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.