LECTURE ELEVEN Flashcards
ANTEROGRADE AMNESIA
Inability to form new long term memories
WORKING MEMORY
- Emphasizes role of active maintenance and
manipulation - Temporary work space
- Highly integrated with sensory memory and attention
Key component of many cognitive abilities
* Language comprehension and production
* Decision making and thought
* Mental operations (arithmetic)
* Goal-directed behavior
* Consciousness – global work space hypothesis
BADDELEY AND HITCH MODEL
REVISE
BASIC STRUCTURE OF WORKING MEMORY
- Sensory information is filtered down to relevant
components by attention (guided by central executive) - Information is then placed in the proper short-term
store - Auditory information – phonological loop
- Visual information – visuospatial sketchpad
- Within the short-term stores, information is updated
through rehearsal (just like A-S model) - The stores also have a limited capacity
- Central executive responsible for maintaining rehearsal and output according to task demands
TESTING WORKING MEMORY
- Span tasks
- Digit span demo
- Other forms of span
- Complex span
- Reading comprehension
- Accuracy for spatial
locations - Recall tasks (typically
immediate)
PHONOLOGICAL LOOP
- Responsible for auditory information, including language
- Information updated through rehearsal
- Can be overt (actually speaking) or covert rehearsal
Phonological loop capacity is related to length of items - Subsequently found to relate to articulatory duration – how long the words take to speak
- Implies that phonological loop capacity is temporal
VISUOSPATIAL SKETCHPAD
- Responsible for visual and spatial location information
- Information updated through rehearsal
- Overt (gesturing, pointing) or covert rehearsal
- Capacity limit of about 4 chunked items or locations
CORSI BLOCKS
- Task used to assess visuospatial sketchpad function
- Lots of variations
- Number blocks
- Color blocks
- Sound blocks (Simon)
Chunking in VSWM
- Chess experts can remember detailed chess positions
- Better recall than amateurs
- Chunking information into larger structure (in this case, common formations)
- Only seen for game- appropriate formations
VSWM Capacity
- VSWM thought to involve parallel representation of
scene (unlimited capacity?) that decays unless
active attention (“inner scribe”) rehearses/refreshes information (limited efficacy – temporal constraints of attention and “gaze” shift) - Multiple object tracking task
- Both attention and VSWM hover around four items at
once (lots of additional factors involved here…but same
factors at play for both processes) - Dependent on speed of objects – relation to gaze shift
and attentional shifts
Evidence for two systems
- Concurrent tasks
- Doing a verbal task during verbal rehearsal or spatial with spatial reduces performance
- Doing a verbal task during spatial rehearsal or spatial with verbal does not affect performance
- More than two systems?
EPISODIC MEMORY
- Temporary storehouse
- Integrates information from WM and LTM
- Cross-modal
- Responsible for chunking
- “Newer” than rest of Baddeley’s model
CENTRAL EXECUTIVE
- Delegates information, maintains rehearsal, and
controls output - Directs attention and holds it on the current task
- Failure of central executive – daydreaming
- Executive function
- Criticism:
- “Homunculus” argument
- Dumping ground argument
FRONTAL LOBE
“Executive Function”
Includes
* Willed attention
* Sequence planning/executing
* Inhibition
* Thought, judgment, emotional regulation
Damage to frontal lobes can impair all of these
* Phineas Gage
* Lobotomy
INHIBITION
Inhibiting impulsive behavior
* “Raw” emotion produced in limbic system
* Frontal lobes regulate emotions (largely for social
reasons)
* Emotional regulation develops until adulthood
Inhibiting one action while performing another
* Responses that lead to desirable outcomes are
reinforced
* Requires inhibition to “un-learn” a certain response
* This also develops until adulthood
