Lecture 7 + 8 (Ch. 6+7 +8 Long Term Memory and Memory Errors)

Question 1

What is long term memory

Answer 1

Information “archive”: events, knowledge and skills

Graded in time (further away harder to remember)

Question 2

Types of long term memory

Answer 2

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)

Question 3

What is episodic memory?

Answer 3

Explicit.
Mental time travel
Associated with specific, personal context and experience
Source of specific knowledge or information (time and a place)
Autobiographical

Question 4

What is semantic memory?

Answer 4

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

Question 5

How does episodic and semantic memory interact?

Answer 5

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

Question 6

What is procedural memory?

Answer 6

Implicit.
learning of skills - motor memory
Not aware of where or when we learnt or how

Question 7

What is priming?

Answer 7

Implicit.
association with sensory memory and perception
Presentation of stimulus will affect performance and subsequent behaviour.
Advertising –> propaganda

Question 8

Classical conditioning

Answer 8

Implicit.
Pairing a neutral stimulus with a reflexive response (Pavlov’s Dogs)
- Association with food reactions
- Association with fear responses –> Phobias and PTSD

Question 9

Working at desk metaphor

Answer 9

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

Question 10

Encoding

Answer 10

• ELABORATION (~ Semantic Link) - Relevance, Importance
• DISTINCTIVENESS (~ Episodic Link) - Novelty, Surprise, Unusual

Other Factors:

• Self-reference effect
• Organizing to-be-remembered information
• Visual imagery

Question 11

Levels of Processsing Theory

Answer 11

Elaboration = depth of processing

• Shallow processing: Little attention to meaning, physical features
• Deep processing: Link with meaning (personal OR general), associated with better memory

Question 12

Retrieval

Answer 12

Transfer from LTM → WM (consciousness)

MOST Memory ERRORS are in RETRIEVAL/ACCESS PROBLEM (The File is there, but can’t find it!)

Question 13

Cued recall

Answer 13

Retrieval cue.
Cue presented to aid recall
- Increased performance over free-recall
- Most effective when self-created

Question 14

Encoding specificity

Answer 14

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

Question 15

State-dependent learning

Answer 15

learning that is associated with a particular internal state , such as mood or state of awareness

Question 16

Synaptic consolidation

Answer 16

Hebbian circuit - neurons that fire together wire together - long-term potentiation

Question 17

Systems consolidation

Answer 17

Interplay hippocampus cortex

Hippocampus: Binds different aspects of experience to form a memory trace involving different regions of the brain

Question 18

Standard consolidation model

Answer 18

Hippocampus provides link with cortex

Question 19

Hippocampus

Answer 19

NEEDED for new memories

Episodic memory !

Question 20

Anterograde amnesia

Answer 20

Inability to form new memories/learning

Question 21

Retrograde amnesia

Answer 21

Memory loss for events prior to trauma

Question 22

Memory gradient

Answer 22

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

Question 23

Example: Alzheimer’s vs. Parkinson’s

Answer 23

Explicit vs. implicit
Conscious vs unconscious
Cortical vs sub-cortical
Alzheimer’s (top) – Parkinson’s (bottom)

Question 24

Episodic vs. semantic

Answer 24

Remembering vs knowing
Hippocampus vs cortex
Anterograde amnesia –> semantic dementia

Question 25

Memory and the SELF

Answer 25

Memory vs. Consciousness
Procedural → Anoetic
Semantic → Noetic
Episodic →Autonoetic

Question 26

Anosagnosia

Answer 26

Not knowing that you don’t know; inability to see oneself and your own problems –> related to problems with episodic memory

Question 27

Memories more fragile and malleable when reactivated

Answer 27

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

Question 28

Autobiographical Memory

Answer 28

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”)

Question 29

Why do people remember more things from when they were adolescents?

Answer 29

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

Question 30

Amygdala

Answer 30

Emotions and memory

Question 31

Flashbulb memories

Answer 31

• 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

Question 32

Source monitoring error (misattribution)

Answer 32

misidentifying source of memory

Cryptoamnesia: unconscious plagiarism

Question 33

constructive nature of memory

Answer 33

what people report as memories are constructed based on what actually happened plus additional factors, such as the person’s knowledge, experiences, and expectations.

Question 34

Advantages and disadvantages of the constructive nature of memory

Answer 34

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

Question 35

Misinformation effect

Answer 35

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

Question 36

Creating false memories

Answer 36

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

Question 37

Eyewitness testimonies

Answer 37

Attention and arousal

Familiarity and source monitoring