Lecture 21 - Memory systems

Question 1

What is the difference between learning and memory?

Answer 1

Learning: Acquisition of new information Memory: Retention of learned information

Question 2

What is the difference between declarative and nondeclarative memory?

Answer 2

• Declarative memory (explicit)
  Facts and events
• Nondeclarative memory (implicit)
  Procedural memory- skills, habits

Question 3

What diseases can a person get if they don’t forget things

Answer 3

PTSD

Question 4

What are the types of declarative memory?

Answer 4

• Sensory memory
• short-term memory/working memory
• Long-term memory

Question 5

Monkeys and humans with lesions of what part of the brain cause them not to know where something is hidden after seeing it?

Answer 5

Prefrontal cortex

Question 6

True or false. specific spaces are activated in the brain for spacial and Facial memory

Answer 6

true
* Sometimes only Face memory, sometimes only spatial, sometimes both

Question 7

What is executive function?

Answer 7

The ability to change behavior based on a new rule/feedback

Question 8

What is most common in schizophrenic patients or patients with dementia or brain injuries in regards to executive function?

Answer 8

• problems with frontal lobe
• they’re unable to change and adapt to new rules

Question 9

What is amnesia?

Answer 9

• Serious loss of memory and/or ability to learn
• Causes: Concussion, chronic alcoholism, encephalitis, brain tumor, stroke

Question 10

What are the two types of amnesia? Describe them

Answer 10

• Limited amnesia (common)
• Dissociated amnesia: No other deficit (rare):

1. Retrograde amnesia: Forget things you already knew forget all memories (forget all memories before trauma)
2. Anterograde amnesia: Inability to form new memories following trauma

Question 11

What are engrams?

Answer 11

means by which memory traces are stored in the brain in response to external stimuli.

Question 12

Describe Karl Lashley’s Studies of Maze Learning in Rats?

Answer 12

• She found that lesions in the cortex impacted memory

Question 13

Describe hebbian modifications

Answer 13

1. External events are represented by cortical cells
2. Cells reciprocally interconnected and react with eachother (called cell assembly)
3. Consolidation by “growth process”
4. “Fire together, wire together”

Question 14

Describe Dr Penfield’s Montreal experiment

Answer 14

• did surgical procedures to identify where patients with severe seizures had there seizures. Removed that part of the brain to end seizures
• Built a maps of the sensory and motor sections of the brain, showing their connections to the various limbs and organs of the body

Question 15

What was an important discovery of Penfield

Answer 15

• Temporal lobe: Role in memory storage
• But, even when the tissue was removed, patients still got their memory back suggesting memory isn’t only in temporal lobe

Question 16

What are The Effects of Temporal Lobectomy (human patient HM)

Answer 16

• Removal of temporal lobes had no effect on perception, intelligence, personality
• Anterograde amnesia so profound cannot perform basic human activities (and partial retrograde amnesia)

Question 17

What is proprioception

Answer 17

Ability to change orientation in space without having a lot of sensory input

Question 18

Describe an interesting discovery of patient HM?

Answer 18

following his lobectomy, he had Impaired declarative memory, but spared procedural memory.

• He could trace an image in a mirror without remembering he did it the day prior, and got better as time goes on (thinking it was his first time)

Question 19

Tracing a template through a mirror creates a visuo-proprioceptive conflict between:

Answer 19

• the antero-posterior mirror- reversed visual information
• the proprioception of the hand when the mirror faces the subject

Question 20

Briefly describe the study, data obtained, and conclusion made by Karl Lashley when he searched for the engram. Ensure you include to identify what was the incorrect conclusion from this experiment.

Answer 20

Lashley trained rats to run through a maze without going into blind alleys. He tested how performance on this task would be altered by making lesions in the rat’s cortex either before or after learning the task. He showed that if the lesion was done before testing the rat on the maze it interfered with their learning; if the lesion was done after learning the maze it interfered with their memory. He found for both learning and memory the number of errors on the task correlated with the size but not the location of the lesion. This data lead him to make the incorrect conclusion that the whole cortex contributed equally to learning and memory.