

Inflicted cortical legions on mouse brains to see where memories are stored.
Used mazes to test memory

Question 9

What did Karl Lashley find?

Answer 9

Location of lesion was not significant.

Extent of lesion and difficulty of task affected. (Mass action principle)

Question 10

What do mossy fibres going into the cerebellum carry?

Answer 10

Sensory information

Question 11

What were Daselaar et al (2006) trying to find out?

Answer 11

What regions of medial temporal lobe are responsible for different aspects of declarative memory

Question 12

What was Daselaar et al (2006)’s experiment?

Answer 12

Subjects shown 120 English words and 80 non words.

After 2 minutes asked to recall in fMRI

Question 13

What was shown by Daselaar’s fMRIs?

Answer 13

• Areas of hippocampus and MTL responding.
• All or nothing response in the back of hippocampus
• Other regions in post parahippocampal cortex showed linear score of remembering (maybe I know?)

Question 14

What experiment did Epstein and Karwisher perform? (1998)

Answer 14

Using scans and Oculus rift type stuff discovered post parahippocampal place area (PPA)

Question 15

What did Epstein and Karwisher (1998) find?

Answer 15

PPA fires much more when seeing outdoor scenes whereas much less with faces

Question 16

What is shown when a musician listens to a song they know how to play?

Answer 16

• Auditory cortex stimulation

- Motor cortex activation (thinking about how to play it)

Question 17

What are the general memory functions for the perihinal, PPA and hippocampus?

Answer 17

Perihinal - object encoding
PPA - spatial layout
Hippocampus - Makes associations

Question 18

During learning where are distinct items initially represented?

Answer 18

Perihinal and lateral entorhinal

Question 19

What happens after the initial viewing of objects?

Answer 19

Back projects to ‘what’ pathway of neocortex supports subsequent judgements of familiarity (identify)