Lecture 7: Procedural Memory Flashcards
3 types of evidence for the difference between procedural and declarative memory:
- experiments on healthy people
- neuroimaging
- neuropsychology
What is procedural memory?
Non-conscious learning that is expressed through performance (non-declarative) a type of long term memory
4 different aspects of procedural memory:
1- skills and habits
2- implicit memory
3- simple classical conditioning
4- non-associative learning (habituation)
2 types of skills and habits:
- perceptual and motor skills
- cognitive skills
What does it show if amnesiacs show preserved skill learning when compared to a control?
A dissociation between procedural skill learning and declarative memory
skills and habits: Two types of perceptual and motor skills
Mirror tracing and pursuit rotor task
Mirror tracing: what does it involve?
tracing a figure on a paper by only seeing the mirror image of the drawing (have to do everything backwards)
mirror tracing: healthy adults vs amnesiacs?
h adults are bad to begin with but can get better with training, amnesiacs are the same!
mirror tracing: amnesiac explanation
it is procedural learning with the absence of declarative memory (patient HM retained this skill overtime but denied having performed the task)
Pursuit rotor task: what did p’s have to do?
keep contact between stylus and white disc moving on a turntable
Pursuit rotor task: what is it intact and impaired in?
intact in amnesiacs (don’t remember having done it but have learnt how to- procedural not declarative) and Alzheimer’s disease
impaired in Huntingdon’s disease (patients with basal ganglia damage- contains the striatum)
skills and habits: cognitive skills, tower of Hanoi findings:
amnesiacs show normal improvement with practice- evidence for strategy learning (but not always), impaired in HD patients
what is Implicit learning?
where a person learns about the a complex stimulus without intending to do so, making this newly gained knowledge difficult to express
Nissen and Bullemer (1997), did what and found what? (sequence learning)
sequence of lights on a screen are determined randomly or in pattern, ps have to press button quickly below light activation.
found: ps in repeated sequence condition improve with practice- many ps report are aware of sequence, but amnesiacs improved with practice but no awareness of the repeating pattern.
Willingham et al (1989) found:
healthy p’s who showed improvement in performance without explicit knowledge of it
