Lecture 7 + 8 (Ch. 6+7 +8 Long Term Memory and Memory Errors) Flashcards
What is long term memory
Information “archive”: events, knowledge and skills
Graded in time (further away harder to remember)
Types of long term memory
Explicit (conscious, declarative, precise, remember/know): Episodic (remembering, specific, events, personal), semantic (knowing, knowledge, facts, general)
Implicit (unconscious, non-declarative, vague, familiarity): Procedural (motor/skills), priming (perceptual), conditioning (cognitive)
What is episodic memory?
Explicit.
Mental time travel
Associated with specific, personal context and experience
Source of specific knowledge or information (time and a place)
Autobiographical
What is semantic memory?
Explicit. Involves Knowing something General or specific knowledge about things, people, events Not associated with an event or a source Can be personal but generic
How does episodic and semantic memory interact?
Episodic memory turns into semantic memory.
Experiences “fades” to knowledge “semanticization” or “decontextualization”
Knowledge influences experience
Personal semantic memories
Episodic = special “subtype” of semantic?
The remember/know procedure - results show that people remember more after 10 years than 50 years
What is procedural memory?
Implicit.
learning of skills - motor memory
Not aware of where or when we learnt or how
What is priming?
Implicit.
association with sensory memory and perception
Presentation of stimulus will affect performance and subsequent behaviour.
Advertising –> propaganda
Classical conditioning
Implicit.
Pairing a neutral stimulus with a reflexive response (Pavlov’s Dogs)
- Association with food reactions
- Association with fear responses –> Phobias and PTSD
Working at desk metaphor
Step 1) ENCODING- Reading and Consulting files and information. Deciding what to throw away &what to put together and keep - Puts notes/drawings into file folders
Step 2) RETRIEVAL - Retrieving information from files to consult
Step 3) CONSOLIDATION & RECONSOLIDATION -Adjusting faulty information and updating
Encoding
- ELABORATION (~ Semantic Link) - Relevance, Importance
- DISTINCTIVENESS (~ Episodic Link) - Novelty, Surprise, Unusual
Other Factors:
- Self-reference effect
- Organizing to-be-remembered information
- Visual imagery
Levels of Processsing Theory
Elaboration = depth of processing
- Shallow processing: Little attention to meaning, physical features
- Deep processing: Link with meaning (personal OR general), associated with better memory
Retrieval
Transfer from LTM → WM (consciousness)
MOST Memory ERRORS are in RETRIEVAL/ACCESS PROBLEM (The File is there, but can’t find it!)
Cued recall
Retrieval cue.
Cue presented to aid recall
- Increased performance over free-recall
- Most effective when self-created
Encoding specificity
We encode information along with its context.
Diving experiment - learn list of words while scuba-diving - remember better while scuba diving than if on dry land
State-dependent learning
learning that is associated with a particular internal state , such as mood or state of awareness
Synaptic consolidation
Hebbian circuit - neurons that fire together wire together - long-term potentiation
Systems consolidation
Interplay hippocampus cortex
Hippocampus: Binds different aspects of experience to form a memory trace involving different regions of the brain
Standard consolidation model
Hippocampus provides link with cortex
Hippocampus
NEEDED for new memories
Episodic memory !
Anterograde amnesia
Inability to form new memories/learning
Retrograde amnesia
Memory loss for events prior to trauma
Memory gradient
Recent events more fragile than remote events
The garden metaphor –> each seed is a memory, the seeds planted years ago are well rooted and set the seeds just newly planted can be washed away easier
Example: Alzheimer’s vs. Parkinson’s
Explicit vs. implicit
Conscious vs unconscious
Cortical vs sub-cortical
Alzheimer’s (top) – Parkinson’s (bottom)
Episodic vs. semantic
Remembering vs knowing
Hippocampus vs cortex
Anterograde amnesia –> semantic dementia
Memory and the SELF
Memory vs. Consciousness
Procedural → Anoetic
Semantic → Noetic
Episodic →Autonoetic
Anosagnosia
Not knowing that you don’t know; inability to see oneself and your own problems –> related to problems with episodic memory
Memories more fragile and malleable when reactivated
Experiment: inject mice with anisomycin under 3 conditions 1 – before consolidation (NO memory) 2- after consolidation (remember) 3 – during reactivation (NO memory)
Used to treat PTSD
Autobiographical Memory
Memory for specific experiences from our life, which can include both episodic and semantic comparisons
Multidimensional
Involves mental time travel
Experiment with photos:
own-photos = prefrontal cortex ( information about the self) + hippocampus (mental time travel”)
Why do people remember more things from when they were adolescents?
SELF-IMAGE
- Construction during adolescence and young adulthood (Many transitions)
COGNITIVE
Encoding better – CHANGE then STABILITY
Evidence from Immigrants
CULTURAL LIFE SCRIPT
- Recall of Personal Life Script in terms of Culturally-expected events
Amygdala
Emotions and memory
Flashbulb memories
- Memory for shocking, highly charged important events
- Where were you, what you were doing
- Highly emotional, vivid and very detailed
- Can be inaccurate or lacking detail
- Regardless of level of confidence and the described vividness
Source monitoring error (misattribution)
misidentifying source of memory
Cryptoamnesia: unconscious plagiarism
constructive nature of memory
what people report as memories are constructed based on what actually happened plus additional factors, such as the person’s knowledge, experiences, and expectations.
Advantages and disadvantages of the constructive nature of memory
Advantages:
Similar to perception
Shortcuts to fill in the blanks
Can easily organize information into meaningful whole
Integrates memories into current self-image
Disadvantages:
Factual errors
Misattribution errors
Actually presented or inferred
Misinformation effect
Misleading information can change the memory
-Elizabeth Loftus
Misleading postevent information (MPI)
Manipulating people’s memories
Yield vs stop signs (Pragmatic interference)
Smashed vs hit
Creating false memories
STUDY: Participants asked to elaborate real as well as false childhood experiences
Few days later, some participants remembered false events
*The issue of recovered memories
* Issue with eyewitness testimonies
Eyewitness testimonies
Attention and arousal
Familiarity and source monitoring
