Memory Flashcards
What does memory do?
- routines and habits
- the sense of self
- social functions
- solving problems
Who is Clive Wearing?
- he had no episodic memory
- he only recognized his wife (semantic memory)
- very short memory
- other forms of memory remained intact
- he could play the piano (procedural memory)
What are the three stages of memory?
- encoding
- storage
- retrieval
What is encoding?
- learning new information
- forming new “memory trace” as a neural code
- when a memory trace is formed as a hippocampal-cortical activity pattern
- putting information into long term memory stores
What is storage?
- retaining encoded memory trace/neural code
- consolidation
- maintaining information in memory
What is retrieval?
- activating a memory trace via a cue (probe for that memory) for a purpose
- when a cue (part of memory trace) triggers pattern completion of the brain pattern
- re activating and using previously learned information
What is memory consolidation?
- encoding and time
- encoding to storage
- when a memory is transformed into a stable cortical pattern
What is the multi-store model?
- sensory input
- sensory memory - 1 second (information not transferred is lost)
- short term memory - 30 seconds (information not transferred is lost)
- rehearsal
- long term memory
What are the types of sensory memory?
- iconic
- echoic
- haptic
What are the types of short term memory?
- attentional control
- working memory
What are the types of long term memory?
- implicit
- explicit
What are the types of implicit memory?
- procedural memory
- priming
- emotional responses
What are the types of explicit memory?
- episodic
- semantic
What is sensory memory?
- automatic reflections of a sense
- information that’s present in the most unprocessed form
- 1 second
What is echoic memory?
- sound byte held for about 3 seconds
What is haptic memory?
- very brief memory of a touch
What is iconic memory?
- millisecond visual memory
- a persistence of vision (afterimages)
What is a positive afterimage?
- a visual memory that represents the perceived image in the same colours
- helpful for seeing things smoothly
- see 75 frames/second, movies are 24 frames/second, but view movies as a smooth event due to afterimage filling in holes
- look at, then look away but still see exact image
What is a negative afterimage?
- a visual memory is the colour inverse of the perceived image
- slightly longer than positive afterimage (few seconds)
- look at, then away and colours are inverted
What is Sperling’s experiment on how long sensory memory lasts?
- participants briefly (0.05 seconds) viewed a visual display - 12 letters
- recalled the letters
- whole report or partial report
What is the whole report?
- reported letters from the whole display
What is the partial report?
- reported only one row of letters at a time over trials
- another experiment the rows were paired with tones and the tones played after viewing the letters, people were able to name each row of letter after hearing the tone for the row
What is short term memory?
- attended information moves from sensory to short term memory
- the prefrontal cortex
- limited time capacity - about 20 to 30 seconds
- limited capacity - magical number seven plus or minus two
What are the types of serial position effects?
- primacy effect
- recency effect
What is the primacy effect?
- we’re really good at remembering the first items on a list
- more time for rehearsal and to go into long term memory
- better at remembering first items than all others
What is the recency effect?
- we’re really good at remembering the last things on a list
- but only for a few seconds after reading it
- if more than 30 seconds pass, this effect is eliminated
At a restaurant, a server took Billy, Barb and then Linda’s order, but didn’t write these orders down! Which person’s order is the server most likely to forget?
a. Linda
b. Barb
c. Billy
d. Linda and Billy equally
b
What is our short term memory limit?
Remembering 7 items plus or minus 2
How can we overcome our short term memory limits?
- chunking strategy
What is the chunking strategy/effect?
- grouping items together in a meaningful way so more information to be represented at one time
- chunking increases with knowledge
- expert chess players recall more pieces on a chess board than new chess players because they use knowledge of moves to chunk pieces together
- this effect is not present if the pieces are on the board randomly
What is working memory?
- retention and manipulation of information not in our environment in conscious awareness
- guides behaviour
- essential for many cognitive functions
What are the components of working memory?
- phonological loop
- visuo-spatial sketchpad
- episodic buffer
- central executive
What is the central executive?
- manages and manipulates information held in short term memory
- processing and manipulating
- conductor of the brain
- the coordinator of information between working memory areas
What is the phonological loop?
- hold sound and linguistic information in short term
- phonological store
- articulatory control loop
- the ability to store auditory information in your mind
What is phonological store?
- passive store for verbal information
- the inner ear
What is articulatory control loop?
- active rehearsal of verbal information
- the inner voice
- used to convert written material into sounds (reading)
- a specialized role in language
What is the visospatial sketchpad?
- the visual cache
- the inner scribe
- the ability to imagine and manipulate visual information in your mind
What is the visual cache?
- information about visual features (form, colour…)
What is the inner scribe?
- information about spatial location, movement and sequences
What is the evidence for separate short term memory stores?
- neuroimaging evidence
- double dissociation in neuropsychological cases
What is the neuroimaging evidence for separate short term memory stores?
- different areas of the brain are active for visual and verbal short term memory tasks
What are the double dissociation in neuropshycological cases?
- patient ELD has problems recalling visual spatial but not verbal material in the short term
- patient PV has problems recalling verbal but not visual material in the short term
- brain injury can selectively effect the phonological loop or the visuo spatial sketchpad
What is the episodic buffer?
- our conscious awareness
- integrates from short term and long term memory
- brings together visual and verbal information
- responds to central executive
- brings in relevant long term knowledge
- bridge between short and long term
Which aspect of working memory is critical for explicit awareness?
a. inner scribe
b. episodic buffer
c. long term memory
d. central executive
b
Implicit or explicit: playing the piano
implicit
Implicit or explicit: remembering your first piano lesson
explicit
Implicit or explicit: knowing the French word for burrito
explicit
Implicit or explicit: thinking about the ski trip you took last weekend
explicit
Implicit or explicit: humming that Justin Bieber song that you listened to everyday when you were growing up
implicit
What is encoding explicit memories?
- when information from short term stores are transferred to long term memory over some retention or time period interval
- then it becomes available for retrival
short term memory - encoding (learning) —– retention interval time —–> memory (recall)
Where does consolidation occur in the encoding explicit memories path?
- retention interval time
Who is Ebbinghaus?
- learned nonsense syllables (no meaning, could not use prior knowledge)
- tested memory at various intervals
- examined what was retained and forgotten
- created over 2000 cards of nonsense syllables
- learned sets of the syllables under struct testing conditions to remove confounds
- the forgetting curve
What were the strict testing conditions Ebbinghaus used?
- read the syllables without any inflection
- read them at a consistently fast pace: 2.5 items per second
- he did nothing else while running these experiments
What is the forgetting curve?
- memory loss is largest early on and slows down
- it is exponential
What is the spacing effect?
- forgetting is reduced when learning is spread over time
- repeated information is more valuable
- don’t cram
What is active rehearsal?
- the testing effect
- participants studied a text passage
- one group studied more, one took a practice test
- those who did the practice test did better on the final
- retrieving memories after the practice test leads to deeper encoding
What are the levels of processing theory?
- the strength of a memory (and potential for forgetting) depends on processes engaged at encoding
- shallow vs deep processing
- memory is stronger with deep processing, more elaborate memory traces
What is shallow processing?
- focus on sensory information
- superficial features
- Counting the number of letters in a word
- ex: learn new words in a new language, memorizing vocabulary words and their translations is shallow
What is deep processing?
- integrate higher-level knowledge (things we know) with learned information
- ex: learn new words in a new language, using the words in sentences is deep
- deep encoding improves memory
- Determining whether a word fits into a particular category (e.g., “is ‘apple’ a fruit?”)
What is the proof that deep encoding improves memory?
- people had better memory when they had to identity a face as a politician or actor than inverted or upright
- self reference effect
- mnemonics
- imagery
What is the self reference effect?
- participants learned a list of trait adjectives with different instructions
- those that related the adjectives to themselves remembered the best
- link to identity
What are mnemonics?
- organizational strategies to help encode information
- often involves linking new information to prior (semantic information) knowledge
- chunking strategies
- acronyms to remember lists
- use familiar image to link encoded information together (imagery)
- mnemonics use deep processing
How can imagery help memory?
- the memory palace
- form vivid mental imagery of a place they know, place different items on it, helps strengthen memory for items
What is the generation effect?
- active rehearsal
- read these pairs: king-crown, horse-saddle
- generate the word: k__g-crown, h____e-saddle
- generating the word leads to better memory
What causes forgetting?
- decay theory
- interference theory
What is the decay theory?
- memories are lost over time due to disuse
- like a muscle you don’t use, a memory gets weaker
What is the interference theory?
- interference is responsible for much of forgetting
- encoded memories are labile/flexible and need to be consolidates into stable long term memories
- during pre consolidation period, memories are susceptible to disruption and effects of interfering information
What is proactive interference?
- forward in time
- prior information interferes with encoding a new memory
- like trouble learning a new phone number because your old number keeps popping up in your memory
What is retroactive interference?
- backward in time
- newly learned information overwrites or interferes with a prior encoded memory
- like trouble remembering an older password after you formed a new password
What are the similarity effects in interference?
- the more alike something is to what is already learned, the more it will mingle and interfere with memory
- if you learn a cupcake recipe then a cheesecake recipe then you will remember less ingredient for cupcakes than if you learned about soup after
Usually park on Alymer; Today parked on Durocher; But I go to Alymer to find my car. What kind of interference?
proactive
What is the encoding specificity hypothesis?
- memory retrieval is better when there is overlap with encoding context
- context can act as a retrieval cue
- internal state
- external state
What is state dependent learning?
- you do better on the test if it is in the same context you studied
- studied underwater, then test is better if done underwater than on land
- study while drunk, then will do better on test while drunk
What is transfer appropriate processing?
- memory depends on the relationship between learning and testing
- highlights the importance of encoding context and retrieval cues
- we need to encode information in the manner we want to retrieve it later on
Phife is studying for their final exam in a quiet room while drinking coffee. During the exam, they downed a decaf coffee before the exam, and found it difficult to recall the information studied. Which scenario best explains Phife’s difficulty in recalling the information?
a. Phife is showing susceptibility to the spacing effect
b. Phife was distracted by the quiet environment while studying
c. Phife’s caffeine intake during studying affected their memory recall during the exam
d. Phife experienced test anxiety during the exam
c
What is episodic memory?
- specific events and episodes
- retrieve encoding context (what, where, when)
What is semantic memory?
- facts and general information
- no retrieval or context of learning
Episodic or semantic? I ordered nachos from the taco truck before my lecture last week.
Episodic
Episodic or semantic? Key ingredients for nachos are cheese and tortilla chips.
Semantic
Episodic or semantic? I love all types of Mexican food.
Semantic
What is the relationship between episodic memory and the hippocampus?
- children with hippocampal brain damage have episodic memory impairment
- semantic memory preservation, normal factual knowledge
- episodic depends on the hippocampus
What is semantic dementia?
- relatively spared at episodic memory tasks
- impaired at word naming and picture matching tasks
- they cannot name the animal or point to the right animal
Who is patient KC?
- had severe episodic memory loss
- able to access semantic information
What are the types of consciousness in long term memory?
- anoetic consciousness
- noetic consciousness
- autonoetic consciousness
What is anoetic consciousness?
- implicit memory
- no awareness or personal engagement
- no conscious connection
What is noetic consciousness?
- semantic memory
- awareness but no personal engagement
- don’t have to mentally travel back
What is autonoetic consciousness?
- episodic memory
- awareness and personal engagement
- mental time travel
What is the reappearance hypothesis?
- an episodic memory trace is recalled the same way at each retrieval
- it is reproduced, not reconstructed
- based on clinical observations that recurrent memories are unchanged from the original event in cases like PTSD
What are flashbulb memories?
- vivid memories of significant events that are:
- emotionally arousing or shocking events
- retrieve specific details about the time and place when hearing about the event
Are flashbulb memories special?
- we forget flashbulb memories in the same way we forget everyday memories
- recollections change, sometimes majorly
- but flashbulb memories ratings of belief and recollection (vividness) increased over time
Do flashbulb memories reappear?
- they do not
- flashbulb memories are not recurrent recordings of events
- flashbulb memory retrieval changes over time and are not resistant to memory distortion, even if memory feels strong
- distinction between subjective and objective memory
- must accept the theory that memories are reconstructed (strong evidence against reappearance hypothesis)
If the reappearance hypothesis is not correct, then what is?
- constructing an episodic memory trance
- every time we retrieve a memory, we construct it again
- can construct it in different ways
- different parts of an event are processed in different regions of the brain
- during retrieval, hippocampus binds together details
What is memory consolidation?
- experiences are encoded and then consolidated into a long term memory trace
- the formation of stable cortical representations of memories
- forming permanent memory trace
- short term to long term
What is memory re consolidation?
- when a trace becomes activated, it become de stable
- cortical connections can be strengthened and modified during this time, which alters how the memory trace is reconsolidated
- retrieval changes a memory trace
- active memory to ling term memory
What is a con to episodic memory being constructed?
- constructing memories at retrieval means these memories are susceptible to distortion
- we may use general knowledge, semantic memory (schemas) to infer the way things “must have been” in a recalled memory
- we may insert false information into the constructed memory, affecting later retrieval
What affects episodic memory?
- semantic memory
- semantic knowledge affects retrieving detailed memories
- schemas distort memories
What are schemas?
- schemas organize and categorize information, provide expectations about how things should occur
- help us predict what will happen
- guide how we form and retrieve episodic memory
What are the War of Ghosts experiments?
- Bartlett (1932)
- tested how schemas affected episodic memory
- participants read an unfamiliar Native American folk story
- did not match Western folk story structure (schema)
- examined how the story changed with repeated retrievals
- participants remembered a simplified version of the story and it became more conventional with repeated retrievals
- omissions and alterations to match Western schema
- excluded uncommon details
- changed uncommon activities to conventional activities, according
to their schemas
What can schemas lead to?
- false memories
- study scenes associated with schema-consistent items removed
- classroom without a chalkboard
- auditory word recognition test for items from the scenes
- people falsely recognized schema related items
What are false memories?
- a familiar feeling can lead to incorrect associations
- details can be added to memories during retrieval
What is the misattribution effect?
- retrieving familiar information from the wrong source (place)
- a failure in source monitoring (not remembering the where or
when accurately) - encounter a familiar person but misremember where you met them
- leading questions can cause false memory formation; how a question is framed can affect how information is remembered
How can we implant memories?
- participants recalled childhood experiences recounted by their parents over three experimental sessions
- a false memory was added to the list of experiences by the experimenter· An overnight stay in a hospital
- 20% of people had a false memory of this event by the end of the third session
What are the virtues/pros of reconstructive memory?
- the same processes that help us construct the past help us imagine the future and plan for our lives
- these are processes of the hippocampal episodic memory system
- you need your past to imagine your future
What is the Rashomon effect?
- people recall the same event differently ?
What is procedural memory?
- Automatic behaviour/actions
- Patterns of movements encoded in the brain
- More immune to forgetting compared to other types of memory
- Initially rely on explicit memory; with training and or exposure then rely on implicit memory
- Motor action sequences
- Repetitive thoughts and emotions
- Basis of some addictions
What does the basal ganglia encode?
motor sequence
What does the prefrontal cortex encode?
organization
How are habits formed?
- with a reward
- Rats trained on a T-shaped maze with tones to signal reward at left or right end
- Required the striatum
- Over time, tones became habit
How do we break habits?
- Removing a reward at one end or making one reward gross (non-rewarding) did not break the habit
- To break habit, need to inhibit prefrontal cortex, region that monitors habit
- replace habit with other behaviour to break it
What is priming?
- Prior exposure facilitates information processing without awareness
- Word-fragment completion test
What is the word fragment completion test?
- Participants are shown a list of words
- Asked to complete word fragments
- Participants are likely to use prior words to complete the fragments without knowing it
What are emotional responses?
- Conditioned emotional responses
- something you’ve encountered before affecting current behaviour, without awareness
- Fear response to snakes, the dark and other scary stimuli (adaptive)
- amygdala
Why is the amygdala important in emotional responses?
- implicit emotional memory
- helps us have conditioned emotional responses, stay away from dangerous things, etc…
- also modulating explicit memory… emotional enhancement effect
- people who don’t experience fear have impaired or altered amygdala response
How is semantic memory organized?
- general to specific
- units, properties, and pointers
- store concepts within an interconnected web in mind
What is spreading activation?
- Automatic activation spreads from an activated concept to other interconnected aspects
- Thinking about a canary will trigger activation in related bird concepts
- Spreading activation to features
- Semantic priming (related ideas triggered at retrieval)
- trains of thought that might seem nonsensical
Who is HM?
- Experimental neurosurgery to reduce seizure activity
- Bilateral medial temporal lobe, including the hippocampus, removed
- Intact short-term memory (can remember short list of words for 30 seconds)
- Intact procedural memory (could learn a new skill-based task)
- Intact semantic memory (could recall major historic events of childhood)
- Profound episodic memory loss (couldn’t learn new information and recalled his past in sparse detail)
- He could not imagine the future, it was blank
- He was stuck in the present
What is anterograde amnesia?
- This is the inability to form new episodic memories
- Clive Wearing
- Impaired formation of new memories after timepoint of brain injury or psychological trauma
What is retrograde amnesia?
- The loss of memories from before the onset of amnesia
- Temporally graded such that remote memories (older) are less affected than recent memories
- Impaired retrieval of old memories after timepoint of brain injury or psychological trauma
What is dissociative amnesia?
- A very rare psychiatric disorder
- Commonly retrograde amnesia for episodic memories and autobiographical knowledge
- Leads to shifts in lifestyle such as moving to a new place, assuming a new identity
- Usually a response to psychological or physical trauma, not from brain injury or malingering
Someone who developed a tumor now can’t remember a wedding they attended years ago. This would be
a. retrograde amnesia
b. anterograde amnesia
c. dissociative amnesia
d. Alzheimer’s disease
a
How are dreams linked to memory?
- Theory: dreaming helps people process past experiences as they sleep
- importance of sleep in helping us consolidate memories
What was the experiment on dreams and memory?
- Patients with focal bilateral hippocampal damage and amnesia and healthy controls
- Woken up at various points during the night and asked if they dreamt and to describe the dreams
- People with hippocampal damage reported fewer dreams and the dreams they had were much less detailed
- need to have functioning memory system to engage in dreams
What is dementia?
- Pathological aging
- Progressive cognitive and functional impairments due to neuronal death
- 63% of all dementia cases are Alzheimer’s disease
- Neurodegenration begins at the medial temporal lobe (MTL) regions
- Earliest symptom is a deficit in episodic memory
What is the Alzheimer’s disease trajectory linked to the brain?
- At the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex (medial temporal lobe) (memory loss)
- spreads to lateral temporal and parietal lobes (reading problems, poor object recognition, poor direction sense)
- spreads to frontal lobe (poor judgement, impulsivity, short attention)
- widespread brain atrophy (loss of language, basic motor skill function problems)
What is semantic dementia?
- Neurodegeneration begins in the left anterior temporal lobe
- Convergence zone for semantic concept representations
- Deficits recognizing faces of friends, words, and uses of objects
- Can still recall episodic memories
What is healthy aging?
- Volume loss is around 5% per decade after age of 40
- Not all areas affected equally
- Frontal cortex and hippocampus most effective
- Implicit memory is intact
- Semantic memory is intact
- Episodic memory (and working memory) is impaired (affected the most as we age)
What are the domain-general cognitive aging theories?
- Older adults have deficits in general executive cognitive processes from frontal lobe atrophy
- Slower at processing information
- Can’t inhibit irrelevant information
- Older adults will have trouble focusing on one picture and ignore all other pictures on a busy wall
What is the associative deficit hypothesis?
- Older adults have problems encoding and retrieving associations in memory due to hippocampal atrophy
- Familiarity or single items: recognizing a face (non hippocampal) but don’t remember where they met
- Recollection: remembering a face and place (hippocampal)
- Older adults did a lot better with single items than associative memory tasks (pick correct face for name)
What is adaptive cognitive aging?
- Memory test in the scanner showed that young adults and old-low memory performing recruited the right prefrontal cortex but old-high recruited the bilateral prefrontal cortex (both hemispheres)
- evidence of neural compensation
What is the link between taxi drivers and memory?
- Memory and space are intimately linked
- ‘The knowledge’: memorize a labyrinth of 25,000 streets within a 10- kilometer radius
- Taxi drivers performed better on tests of spatial memory than bus drivers
- Taxi drivers have greater posterior hippocampus grey matter volumes
- The volume of the posterior hippocampus in taxi drivers is related to years of experience as a taxi driver
Who are highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM) people?
- HSAM people can remember every single day from their lives in detail
- Enhanced autobiographical memory
- Recalling very detailed daily memories
- HSAM does not involve mnemonic strategies
- Not photographic memory
- HSAM is specific to autobiographical memory, personal memories
What is the downside of having a superior memory?
- Consistency in recalling memories (not forgetting details of the past) relates to OCD symptoms
- Emotional problems
- Limited social connections
- cannot forget painful memories
True or false: Explicit memory tends to be less susceptible to forgetting than implicit memory.
False
Luck and Vogel (1997) determined the capacity of visual short-term memory is ________ items.
a. 10
b. 3 to 5
c. 2
d. 7 plus or minus 2
b
You always study for online quizzes in your living room. You took the first quiz in your living room but the second at the library. Why might you have performed better on the first quiz?
a. Context-dependent memory
b. State-dependent memory
c. Schematic memory
d. Transfer-appropriate processing
a
_______ interference is when newly learned information interferes with old information, whereas ________ interference is when previously learned information interferes with new information.
- retroactive
- proactive
Henry Molaison (patient H. M) was unable to form new long-term memories following the surgical removal of most of his _______.
hippocampus
Which of the following activities requires memory?
a. Tying your shoes
b. Telling a friend about your high-school graduation
c. Doing mental math
d. All of the above
d
What is intermediate processing?
Relating a word to personal experiences or memories
Which of the following is FALSE regarding the subunits of working memory?
a. Episodic buffer integrates information from short- and long-term memory
b. Different areas of the brain are active for visual and verbal short term memory tasks
c. Phonological store is responsible for converting written material into sounds
d. The frontal lobes are typically associated with the central executive
c
The process of making memories durable and, in some case, permanent is referred to as _______.
consolidation
True or false: Sensory memory has a greater capacity than short-term memory.
True
Which of the following is NOT a fundamental component of memory?
a. encoding
b. storage
c. synthesis
d. retrieval
c
Which of the following is NOT a type of implicit memory?
a. Prejudice
b. Procedural memory
c. Episodic memory
d. Phobias
c
It is theorized that people who can memorize long strings of letters or numbers do not have enhanced memory capacity but, rather, a skilled ability to form large __________.
chunks
________ memory depends on the reactivation of the same brain regions that were first engaged in encoding the experience while _________mory depends on more abstracted representations.
a. semantic; episodic
b. semantic; procedural
c. procedural; semantic
d. episodic; semantic
d
Dory from Finding Nemo has difficulty encoding new memories, she likely has _______ amnesia.
anterograde
Chase & Simon (1973) ran an experiment to examine the effect of expertise in the visual domain in which they compared chess experts’ and novices’ ability to memorize the arrangement of chess pieces on a chess board. Which of the following statement is TRUE regarding their findings.
a. They found that chess players have larger visual short term memory capacity than novices
b. They found that experts were no better than novices at recalling the configurations
c. They found that experts outperformed novices in remembering the configurations even if the pieces were randomly places on the chess board
d. None of the above
d
According to decay models of forgetting in short-term memory, forgetting occurs due to the passage of time. Lewandowsky et al. (2004), however, argued that _________ is the cause of forgetting in short-term memory.
interference
Baddeley’s (1974) original working memory model consists of which three sub-units?
a. Visuo-spatial sketchpad, auditory buffer, central executive
b. Visual buffer, auditory buffer, central controller
c. Spatial sketchpad, linguistic loop, executive processor
d. Visuo-spatial sketchpad, phonological loop, central executive
d
