Lecture 7 - Memory 4: Memory and forgetting Flashcards
Butters and Albert 1982
famous faces experiment - reterograde amnesia had intact remote memory
Test long-term retrograde amnesia by asking people to recognise / name? people famous in a particular era. Retrograde amnesia is usually temporally graded. Memory is better the further back in time you go; remote memories recalled better
Got a control group and then a group of people who had retrograde amnesia that had some sort of brain damage that damaged the medial temporal lobes on their brains, the damage occurred fairly recently to the time of testing so in the late seventies or early eighties
Amnesia data for memory from the 30s and 20s (40 to 50 years ago) is equal to that of the health controls and their memory loss is several decades for the time prior to the brain injury so we point out that their is intact remote memory (memory from very remote events that might have occurred 50 to 60 years ago are often quire good and events that have occurred fairly recently such as a few years ago can be quite poor)
Temporally graded retrograde amnesia = haven’t lost all of your memories but you have lost some of the memories that you had before the brain injury, the remote memories are intact
What this suggests is that memory is actually consolidated/being consolidated over time such that the older the memories are the more stable they are and the more resistance they are to brain damage
Episodic memory is disrupted in …
temporal lobe amnesia
Episodic memory define
Episodic memory is a category of long-term memory that involves the recollection of specific events, situations, and experiences. Your memories of your first day of school, your first kiss, attending a friend’s birthday party, and your brother’s graduation are all examples of episodic memories.
Does semantic memory stay intact with temporal lobe amnesia?
Stays relatively intact
Semantic memory
Understanding of the world around you
H.M was presented with a number of scenarios such as what would you do if you were lost in the forest in the day time? Or why does lan in the city come more than land in the country?
He could answer sensibly and correctly despite his brain damage
He does slightly better than the control or just as well so this clearly shows that HMs semantic memory is clearly intact so it shows that you can lose the ability to store the episodic memories but you can still have a completely intact semantic memory which suggests some separation in memory
HM was his skill learning intact?
Yes
For example he could learn to do table tennis and he would not remember learning how to lay table tennis but you could give him a bat and he would actually be quite good - so he could play the skill well with no memory of ever experiencing it before
e.g. mirroring task - shows that the number of errors which was going outside of the borders of the paper decreases as the days go on
Priming
Priming is a phenomenon whereby exposure to one stimulus influences a response to a subsequent stimulus, without conscious guidance or intention.
Memory trace that is there which means that you will always tend to do it that way but you are not consciously or explicitly aware of it e.g. pretending you are taking your shirt off experiment
Tested in the word fragment completion task
Brief (35ms) presentation of a word like hare, later presentation of word fragment H_R_ (people exposed to the prime are more likely to answer “HARE” than non-exposed controls)
Priming is spared in temporal lobe amnesia! That is, even though people do not explicitly remember seeing the priming word, their nervous system has been implicitly affected by it
Seven sins of memory
Transience/memory decay Blocking/retrieval failure Absentmindedness/encoding failure Persistence Misattribution Bias Suggestibility
Four sins of memory related to forgetting
Transience/memory decay
Blocking/retrieval failure
Absentmindedness/encoding failure
Persistence
Three sins related to memory distortion
Misattribution
Bias
Suggestibility
Habits are intact in
temporal lobe amnesia
implicit memory (procedural) = brain has developed particular patterns that allow you to produce actions without being consciously aware of them once you are well trained Suggests different compartments
Interference
where other information interferes with your memory traces and there are two ways this can occur - retroactive and proactive interference
Reteroactive interference
New learning interferes with old
e.g. past = learn to speak Spanish, present = learn to speak Italian, problem = my Spanish is error prone
Proactive interference
Old learning interferes with the new
e.g. past= always park in the same place at the supermarket, present= park car in new place, problem = where is the car today?
