long-term memory Flashcards
1
Q
episodic memory
A
- Explicit (declarative) - conscious access.
- You can describe the memory
- Memory for events that have happened in your life.
- That is, you can describe episodic details
- Includes contextual details.
- Prone to forgetting
- For instance, remembering the last time you were at firework display.
2
Q
semantic memory
A
- Crystallised (stable), explicit knowledge about the world.
- The concepts we have, the language we have.
- Acontextual - just the facts
- Its part of declarative memory
- For instance, what happens when you visit a restaurant?
- A network of connected concepts.
3
Q
procedural memory
A
- Implicit (non-declarative) - unconscious
- You cant describe its content - not very easily
- The content is not easily accessible consciously
- You know ‘how’ but its hard to say ‘why’
- ‘automatically’ retrieved
- For instance, the action sequence that you use when tying your shoelaces.
4
Q
brain regions associated with each system
A
- Episodic system - medial temporal lobe
- Semantic system - lateral temporal cortex
- Procedural system - basal ganglia
5
Q
what drives memory encoding
A
- Like Pavlov’s study
- Is there a single memory encoding mechanism for all memory systems?
- ‘Prediction error’ = ‘outcome’ - ‘exception’
- The brain as a prediction machine that learns when it is wrong.
- This idea stems from reinforcement learning theory.
- Mouse associates light on as eating cheese
- Then condition it with a tone and a light with the cheese
- But this doesn’t happen, the tone doesn’t get the same response to the cheese - the light blocks association of the tone to cheese.
- Prediction error drives learning.
6
Q
episodic memory - forgetting
A
- Prone to forgetting
- Ebbinghaus (1913) - quantified the decay of forgetting for nonsense syllables e.g., Wid, Zof, Lup.
- We tend to forget words very quickly
- Berens et al (2020) - quantified what is actually forgotten, we loose access but not precision.
7
Q
episodic memory - depends on context
A
- Serial position curves - recency and primary effects, e.g., Capitani et al, 1992
- Context-dependent memory effect - recall is better in the encoding context, e.g., Godden and Baddeley, 1975.
8
Q
semantic influences on episodic memories
A
- Episodic memories depend on semantic knowledge.
- Bartlett (1932), war of the ghosts:
- One night two young men from Egulac went down to the river to hunt seals, and while they were there it became foggy and calm. Then they heard war-cries, and they thought: “Maybe this is a war-party”. … He told it all, and then he became quiet. When the sun rose he fell down. Something black came out of his mouth. His face became contorted. The people jumped up and cried. He was dead.”
- Participants omitted supernatural events, and ‘rationalised’ the story.
- Semantic processes can bias what is remembered.
- Loftus and Palmer (1974):
- “how fast were the cars going when they smashed/contacted each other?”
- A week later … “was there any broken glass at the scene?”
9
Q
complementary learning systems
A
- McClelland, Mcnaughton and O’Reilly (1995)
- Central idea - semantic memory cannot be updated too quickly (interference).
- As such, all ‘explicit’ information is encoded by the episodic system first.
- ‘System consolidation’ slowly transforms memories: episodic -> semantic.
10
Q
system consolidation - sleep
A
- Walker, Brakefield, Hobson and Stickgold (2003) - found that performance on a sequence learning task increased after sleep.
- Klinzing, Niethard and Born (2019) - there has been much progress identifying how consolidation occurs.
11
Q
a problem for the CLS model
A
- Tse et al, (2007) - schema consistent information can bypass system consolidation.
- Kumaran, Hassabis and McClelland (2016) - updated CLS model to account for the rapid semantic updating.
