Lecture 8 Memory 1 memory types

Question 1

anterograde amnesia

Answer 1

difficulty in learning new information

Question 2

retrograde amnesia

Answer 2

inability to remember events that happen before the brain damage occurred

Question 3

patient HM

Answer 3

27-year old underwent removal of bilateral medial temporal lobe for relief of severe epilepsy; after surgery, severely amnesic

• normal: intellectual ability; personality; good natured; conversation ok; mental arithmetic ok; short-term memory ok
• lost old memory, but retained older ones
• unable to learn anything new (1953)
• cannot find ways around new home

Question 4

amensia

Answer 4

how to become this: damage to the medial temporal lobe, ECT, chronic alcoholism, concussion, etc.

important for understanding memory systems: some memory functions preserved, others damaged, in amnesic patients

Question 5

medial temporal lobe

Answer 5

area that includes the hippocampus, amygdala, and adjacent areas of the cerebral cortex; converts memory from short term to long term

learned from HM that:

• not the location of LT memories; nor is it necessary for the retrieval of LT memories
• is not the location of immediate (short-term) memories
• involved in converting immediate (short-term) memories into long-term memories

Question 6

short-term memory

Answer 6

immediate memory for stimuli just perceived

Question 7

Korsakoff’s syndrome

Answer 7

severe anterograde amnesia; often a result of chronic alcoholism –> thiamine (B1) deficiency; confabulation: reports memories of events that did not take place without the intention to deceive

Question 8

evidence for separate short- and long-term stores

Answer 8

effects of brain damage; capacity; serial position effect

Question 9

capacity

Answer 9

verbal STS has limited storage capacity; recall accuracy depends on number of digits

• number of digits recalled: digit span = “7 plus or minus 2” chunks
• generically, capacity of STM: memory span
• Miller: memory span is 7(+-2 items) –> this is true for vision, audition, etc.; the magical number is 7
• not always 7 –> word length effect

verbal long-term memory has no known capacity limit

visual STM is used everyday and it has limited capacity; accuracy to detect changes drops as the number of items to remember increases (capacity ~ 4 items); accuracy is affected by the complexity of each chunk (just like the word length effect)

visual and verbal are both severely limited in capacity; unit of the capacity limitation is a chunk (a verbal chunk and visual object); complexity of each chunk matters somewhat (verbal: word length effect; visual: visual object’s complexity)

Question 10

chunk

Answer 10

group of items that have a meaning; a unit that is decomposable (digits, words, sentences); unit of visual STM capacity

Question 11

word length effect

Answer 11

speed of articulation; digit span increases systematically with age: older children rehearse faster

Question 12

serial position effect

Answer 12

primacy effect = better recall for words at beginning; due to greater rehearsal of items –> LTM
recency effect = better recall for words at end; due to items still in STM
primacy and recency components open to separate sets of influences –> filled delay affects recency, not primacy; familiarity of words, rate of presentation, etc. affects primacy, not recency

Question 13

Lab 2 serial position effect results

Answer 13

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