Lecture 6 - Memory 2 Flashcards
What is autobiographical memory?
Memory for specific experiences from our life, which can include both episodic and semantic components.
Involves mental time travel.
What is active construction?
based on combining episodic, semantic, sensory, and self-relevant information
What is the sensory component of autobiographical memory?
Patients who cannot recognise objects also experience loss of autobiographical memory (Greenberg & Rubin 2003).
Visual experience plays a role in forming and retrieving AM.
What events are remembered well?
- Significant events in a person’s life.
- Highly emotional events.
- Transition points.
What are flashbulb memories?
Memory for the circumstances surrounding shocking, highly charged important events
What is implicit memory?
Occurs when learning from experience is not accompanied by conscious remembering of acquisition
Procedural
Priming
Conditioning
What are procedural memories?
Skill memories
e.g. riding a bike
What is priming?
Priming is an unconscious (implicit) pre-activation of relevant features by an unattended stimulus.
E.g. for perception/recognition experiments, propaganda effect, implicit advertisements, music charts
What is conditioning?
Associating two not naturally related things via experience
What are engrams?
Engrams are the first physical traces of memory
They initiate in the hippocampus and eventually are thought to be distributed in different parts of the cortex
What is encoding?
Acquiring information and transforming it into memory
What is retrieval?
Transferring information from LTM to working memory
What is maintenance rehearsal?
Repetition of stimuli that maintains information but does not transfer it to LTM
What is elaborative rehearsal?
Using meanings and connections to help transfers information to LTM.
What is the levels of processing theory?
Memory depends on how information is encoded (depth of processing)
Shallow or deep processing
What is shallow processing?
- little attention to meaning
- focus on physical features
- poor memory
E.g. skimming a chapter in your textbook
What is deep processing?
- Close attention to meaning
- Connecting new information to existing information
better memory
E.g. reading a chapter in your textbook and look up examples online
What are the factors that help encoding?
Create connections
- imagery
- link to self
Active creation
- generate information
- testing (retrieval practice)
Organisation
- recall by groups
- present info in organised way
Why is retrieval vulnerable?
Many memory failures are failures of retrieval.
e.g. tip of the tongue phenomenon
Emotion interferes with retrieval (positive events are retrieved easier than negative ones)
Context interferes with retrieval(easier to retrieve information in similar situations or moods compared to when information is learnt)
Retrieval itself can change our memories
How can we improve retrieval?
- cues
- matching conditions between encoding and retrieval
What is memory consolidation?
Transforms new memories from fragile state to more permanent state.
What is synaptic consolidation?
a rapid consolidation that occurs at synapses
What is systems consolidation?
more gradual, reorganisation of neural circuits
Hebb 1948
Synaptic Consolidation
Learning and memory are represented in the brain by physiological changes at the synapse (takes minutes/ hours)
Neural record of experience.
What is long term potentiation?
Strengthening of synaptic transmission by enhanced firing of neurons after repeated stimulation.
Structural changes and enhanced responding.
Memory is behaviour, not storage
Describe the process of systems consolidation
Connections between the cortex and the hippocampus are initially strong.
Reactivation - activity occurs between the hippocampus and the cortex
Connections are formed between cortical areas, and the connections between hippocampus and the cortex are weakened and eventually vanish (cross-cortical consolidation).
What is retrograde amnesisa?
loss of memory for events prior to trauma
What is graded amnesia?
memory for recent events is more fragile than for remote events
What is anterograde amnesia?
inability to form new long term memories for events after trauma (H.M. example)
What are the factors affecting consolidation?
- sleep (enhances consolidation)
- memories that are intentionally learned for recall (more consolidated)
What is reconsolidation?
Retrieved memories become fragile and are consolidated again
How does age affect memory?
Semantic memory increases until ~60-65
Then decreases slowly
Implicit memory is not much affected by age
Episodic memory deteriorates quite rapidly after 60
Recognition performance better than free recall
How does time affect memories?
Forgetting
- Familiarity: semantic memory, e.g. when seeing a familiar face but don’t remember the name of the person or where we know them from
- Recollection: episodic memory, e.g. when remembering where you met that person and what you talked about, but you forgot their name
Remember/Know procedure
- Semanticization of remote memories (you know but don’t remember)
- Loss of episodic details for memories of long-ago events
What is the constructive episodic stimulation hypothesis?
Addis 2007
Episodic memories are extracted and recombined to create simulations of future events.
Helps us to anticipate future needs and guide future behaviours.
Adaptive function similar to mind wandering
What is the constructive nature of memory?
Memory = what actually happens + persons knowledge experiences and expectations
Describe Bartletts war of the ghosts experiment
Participants remember a story from a different culture
Repeated reproduction.
Over time, reproduction became shorter, contained omissions and inaccuracies, changed to make the story more consistent with their own culture or stereotypes about the other culture.
What is a script?
Concept of a sequence of actions that usually occurs during a particular experience, e.g. going to a restaurant; paying at a store.
How do schemas and scripts influence memory?
Memory can include information not actually experienced but inferred because it is expected and consistent with the schema.
The constructive nature of memory can lead to errors or “false memories”
What is source memory?
Process of determining origins of our memories.
What is the source monitoring error?
misidentifying source of memory (source misattributions)
What is the misinformation affect?
Misleading information presented after someone witnesses an event can change how that person later describes the event.
What is cryptomnesia?
unconscious plagiarism of another’s work due to a lack of recognition of its original source.
How do inaccurate memories reinforce structural inequalities?
Social hierarchy in whom we believe
Making inferences based on biased beliefs
Face memory worse for groups of people we do not interact with much (e.g. minoritized groups)
People trust their own (and others’) memories
Confidence may be increased by post-event questioning (may make memories easier to retrieve)
Suggestive questioning by people who (also) may hold biases
Errors due to attention and arousal (people may feel threatened by some people, e.g.; minoritized groups)
