LTM 1 Flashcards
Mental time travel
According to Tulving, the defining property of the experience of episodic memory, in which a person travels back in time in his or her mind to reexperience events that happened in the past.
Personal semantic memories
Semantic components of autobiographical memories.
Remember/know procedure
A procedure in which subjects are presented with a stimulus they have encountered before and are asked to indicate remember, if they remember the circumstances under which they initially encountered it, or know, if the stimulus seems familiar but they don’t remember experiencing it earlier.
Semanticization of remote memories
Loss of episodic details for memories of long-ago events.
Constructive episodic simulation hypothesis
The hypothesis proposed by Schacter and Addis that episodic memories are extracted and recombined to construct simulations of future events.
Expert-induced amnesia
Amnesia that occurs because well-learned procedural memories do not require attention. (e.g. surgeon doing surgery)
Repetition priming
When an initial presentation of a stimulus affects the person’s response to the same stimulus when it is presented later.
Propaganda effect
People are more likely to rate statements they have read or heard before as being true, just because of prior exposure to the statements.
Generation effect
Memory for material is better when a person generates the material him- or herself, rather than passively receiving it.
Testing effect
Enhanced performance on a memory test caused by being tested on the material to be remembered.
Spacing effect
The advantage in performance caused by short study sessions separated by breaks from studying.
Serial position curve
People’s ability to recall items on a list
depend on their position in the list
Recency effect
Better memory for items that appeared late on a list
Primacy effect
Better memory for items that appeared at the
beginning of a list
Implicit memory
Memory that affects behaviour without conscious awareness
Why is implicit memory often called nondeclarative memory?
Because these are memories that you cannot make declarations about
Types of implicit memory
- Procedural memory
- Priming
- Classical conditioning
Procedural memory
Knowing how to perform a skill
Perceptual priming
Change in the response to a stimulus caused by the previous presentation of the same or similar stimulus
Classical conditioning
When pairing a neutral stimulus with a biologically relevant stimulus changes the response to the neutral stimulus - responses to stimuli don’t involve any conscious recall of initial pairing
Explicit memory
Memory that involves conscious recollections of events or facts
Why is explicit memory often called declarative memory?
Because these are memories that you can make declarations about
Types of episodic memory
- Episodic
- Semantic
- Autobiographical
Episodic memory
Memory for specific, personal experiences. Involves mental time travel to relive that experience.
Semantic memory
Memory for facts
Autobiographical memory
Subset of episodic and semantic memory - it has components of both. Someone’s memory of experiences in their own lives, as well as facts related to these experiences (known as personal semantic memories).
Patient KC
- Damaged his hippocampus and surrounding regions in a motorcycle accident
- After his accident, he could no long relive any events from his past (Episodic Memory)
- He could learn new facts though — e.g. the death of his brother
Patient LP
- Suffered an attach of encephalitis.
- After the illness, could not recognize familiar people, couldn’t remember the meaning of words or where items were kept (Semantic Memory)
- She could remember the events from her life
Henry Molaison
- Had his hippocampus (and surrounding brains structures) removed in 1953 to treat his epilepsy
- After his surgery, his IQ remained high, his language
skills remained strong, his STM was okay - He could not form new long term memories
Patient KF
- Suffered damage to parietal lobe in a
motorcycle accident. - After the accident, his digit span dropped to 2 and
he did not show a recency effect in the serial
position curve - He could form new long term memories about his
life
Why are there so many memory systems?
- Different memory systems have different experiential qualities
- Each memory system can be manipulated independently of others
- Double dissociations in patients with brain damage
Encoding
Formation of a new memory
Consolidation
The process that transforms new memories from a fragile state, in which they can be disrupted, to a more permanent state
Retrieval
Reactivating a memory and putting it in working memory
Reconsolidation
Idea that everytime you retrieve a memory, it becomes unstable again, so you need to stabilize it again
Levels of processing theory
Levels refer to how you process information = shallow or deep
Shallow processing
Corresponds to sensory analyses (e.g. attending to perceptual features, maintenance repetition)
Deep processing
Corresponds to semantic/conceptual analysis (e.g. thinking about the meaning of the content, elaborative rehearsal)
Retrieval tests
- Free recall
- Serial recall
- Cued-recall
- Recognition
Free recall
Participants study a list of stimuli (words, pictures, etc) and then are asked to recall all the stimuli that they can, in any order
Serial recall
Similar to Free Recall, but must recall stimuli in the same order as they were presented
Cued-recall
Participants study pairs of stimuli (a Cue and a Target). Are then shown each cue and are asked to recall the corresponding target
Recognition
Participants study stimuli and then are shown the studied stimuli (‘old’) along with unstudied stimuli (‘new’). Asked to indicate which ones the recognize
from the study list.
Encoding specificity
Matching the context in which encoding and retrieval
occur
State-dependent learning
Matching the internal state presented during encoding and retrieval
Transfer-appropriate processing
Matching the task involved in encoding and retrieval
How does sleep enhance episodic memory?
During sleep the hippocampus is thought to ‘replay’ events from your day, ‘teaching’ them to the cortex of the brain.
Systems level consolidation
New memories are first encoded in the hippocampus, which builds connections with higher cortical areas during sleep and retrieval. Once the memory is consolidated, connections in the cortex are strong enough that the hippocampus is no longer needed during retrieval.
Multiple trace model of consolidation
The idea that the hippocampus is involved in the retrieval of remote memories, especially episodic memories. This contrasts with the standard model of memory, which proposes that the hippocampus is involved only in the retrieval of recent memories.
